Netherlands Books

This Book has been one of my greatest reading experiences it has been subtely combined with the portraits. The letters have been written with alot of passion and admiration and also with a certain amount of trust and comfort in one another. this is book is a must buy for all art lovers it will educate them immensely about the life nad works of on of the greatest artists to exsist and besdides that they will get an insight into the life of this great artist and human being.

This book gives a very brief biography of Van Gohg's life, although the pictures are large and beautiful. A good collection book or gift for a van gogh fan.

This is a "pocket-sized" guidebook to one of the most civilized cities I've ever visited. It is organized very well, breaking the "tourist parts" of the city into color coded zones, with nicely detailed descriptions of each of the zones. Amsterdam has great public transit and the guide has a good description of the tram lines and how to use them. In the back there is a pocket which contains a very nice fold out map--on one side there is a "day" map of Amsterdam and on the other a "night" map. Each side reflects the activities available at each time, with colored markers for the type of activity and their locations. You really don't need any other guide, this one is pretty comprehensive.

After World War II Canada welcomed over 65,000 War Brides of Canadian Armed Services personnel. Many had happy married lives and some did not. We have all heard their stories; sometimes the storytellers were among our own families and friends.
But what about the 23,000 women, many of them teenagers, who were not so lucky, who bore children and were abandoned by their (often married or bigamous) lovers when the war was over? The attitude of the Canadian authorities was that illegitimate children of servicemen were not their problem; the soldier was posted elsewhere and requests for financial assistance were denied.

This book opens the door on these hidden and tragic stories that were kept out of sight and out of mind for too long. It contains 50 simple narratives, many written by the now aging children themselves about their heart-wrenching experiences growing in a world that all too often despised and mistreated them for being illegitimate, and about their attempts to find their Canadian roots. Many of the war children still search in vain; their fathers are long since dead. The most poignant stories are those of fathers who returned from Canada to marry their sweethearts and were rejected by them. Yet there are happy endings for some children who discovered and were welcomed by half siblings half a world away.

There is a nice balance of stories: British children, Dutch and German children, adopted children, children of war brides whose marriages failed, children of Canadian Servicewomen.

My one complaint is that the book is too short. Twice as many stories would have made a greater impact. I saw many other, unresolved, stories on the authors' website which unfortunately did not appear here.
Have the Kleenix box handy when you read this book.

Helpful book to identify landmarks in the city, good restaurant advice, a decent city map (but not great).

The title is a bit pompous. The book looks like another regurgitation of already well written world-systems garbage. Surprisingly, though, Peter Taylor has come up with something more readable than Arrighi's "The Long Twentieth Century" and perhaps more theoretically sound. I am currently writing a Masters thesis in political geography, and I was pleasantly surprised when I read this book after a plethora of others by Taylor and Arrighi. Having read a good dozen books on hegemony, this is my favorite one yet. If it weren't for the outrageous price (get it from the library!), it might be the book that would convert other structuralists over to world-systems theory. If you are into geohistorical analysis or hegemonic discourse you must read this book. Kudos to Doctor Taylor! Job well done. (His book "Modernities" was excellent too!)

I thought that the best thing in this book was a story about an ancient Greek painter named Zeuxis. Back before photography, painters put a lot of effort into trying to capture reality in a picture, which might not sound too hard until you find out that for a guy like Zeuxis, "the situation seemed so ridiculous that he burst into laughter. And he laughed so hard that he died." (p. 8) The amazing thing for me is that anyone who had so much talent could live to be 61, which is the setting that is used for Rembrandt to be the narrator of this book: "Zeuxis ~ he was as old as I am, sixty-one." The dates on pages 55-57 reveal that Rembrandt lived to be 63. Most of the information in this book is about his art.

This was a very good book about a jewish boy and his family in Germany during the rising of the Nazi's and Hitler. It shows what some of the regular people were doing and how they felt, not to mention how people's views and feelings change.

The authors, two Dutch social scientists, write, “When we speak of ways of life colliding, we have in mind genuine differences about what is right and wrong embedded in a larger context of common ground.” This is not the ‘clash of civilisations’, beloved of warmongers.

They write, “Our concern is the collision between Western European values and Muslim values. Our focus is the Netherlands because it has undertaken the most ambitious policy of multiculturalism. The premise of multiculturalism as a principle is respect for the pluralism of cultures. Yet its thrust as a public policy has been to legitimize and subsidize one particular expression of Muslim culture – ironically the one most at odds with the pluralistic spirit of liberal democracy.”

They show how multiculturalism has preserved and promoted the most illiberal version of Muslim practices that holds sway only in traditional, rural and remote areas of the Middle East. Multiculturalism legitimised an authoritarian and inegalitarian approach to women and children. Multiculturalism has given special status to traditional, unelected, ‘community leaders’ and even set up a separate, state-funded school system in Holland.

They conducted their survey in 1998, before 9/11, before the murder of Theo van Gogh, the controversial film-maker. They found, “In all of our studies across a variety of countries, the single best predictor of prejudice towards minorities is the importance that people attach to the value of conformity.” However, they found that intolerance and criticism of multiculturalism are not the same.

They also found that, “Even among the most tolerant, on the order of a half support raising the barriers to immigration, and the support for doing so rapidly becomes overwhelming. There is thus support for making immigration more difficult throughout the society.”

They note that multiculturalism’s “sensitivity to the threats that immigrant minorities perceive to their way of life has been accompanied by an insensitivity to the threats that the majority perceive to their way of life.” The policy of multiculturalism was not the result of popular pressure – indeed it is a deeply unpopular policy.

This raises the question - if the majority want stricter immigration controls, oppose multiculturalism and want a greater degree of assimilation, shouldn’t this be what happens in a democracy?

I can say that the book is quite good for people who is looking to read about advanced wireless networks.