Alberti Books

The third of this magnificent six volume set proceeds with the dominant theme of the work, which aims to furnish proofs of the soul's immortality through a systemization of the principal ideas belonging to the Platonic tradition [yet paradoxically the work is also highly syncretic, blending elements of Hermetism, Scripture, Eastern mysticism and Medieval Aristotelianism]. Now the crux of this volume then, for one, is that the soul is prior to matter in the hierarchy of being, making it intrinsically superior to the material order. And further, the soul is enjoined to universal Divine Soul and thus it is indivisible, indestructible and eternal by nature. Moreover, while the soul is enmeshed in matter it is the dominant active agent, the ruler of the body: the soul acts in and outside of matter freely but the soul is never is acted upon by matter. Even when the body is said to adversely affect the soul--it is merely a defect in the soul's will-power not a force native to body. And finally, the soul is equipped to understand the true rational principles [Ideas] and their Forms, by way of discursive reasoning as opposed to carnal sense perception. This, it is hoped, will shed some light on some of the main points Ficino demonstrates in his elaborate thesis affirming the soul's immortality. It is recommended that the entire set be purchased and that it be read in moderation due to the density, complexity and magnitude of philosophical ideas and arguments layered throughout this magnificent work. For more details on the Platonic Theology see the *reviews posted for volumes one, two and five.

Marsilio Ficino's "Platonic Theology" is a masterpiece of neo-platonic literature. A seminal review of Plato, Proclus, Augustine etc. Vol 4 is especially good on the properties of God and the working of miracles.
This translation, for the first time in English by Michael Allen is fluid and very readable. The binding and printing is very well done, larger in format and more readable than the Loeb Classics series by the same publisher Harvard University Press. Highly recommended.

Marselo Ficino was one of the leading scholars in Renaissance Italy. Charged by the famous and powerful Medici family with recovering classical literature and philosophy, Ficino played a critical role in translating such works as the Hermetic Corpus and the works of Plotinus and Plato.

Ficino's Platonic Theology is a Renaissance restatement of the metaphysical system of Neo-Platonism, particularly that found in Proclus's Platonic Theology. The core of the system is the First Principle, the One, which while itself is immutable, eternal, and timeless, produces the universe through a chain of being through which it transmits its goodness and being, from the highest level of reality to the lowest, which then returns back to the One in an processing cycle.

Ficino made some accomodations to Christian belief and theology so his system would not raise the ire of the religious authorities, though he also had considerable freedom from ecclesiastical control.

This work is of interest to any philosopher interested in Neo-Platonic idealism and how it has influenced the shape of modern thought.

The Italian philosopher Marsilio Ficino, who was renowned for his Latin translations of all Plato's dialogues, set out to prove that the tenets of Platonism, instead of Aristotelianism, were fundamentally compatible with Christianity. He attempted this not only by acting as the primary mover of the Florentine academy, but also through his magnanimous patron Cosimo de' Medici who apportioned Ficino the leisure to commence his monumental work, "The Platonic Theology," which is offered here for the first time in a long-awaited English translation. Marsilio Ficino's work--from what may be seen from the first of five anticipated volumes--is an artful, straightforward representation of the divine philosophy of Plato, magnificently garbed under a brilliant and definitive medieval synthesis. Of the work itself Ficino says, "the Platonic mysteries are set forth as clearly as possible...so that...we may reveal the Platonic teaching, which is in complete accord with the divine law." Like all Christian-Platonists, Ficino used Augustine as a model for his orthodox amalgamation of the teachings of Plato and Christ, and believed so strongly in it that he said, "the Platonic teaching...is related to the divine law of both Moses and Christ as the moon is to the sun." With this in mind, it may be said that the vision of Marsilio Ficino, so clearly manifested in this work, will come as a relief to anyone ardently devoted to the school of Plato and the religion of Christ. The translated works of Ficino are certainly a great benefit to those confined to the English speaking world, and the other up-and-coming volumes in new I Tatti Renaissance Library (Harvard) are likely to produce the same effects. The value of these newly translated masterpieces of western culture cannot be described.

Useful to the scholar. Thought provoking as intellectual work. Life changing in world view. There is an alternative to secularism or post-modernism.

As part of my studies in the University of PR, I had the extraordinary experience of reading "the soul" of Jose Maria Arguedas. He trully wrote from his heart about his lack of belonging of either culture he was exposed or came from. As a Hispanic dealing with Hispanics in the States, I strongly recomend this book as an eye opening to the struggles that other people have faced in their life.

José María Arguedas escribe desde lo profundo de su corazón, sobre su incapacidad para encontar pertinencia en una u otra cultura de las que fue parte. Es un profundo buscar de las raíces de un ser humano. Toda mi vida ha sido impactada por este trabajo y en este momento en el que trabajo con Hispanos en EU, recomiendo absolutamente el mismo para dar una perspectiva impactante sobre el problema que muchas personas han confrontado a través de los tiempos.

