Berg Books

A well written and must have book for any "car guy". Garages are becoming a living space for many homes and this book shows some of the best along with great cars.

More than just garages, this book tells wonderful stories about the car nuts, their automobiles and the garages that house them. It gives you an idea why guys like Jay Leno have built their garages and how their obsessions with the automobile developed.

After receiving this book as gift, I have greatly enjoyed Ultimate Garages by Phil Berg and have given three books as gifts to friends.

I just ordered, and am looking forward to, Ultimate Garages II also by Phil Berg. I did get Motor City Dream Garages and have not enjoyed it as much as the original Ultimate Garages.

This is a great book, of classic cars and garages. While the cars and garages may be unrealistic for most, it gives us ALL something to dream about and strive for... Great photo's and great descriptions about 13 grown boys addictions; their cars and their respective garages.

I was very dissappointed in this book. I rec'd it for Christmas and actually asked my wife to send it back. It a pictoral of 'showrooms' (not garages) of the filthy rich. Cars that nobody but the owner can afford. Hardly a tool can be found.

I was looking for a book that would help be design or build a very 'usable' functioning garage for the space I had.

There is nothing normal or useful in this book.

Sorry.

Like exotic McLaren F1s, Italian supercars, Porsches, etc., the garages of the rich and famous are equally exotic in materials, size and construction. Not many of us who are car crazy will ever have a garage like the ones in the book but then again, something normal wouldn't be inspirational. There are slightly less exotic garages also included in the book but millionaire garage or not, all of them house historic, exciting automobiles and motorcycles and are an inspiration to all of us who aspire be the best at what we do with our much loved motorised possessions.

Excellent directory of hard-to-find plan catalogs, websites, products, references and materials. I found the illustrations of garages, horse barns and apartment barns to be lovely, and I liked that I could reach the architects/designers directly for more information on their designs. Many websites given here don't seem to appear on search engines, so this book will help you with your Internet search for plans. This is similar in format to Berg's "Barns and Backbuildings" and "Backroad Home" and, like those, will be a great help if you're dreaming to build.

THIS IS A VERY DISAPPOINTING COMPILATION. THE INFORMATION GIVEN IS EITHER AN ADVERTISMENT TO BUY OTHER DESIGNERS' IDEAS, OR IS ALREADY READILY AVAILABLE FOR FREE ON THE INTERNET. MOST OFFENSIVE ARE THE TERRIBLE RENDERINGS; FIRSTLY, BECAUSE THEY ARE IN LIGHT GREY, WHICH MAKES IT DIFFICULT TO DISCERN ANY DETAILS, AND SECONDLY, MANY OF THEM ARE NOT EVEN CORRECTLY DRAWN TO PERSPECTIVE! ANYONE CONSIDERING USING THESE RECOMMENDED DESIGNERS SHOULD HAVE THEIR HEADS - AND EYES - CAREFULLY EXAMINED.

First, the definition provided by Berg: "In certain parts of the country, the terms `carriage house' and `carriage barn' are synonymous with any building that combines a garage and an apartment." The value of this book thus becomes obvious; many of us are faced with the dilemma of which to build first, the house or storage building to shelter tools and materials. So here's the answer, build a carriage barn that serves both purposes. Later, one can build the dream house and use the previous apartment as guest quarters or writing/painting/sculpture/crafts studio. As with his other books, Berg stimulates and inspires with lots of drawings showing classic and contemporary solutions to questions of style. Drawings from previous centuries and current working architects give a panorama of choices. Whether restoring an old carriage house or building a new one, this book is a useful tool for finding ideas, plans, and salvaged or new products for authentic construction or reconstruction.

Wow, this book is great! Terrific plans and a great resource tool. Just what I needed for inspiration. There are samples of the carriage barn, stable and garage designs on Donald Berg's website...See for yourself!

The author proposes to review the colonial effort in Indochina between 1867 and1954. She discusses the conquest, building, transforming and marketing of these colonies. She then discusses the work of the colonizers and the role of native and French women in the colonies. The work ends with the battle of Dien Bien Phu, the exodus of the boat people, and the revisiting of Indochina.

She did not go into details about the exploitation of the country resources or of the natives, except to mention about French brutal colonial past. One error is to think that the Vietnamese presently living in France were submissive and apolitical. My feeling is that they were not as interested in French as in Vietnamese politics, therefore were not vocal about French state affairs (see Bousquet: Behind the Bamboo hedge).

