Berg Books

After forty years on the front lines of public education, author Thomas Alan Berg offers a unique and valuable perspective into what has gone wrong with the American public education system. In the "one nation under God" any mention or reference to "God" or a "Creator" has been stripped from the curriculum in the name of secularism. According to Berg, the US educational system now serves primarily to create generations of worker bees and consumers instead of creative individuals. In Uncle Tom's Classroom, Thomas Alan Berg shares a fantastic curriculum that he developed in his own "Bergland" classroom over the years, one that empowers the "Super Self" of each child and awakens the full and true potential of those he has taught. He has found a way to bring an empowering spirituality back into the classroom, without the pitfalls of religion. This is a must-read for any parent with kids in the public system, or anyone who has gone through it themselves. A real eye-opener!

Now in a revised and updated edition, Underage And Overweight is a valuable and insightful book by childhood obesity expert Frances M. Berg. Written for parents, teachers, and healthcare providers, Underage And Overweight presents practical guideposts for a healthy lifestyle that will help every child and, even more importantly, do no harm. Above all, Underage And Overweight produces a wealth of information stressing that diets don't work - efforts to artificially force rapid weight loss, such as extremely low-calorie diets, "fat camps", and appetite suppressing drugs will not keep off the weight long term because the body is resilient about defending its fat and its "setpoint" of weight. Worse, low-calorie diets, pills and extreme solutions such as liposuction or stomach stapling can have long- term health risks or even cause death. So what does work? Underage And Overweight offers a wealth of practical tips, tricks and techniques to improve lifestyle habits, offer a balance of greater activity and exercise, improve nutrition, and deal with the psychological issues of being large size at a young age. In the case of young overweight children, an ideal solution is often to help the child maintain his or her weight at the current amount as he or she grows older, allowing the child to "grow into" the weight. An active lifestyle can avert "setpoint creep" upward as children and adults age. Above all it is crucial to love and accept children, as negative emotions will only compound physiological problems, and children are far too hard on themselves and each other as it is. Underage And Overweight is a serious analysis of a problem with no quick or easy solutions, yet it is packed cover to cover with practical advice for fostering healthy attitudes for long-term improvement - from the importance of learning table manners to encouraging regular walking to meal planning based on sound nutritional principles and much more. Highly recommended, and a valuable resource of vital information for adults struggling with obesity as surely as children.

"How does culture shape notions of sexuality and gender? Why are transvestites in the West so often seen as `deviant' or `perverse', while they are accepted in other societies? What are the implications for the categories of `male' and `female' when considering transvestism?"

Author/researcher Dr. Charlotte Suthrell attempts to answer these questions which are posed on the back cover of her book, "Unzipping Gender", sub-titled "Sex, Cross-dressing and Culture".

The book, itself, is the author's doctoral thesis based upon field work conducted on two continents and over a four year time span. From an academic viewpoint it makes fascinating reading. In particular, the last two chapters give the reader much thought provoking material for discussion.

Chapter One starts by examining the ongoing debates and discourses on sex, sexuality and gender. Contending that gender lies at the intersection of culture and biology, Dr. Suthrell examines current doctrines concerning cross-dressing, its prevalence, and its uses. Her study is focussed exclusively on male-to-female cross-dressers, excluding so-called "drag queens" and stage personalities in cross-dressed roles.

Chapter 2, entitled "Clothing Sex, Sexing Clothes: Transvestism, Material Culture and the Sex and Gender Debate", starts with the author's claim that "Clothing as an artefact, with its clear gender divisions, illustrates, as few other things can, the socially constructed nature of gender which goes beyond biological sex." (p. 14). Then, for purposes of her study she goes on to define transvestism as "the deliberate and conscious wearing of clothes which, in that particular society, are perceived as the domain of the opposite sex, usually to knowingly create an image of the self as a person of the opposite sex." (p.17). Having thus defined and delineated the scope of her studies she moves quickly to her field work.

Chapters 3 and 4 describe her interviews with subjects from two widely diverse cultures, one representing the West (the UK), and the other the East (India), to illustrate the stark difference between the way the two cultures regard cross-dressing males.

In Chapter 5 she expands upon the interviews and case histories to show that "belief systems are a crucial part of the underlying structures which shape the sex, gender and sexuality discourses in each society." (p. 123). It is here that she states "one of the reasons why sex and gender are so powerful as systems of control is that they are considered so normal and natural that they are rarely opened up to be questioned in a radical fashion," which this book does. (p.124).

But it is in Chapters 6 and 7 that she really digs her teeth into her study and where she massages her data in an attempt to wring out basic truths which call into question Western society's current approach to transvestism.

Because her study is about material culture and the use of clothing as an artefact of gender, only rarely does she dig into transgenderism. Although she states that transvestism is primarily a gender phenomenon, rarely is the term "transgender" used in her discourse. Arguing that cross-dressing cannot be satisfactorily separated from issues of sex and sexuality she observes that "in our society, there seem very few things that one needs to be gendered for except sexuality; sexual relationships are one of the only places where gender is the key defining object - clothing being one of the few others." (p. 144).

Although this reviewer's perception is that transgender individuals seem not wanting to be represented by any specific social group, preferring to speak for themselves, Dr, Suthrell contends that s/he, [the transvestite], "is also performing a social role for the whole of society, whether this is viewed as a social imperative, a transgression, or a striking out for balance and wholeness." (p. 164). That is something to think about!

However, the sad fact, so clearly delineated by Dr. Suthrell, is that: "Within the Western context, it therefore starts to become very clear why transvestites have no place in the scheme of things. Women's economic and social position in the UK may have altered significantly in the last century, as parallelled by clothing changes, but not much has really changed for men - and underneath the surface improvements, at the level of structural symbolism (particularly regarding presumptions and truisms of what men and women do and are), little has changed for either sex." (pp. 169-170).