As part of my studies in the University of PR, I had the extraordinary experience of reading "the soul" of Jose Maria Arguedas. He trully wrote from his heart about his lack of belonging of either culture he was exposed or came from. As a Hispanic dealing with Hispanics in the States, I strongly recomend this book as an eye opening to the struggles that other people have faced in their life.

José María Arguedas escribe desde lo profundo de su corazón, sobre su incapacidad para encontar pertinencia en una u otra cultura de las que fue parte. Es un profundo buscar de las raíces de un ser humano. Toda mi vida ha sido impactada por este trabajo y en este momento en el que trabajo con Hispanos en EU, recomiendo absolutamente el mismo para dar una perspectiva impactante sobre el problema que muchas personas han confrontado a través de los tiempos.

As part of my studies in the University of PR, I had the extraordinary experience of reading "the soul" of Jose Maria Arguedas. He trully wrote from his heart about his lack of belonging of either culture he was exposed or came from. As a Hispanic dealing with Hispanics in the States, I strongly recomend this book as an eye opening to the struggles that other people have faced in their life.

José María Arguedas escribe desde lo profundo de su corazón, sobre su incapacidad para encontar pertinencia en una u otra cultura de las que fue parte. Es un profundo buscar de las raíces de un ser humano. Toda mi vida ha sido impactada por este trabajo y en este momento en el que trabajo con Hispanos en EU, recomiendo absolutamente el mismo para dar una perspectiva impactante sobre el problema que muchas personas han confrontado a través de los tiempos.

En la novela Los Ríos Profundos, un niño que ha vivido su infancia en un ayllu (comunidad indígena), emprende un viaje con su padre, quien más tarde lo deja -en busca de un mejor trabajo- en una escuela religiosa. El niño protagonista, Ernesto, nos entrega su visión del nuevo mundo que se le presenta. Así, en su particular percepción del entorno, el lector va decubriendo un entramado de matices de desencuentro, de sometimiento, de represión, de confluencia, de presencia: matices que posibilitan una mirada sobre los mismos elementos constituyentes de la realidad latinoamericana que se tematizan en esta novela.

Rafael Alberti (1902-1999) is one of the most notable poets of the 20th century. He is not nearly as well known as his friend Federico García Lorca and most of his work is still unavailable in English translation. City Lights has made an invalubable contribution in the effort to widen the availability of Alberti's work to English speaking readers. This collection from 1929, here in a bilingual version, is considered by many to be Alberti's greatest poetic achievement. Translator Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno set himself a monumental task and he comes through with dignity and grace. The brief introduction by noted Hispanist Ian Gibson (a Lorca specialist) is helpful and Alberti's autobiographical note (from 1955) is fascinating.
Critical inertia has set "Concernng The Angels" in a surrealist context, but the work is not at all exemplary of surrealist art nor does it reflect in any important ways significant surrealist influences. The collection is, rather, an immensely creative narrative of the redemptive value of imaginative art. Alberti, who two years after publishing this book began a life long engagement with the Communist Party and a commitment to political activism, here makes his best and most radical political statement. Read this book and discover what it is.

This book illustrates why City Lights Books is the most important tourist stop in San Francisco - they are the publishers of this excellent book. The Andalusian poet is a contemporary of Lorca, Dali etc. In his brief autobiographic note, he states that these poems were written at night in a frenzy. I believe him. At least three-quarters of the poems have a sense of being inspired rather than crafted i.e. as if they came as whole to the poet, i.e. as if they came directly from within as an expression of state-of-being rather than being created consciously by the artistic intellect.

Within the poems there is a significant variety in structure and tone although most share a sense of disorientation. There are very inventive images which absolutely fit in the poem although standing alone, that seems impossible. Throughout the poems there was only one image that jarred, one (to my mind) misplaced "piano". Some examples: "Ah yes. A suit of clothes went by / uninhabited, hollow" or "The earth was an enemy, / because it fled. / The sky an enemy, / because it never stopped."

This volume is bilingual - something I appreciate (or demand) in translations of poetry. It is a volume that bears reading and rereading in either or both languages.

Rafael Alberti's "Concerning the Angels" stands as not only one of the strongest & greatest collection of poems by a Spanish author in the twentieth century, but as the back cover states it is on par with other essential poetry books from all countries of the last century. Alberti's brief & poetic autobiographical statement at the beginning brings light to his mental state when he wrote the book in 1927-28. "What was I to do? How could I speak? How could I shout? How could I give form to that enmeshing tangle with which I was engaged in combat? How could I raise myself again from that catastrophic pit in which I had sunk? Submerging, burying myself more and more in my own ruins, covering myself up in my own rubble, with my insides torn, my bones splintered." Judging from the poems alone, one can tell that Alberti was in an anguished state. Alberti's recurrent idea of the soul in it's different conditions deserves to be examined closely & not be taken in a religious context, just as he informs us that, "the angels revealed themselves to me, not as Christian, bodily angels of the sort found in beautiful paintings or prints, but instead as irresistible forces of the spirit, maleable to the most turbid and secret states of my nature."