Like the previous reviewer, I had to read this book for a class. The book gives the view of Indochina from the French perspective. Relying on novels, newspapers, movies and other items of popular culture, the author shows how French culture created an image of Indochina and dealt with their first colonial defeat. Chapters include discussions of the French Exhibition of 1931 and the role of gender in the cultural image of Indochina and a number of fairly sophisticated historiographical arguments. The author does a good job of summarizing each of her points which is extremely beneficial since this is not a book for the casual reader.

I felt that in some areas the author was stretching her points but perhaps that makes the book more provacative. My one major criticism is the constant injection of long paragraphs in French with no English translations. The previous reviewer found that aspect of the book beneficial. Perhaps he or she is bilingual and able to read the French. Most English readers are not. I felt that I lost a great deal because I was unable to read the quotations. Would it have been so hard to footnote those quotes in English since the book was published for an English speaking audience?

I had to read this book for my class and I thought that it was really great insight. I also loved how Ms. Cooper includes the French original text in the book. I recomend this book to anyone who is interested in Indochina or French culture.

Nicola Cooper. France in Indochina: Colonial Encounters. Oxford: Berg 2001.

In France in Indochina, Nicola Cooper is concerned with revealing aspects of France's colonial discourse with Indochina, but from a fresh perspective. Cooper looks at French popular culture: movies, books, music in an attempt to gain a better understanding of Indochina in French colonial discourse. The narrative is principally concerned with the period between 1867 and 1954. Cooper discusses such subjects as the conquest and transformation of Indochina, the role of women in the colonies and a review of how Dien Bien Phu has been depicted in France.

Cooper argues that French popular culture of the period viewed Vietnam as a feminine virgin land. Indochina was seen as a place where Frenchmen could go and make a name for themselves by constructing buildings or railroads; in effect taming Indochina with oftentimes phallus-like monuments to themselves and the greatness of France.

She shows how Indochina was given a highly centralized school system where vocational training was stressed. It was frowned upon for Indochinese to come to France for an education because it was seen as dangerous. French language training was also promoted to the detriment of native tongues. Cooper asserts that this was purposeful and was designed to see the gradual adoption of French as the language of common communication in Indochina. Textbooks in France depicted the colonial administration of Indochina as virtuous and honorable. The textbooks promoted the notion of Mise en Valuer: a term which connotes not only economic development, but also the moral and cultural improvement to be wrought in the colonies (29).


In the attempt to create a new Indochina in their image, the French imported styles found in other parts of Asia and fused them with western architecture. The new French Indochina was to be visible everywhere: bridges, railroads, buildings. Entire cities like Saigon were torn down and rebuilt in the new French style. Cooper argues that this was a conscience effort on the part of the French to reinforce their status in Indochina. It was also used by the French as justification for their status: France brought civilization and modernity.


Cooper's chapter on France's 1931 colonial exposition is the most interesting section of the book in my opinion. The colonial exposition was a festival the nation put on, a grand spectacle to show off France's greatness, wealth, and benevolent administration of its overseas possessions. The other empires of Europe where invited to attend but the French dominated exposition by building models of Laotian temples and examples of the new French style being built in Indochina. Anyone who attended could sample Asian cuisine and learn more about the empires of Europe. By far the most impressive display at the exposition was the near-scale rendering of the ancient city of Angkor Wat. Despite the fact that Spanish and Portuguese explorers had visited the site since the 1700's, the colonial exposition saw the rise of a new Francophone version of its discovery in which French explorer Henri Mouhot is the hero. Cooper asserts that Angkor Wat is hugely important as a metaphor to explain French colonial discourse with Indochina. In the French constructed myth behind Angkor Wat's rediscovery it took a Frenchman, when the natives had left the site to the ravages of the jungle and time. The French perceived themselves as not so much introducing civilization to Indochina, but reintroducing it.

Copper's shows us that while the colonial exposition of 1931 was meant to show everything that was good and just about French colonialism in Indochina, the exposition was ill timed- for the year before saw the Yen Bay riots in Vietnam, the largest expression of indigenous unrest to French colonial authority. She traces how the riots saw an increase in interest by the journalists of the "mother country" towards Indochina, and French writers descended in droves upon Indochina. Their mission was to find out just what was the best representation of Indochina: the one put forth by the colonial exposition, or the Yen Bay riots and student protests of elite Vietnamese in Paris to the French actions in putting down the rebellion. The journalists found that French administration in Indochina was far from the enlightened view espoused at Home. They decried what they saw as devolution of the quality of French colonial administration. Cooper goes on to detail that the blame for this devolution came from an unlikely source: the growing number of Western woman in the colony. French writers blamed woman whose social status was elevated in Indochina from what it should have been because of the paucity of Western woman as the root cause of the devolution. It was argued that these women brought their provincial attitudes with them to Indochina, to the detriment of the colony and France.