The book is very aptly entitled "Unzipping Gender" as opposed to "Gender Unzipped", for although Dr. Suthrell has gotten the zipper moving, it still has a long way to go. Let's hope that as society continues to move the zipper further it doesn't get stuck on a broken fingernail in the process.

Whether for academic study or just for general knowledge this book is an excellent read.

This was the book I needed and I received it in plenty of time to start my class.

A stunning first novel from this author full of suspense, obsession and emotions that will keep you captivated from the moment you start reading to the very last page. Very realistic, I love it.

The subject of wavelets is intermingled with a variety of
more traditional areas of math, and with exciting applications to physics, to engineering and to science in general. Wavelets didn't start in isolation, and even now in its maturity, surprising and deep connections to other areas continue to enrich the subject. The book contains a number of readable
tutorials and survey articles by authorities in astro physics, in turbulence[the largest number of pages are set aside for turbulence], in Navier-Stokes equations, in plasma physics, in solid state and atomic physics, in thermodynamics, in the subject of atmospherical blocking, in atom-laser interaction, mixed in with the math of multi-scale analysis, fractals, in quantum chaos, and more...The individual articles are relatively selfcontained, and the book forms a well edited unity, despite the diversity of contents. The book further serves an important purpose: Without the help of this book, it would be hard for students to extract material from the specialized journal literature. The subjects are well explained, and they are all amenable to the kind of numerical methods where wavelet algorithms excel.

Weird Tales was actually a magazine published from 1923 to 1954. The three authors selected stories from each year the magazine was published. I had no idea such a magazine existed let alone one from 1923 and some stories have never been reprinted.

Some of the selected works by: H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Laurence J. Cahill, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Anthony M. Rud, 33 authors in all. The book has 665 pages with 32 black-and-white illustrations.

Having read some of these short stories I was quite impressed with the diversity, from horror to downright perversion, these will grab your attention. Who would have thought there were women science fiction writers in those early days? Science fiction buffs will be thrilled TO DEATH!!

As an academic researching the implications and attractions of violence in global "Hollywood' culture, I have come across few works as original, provocative, and compelling as this. Duclos' harrowingly in-depth, quasi-Lacanian study of the lives and loves of American serial-killers and their place in the mythos of our time has many virtues, not the least of which is its determination to undercut the customary opposition between censorious conservatives and carefree libertarians. For, while refusing to buy into any simplistic, mechanistic account of 'media effects', Duclos shows how calls for untrammelled expression of the will to transgress and demands for renewed control of basic instincts endlessly reinforce one another, feeding into a cycle of universal complicity. And is it not clear, right now, that loudly voiced concerns about the possibility that videos produce teenage psycho-killers, concerns which amplify and ramify themselves through the global circuits of the media, constitute something like a DARE that young people fulfill our own desiring/fearful phantasies about the unleashing of repressed forces of violent transformation?

One of the book's few weaknesses is its evident unwillingness to face the difficulty of distinguishing between words and images that simply contribute to this feedback cycle, on the one hand, and those which reflect that culture without simply acquiescing to it (like Duclos's own book), on the other. How does one decide, for example, whether the cop-torture scene in Reservoir Dogs is a mere 'example' or a 'reflection' upon 'the werewolf complex'? Nonetheless, this book is indispensable for anyone interested in contemporary popular culture and violence.

Brian Morris is Professor Emeritus (retired) of Anthropology @ University of London. He's published interesting work, and this book is wonderfully interdisciplinary and suitable for advanced undergraduate students and entry level graduate students working on Intellectual History, Cultural History, Anthropology, Sociology, Political Science, Cultural Studies etc.

Moving on, the book gives great accounts of how numerous intellectuals, schools of thought, theoretical stances, and discourses have accounted for and described 'the individual' - and by extention, 'the subject' and 'the self'.

The book's scope is wide and covers many significant moments in modern Euro-American Intellectual history.

It covers the 1) beginning of the subject (Descartes/Kant), 2) The will (Freud/Nietzsche), 3) Empiricism (Skinner, Sociobiology), 4) Neo-kantianism (Dilthey/Wundt/Boasian Anthropology), 5) Hegelianized Marxism (Gyorg Lukács), 5) Sociology (Durkheim), 6) Pragmatism (also covering Goffman's symbolic interactionism), 7) Critical Theory (Frankfurt School, but also covering Marcuse's psychoanalytic bent), 8) Phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty), 9) Structuralism and Beyond [Clearly taking the title from Dreyfus and Rabinow's book] (Levi Strauss, Althusser, Foucault, and Derrida).


One complaint- I think that he should have either combined the chapter on Lukács w/ the one on The Frankfurt School, or the Frankfurt School should have came directly after.

For more complex accounts of histories of the self or subjectivity look at Jarrold Sigel's book- 'The Idea of the Self', Martin Jay's 'Songs of Experience', Dwor Wahrman's 'The Making of the Modern Self', Michael Mascuch's 'Origins of the Individualist Self' and the powerfully influential 'Sources of the Self' by Charles Taylor

I have a great deal of respect for the cow, I now find it is even more fascinating than I ever suspected. I can see why the cow is sacred in India, with such a divine anamial it should have respect. I never really gave much thought to all the famous cows and how much the cow gives to us in our every day life. This book has great visual and historic value. I also found a reference to one of my most beloved poems ,"Purple Cow" now that is an oldie but goody. I found this to be such a fun book for the cow lover of any age, I would like to give it as a gift ,or carry it in my leather store. I guess you know how I felt when I found it was out of print. The art is all great and covers so many aspects, the text is fun fun fun, it is my idea of a great coffee table book.