If people now find it hard to contemplate the notion of the soul in other than a strictly religious context, I have no reservations in stating this is one of the more lamentable effects of our consumer-driven society. As much as Alberti writes about the soul it is evident from these poems that he was witness to man's demoralization:

"body that for soul

had the void, nothing,"

"Ruined men, fixed,

in the wrecked cities,"

"Lost among equations, triangles, formulas and blue precipitates,

between bloody events, ruins and toppled crowns,

at the time of gold hunters and bank robberies,

in the tardy blush on the flat roofs

voices of angels anounced to you the casting off and loss of your soul."

Lorca brought "Concerning the Angels" with him to New York & was influenced by it while writing, "Poet in New York" esp. in his poems criticizing the greed of American capitalism. If capitalism & industrialized societies have offered us comfort & luxury, it has been enormously detrimental to our being, modern capitalism has turned people into exploitable objects with a dollar sign on everything. Beginning with Blake & Novalis, poets have been warning mankind about the negative effects of capitalism.


For Alberti physical death is preferable to anguish, especially after the loss of love. Rimbaud gave us a memorable definition of this when he wrote, "the only thing that is unbearable is that nothing is unbearable." The poet Ruben Dario writes of a different hope in death: "...Tell me that this horrible dread of agony which posesses me is my own wicked fault; that, dead, I will see the light of a new day, and then will hear you say, "Arise and walk!" Indeed, in extreme desperation what Alberti longs for more than anything else is either the void of death or a return to a state prior to becoming acquainted with love's disappointments. Usually this state assumes the form of childish innocence, but since this is more unlikely than the void of death, the most memorable lines of the book belong to the latter solution:

"Fly now from me, dark

Lucifer of quarries without dawn,

of wells without water

of caverns without sleep,

now, ember of the spirit,

sun,moon...

Oh, burn me!

More, more, yes, yes, more! Burn me!"

"Ugly one, sooty and muddy

I don't want to see you!

Before, you were snowy, gilded,

in a sled across my soul.

Ornamented pines. Slopes.

And now through the carriage houses,

of charcoal, filthy.

Out! Out! Away!"

"Always at counterlight,

never overtaken, alone,

soul alone...

Soul in pain:

lifeless brilliance,

you conquer."

In "Concerning the Angels" anguish usually appears in the form of mist, in fact three sections of the book bear the title, "Guests of the Mist", a line from G.A. Becquer, who Alberti dedicates one of the greatest poems of the entire book, "Three Remembrances of Heaven." This mist is the physical manifestation of Alberti's mental states, either completely obscuring anything colorful & promising or bringing back even more painful memories:

"Neither sun, moon, nor stars,

neither the unexpected green

of lightning or thunder

nor the breeze. Only mists."

Again the poem mirrors the conditions under which Alberti wrote them, "a creature of darkness, I began to write blindly at any hour of the night without putting on the light in my room."

We move with the poet through these skeins of mist, knowing all along, "to go to hell there is no need to change one's place or posture." Alberti keeps searching for what will eclipse his pain completely, the reason it is usually death he sees as the answer is because with every other solution, even a new love, there is the potential of old memories reappearing and throwing him back into extreme agony, what Alberti wants from death is to be cauterized not only from his present torments but from the painful memories as well. The poet's hope he puts into his death is, "there is always a last time after the fall of the wasteland, the advent of cold in forgetful dreams, and the tumbling down of death on the skeleton of nothingness." Alberti's conviction in the soul & his longing for the complete void of emotions that death promises may at first seem a paradox, but it is not. Only for someone who acknowledges the soul as something absolutely vital to living, as opposed to merely existing, would require death's permanence as a solution to their persistent agony, and the reason it is so intolerable is because it refuses to end. With "Concerning the Angels" Alberti has given us one of the most magnificent poetry collections, a veritable catharsis of the soul.

This is an excellent, finely tuned study of Gaskell. It investigates Gaskell as an artist caught up in ambivalent, conflicting goals. When so much work on Gaskell flattens her into an unbridled politico, this book traces the complex relationship between her social intentions and her artistic ones. And it reads all the novels but _Cranford_, including the neglected _Sylvia's Lovers_.

There aren't enough books about Elizabeth Gaskell. D'Albertis has stunningly filled what heretofore had been a Gaskell void. Yea, Dierdre! This sort of scholarship is rarely seen amongst Victorian scholars, particulalrly female ones. Fabulous!

The burgeoning interest in Elizabeth Gaskell has at last produced an author with the cogent prose style and analytical brilliance to match the subject. Brava d'Albertis! It reminds me of the impact of reading Axel's Castle in 1931.

One learns an enormous amount about the buildings and the man from this beautiful book. Indeed it is the place to go for Alberti as master builder.

Alberti's buildings were mostly left incomplete, altered, or unfinished by others, his original intentions often impenetrable. Tavernor goes further than previous scholars in untangling this confusion in his impressive, handsomely illustrated study. Though complex and learned, his book has a clarity and consistency of aim in its analysis of the process by which theory is related to architecture.

Robert Tavernor's On Alberti and the Art of Building is a book for which every student of Renaissance history in my young day would have sold his soul, for it presents this seminal theorist as an architect of rich intelligence and aesthetic sensibility, his excitement irresistibly infectious. With Tavernor's help we see through the alterations, false completions and unfinish of the buildings and comprehend Alberti's original intentions; reconstructions, models and photographs of astonishing documentary clarity support the exhilarating text. This book will no doubt pass unnoticed except by those few art historians whose imaginations were touched by Alberti when they first discovered him in Florence, Mantua and Rimini, and stood in awe of flawed perfection, but this monograph is, for me, the best art book of the year. Brian Sewell, Art Critic, London Evening Standard, 11 December 1998.

This book, in my opinion, is the best wiretaps book out there. It includes intricate and easy to comprehend details in the using and purpose of various items in the intelligence field. I would reccomend this highly to all people who have the urge to learn wiretapping skills. Furthermore, the author, Anthony Alberti, has an obvious passion and deep understanding of his profession and can easily protray this in his book. So if you are interested in learning wiretapping skills, this book is top of the line and good for you.

way to go tony........

I found this book to be highly informative. The author seems to be an expert in this field

As I have come to expect, another first class effort from Histoire & Collections. While I can't describe this book as all-encompassing, or totally comprehensive, I believe it provides an oustanding, well illustrated overview of the subject. Apart from numerous, well reproduced period photos, virtually all the many illustrations are in color. The original uniforms, photographed on current live models, are especially good. Full dress , as well as combat uniforms are covered in detail, along with a good chapter on female Marines, and shorter chapters on Navy corpsmen, and Seabees, both assigned to Marine units.
In my opinion, this publisher can be counted upon to offer truly valuable military titles, covering many countries, for a very fair price.
Also, for books that are almost always translated from the original French, there are few typos, in fact often fewer from books I have read that were published originally in English.
If you have any interest at all in the USMC of WWII, you should own this book.

Another great uniform reference book by Historie & Collections at a reasonable price. Large format, quality glossy paper with sharp clear photos, all English text. Has original B&W period photos along with hundreds of modern color photos of officer/enlisted dress/combat uniforms, headgear, weapons, fieldgear and insignia. Many of the photos are full page models wearing original uniforms. Did you know there were 3 classes (A,B,C) of the enlisted Dress Blue uniform or when camouflaged utilities/helmet covers were introduced? I didn't. Includes large interesting sections on Women Marines and Navy Corpsmen and smaller sections on the SeaBees and Marine occupation forces in China 1945-46. This book must surely have color photos of everything a Marine wore or carried from the beginning to the end of WWII. I really can't praise this quality book enough. Every time I open it I learn something new. It is a must have.

Este libro es una magnífica memoria de la infancia y juventud de Rafael Alberti, uno de los poetas más importantes de la literatura española. Su prosa es excelente, y en mi opinión, la trama no decae en ningún momento. Mis capítulos favoritos son su infancia en El Puerto de Santa María (algunos miembros de su familia, reales, son dignos de novela), y su conexión con los otros miembros de la Generación del 27. Una obra muy valiosa desde un punto de vista histórico y literario.

Este libro es una magnífica memoria de la infancia y juventud de Rafael Alberti, uno de los poetas más importantes de la literatura española. Su prosa es excelente, y en mi opinión, la trama no decae en ningún momento. Mis capítulos favoritos son su infancia en El Puerto de Santa María (algunos miembros de su familia, reales, son dignos de novela), y su conexión con los otros miembros de la Generación del 27. Una obra muy valiosa desde un punto de vista histórico y literario.

My surname is Alberti (52 years old), I am a direct decendant of Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72). It was a very personal experience to read Mr. Graftons book. How often in this fast paced world do we forget our roots and our heritage. Since my father is still living there are 4 generations of Alberti's all residing in the United States. I appreciated Mr. Graftons style of brining to life the man behind the ledgend. Thank you Mr. Grafton, you have added much to the completion of the history of my family and ancestory.