One of Cooper's more interesting assertions is her belief that despite contrary evidence, some it documented in the book, the French look back upon their empire with nostalgia and see their role in the history of Indochina as largely positive. She cites Raymond Aron, the preeminent French intellectual of the 20th century, who argued against reclaiming the empire at the end of the Second World War because he thought the costs would be too much for France to bear, not out of any empathy for the right of people to govern themselves. Cooper asserts that this is an opinion all too many in France still share with Aron, and she laments that most French have failed to come to terms adequately with the darker consequences of their country's colonial discourse with Indochina. Mise en Valeur is still alive and well.


Quibbles that one might have with the book are that Cooper cited numerous French language sources throughout the narrative, but provides no translations in her footnotes or endnotes thus making the book less accessible to a larger audience. This is unfortunate since the author raises many interesting questions. The indigenous peoples of Indochina are almost completely removed from the story in this study, seen only through the lens of French culture, art, and letters.

This book is alright. I was a little disappointed in how he dealt with, or rather did not deal with his use of steroids to achieve his physique. It's good for someone looking for ideas on how to start training or for the pictures of a huge man. However, it is not a book for detail or much information.

It's always fun to read about the pros and how they train. After reading through it, I didn't get much info out of it, just more opinions. OK read, nothing spectacular.

Ronnie Coleman give the wannabe bodybuilder the mindset of what hardcore training is about. It is not for the weak hearted! I have started to lift "hard and heavy" - heavy weights with higher reps and my body hurts. I am starting to see results in only 3 weeks but its painful. I cannot even work his split - my body cannot recover that fast. I am doing a one bodypart every every 6 days and even that hurts. To follow this book will encompass a lot of pain - but if you are strong, you will have a well condition body - in a few years. When you go to the gym, you will recognize the serious bodybuilders from the recreational lifters. Be careful, its easy to burnout on this program. As far as diet and supplements - I had to do the calculations to determine ratios for the cutting and bulking but it may not work for everyone. Otherwise, very good book.

Ronnie Coleman's complete guide to weight lifting is a very good and simple book, unlike Arnold's book and many other writers, Ronnie spoon feeds you the routines in such a way that you dont have to read the entire book to know. For chest he gives an outline in big bold letters his 4 routines the sets and reps, then if you want to read more you can. Ronnie's excersices are common one's not the dumb one's youd find in Men's Fitness, and he doesnt over train you like Arnolds book does, the only thing thats really lacking is the nutrition section, where he only gives his own eating regiment which no normal person could expect to follow as it has a whopping 6,365 cal and 623 Grams of protien!

He recommends high reps, he says if you dont do atleast 8 reps your not really accomplishing anything, all of his workouts he recommends atleast 10 reps, mostly everything is 10-15 reps. For chest he recommends working them out twice a week, once all barbell once all dumbbell, he has a "My Offseason/Precontest Workout" its hard but its do able. It basically requires about 1-1.5 hrs a day 6 days a week that shows exactly what he does everyday. Arnolds books I would spend 4-5 hours in the gym everyday a full time job! He recommends lateral raises to widen the should and chest tie-in to add thickness to the chest. His leg workout routine was painful, I could barely walk the next day. It seems pretty standard, all of the major mass gaining excersises, deadlift, squat, hack squat, and front squat. The Leg routine takes about 30-45 minutes, and its mostly high reps. Very good book, and written by a 8 time Mr. Olympia!

The book tells and interesting story of a young man in southern and eastern Oregon in about 1910 after the big pioneer rush. Very well written with good characters. It won the Pulitzer prize in 1935.

This book was impossible to put down. It is an absorbing novel set in (apparently) early 1900s Oregon. It is well researched as to the history and conditions prevailing in a country always hard to live in. And it is a rollicking good story.

I have enjoyed extremely some other works by H. L. Davis, most notably the novel Winds of Morning and the beautifully executed short story, "The Homestead Orchard." It was with pleasurable anticipation that I obtained Davis's prizewinning magnum opus.

But this monstrosity totally surprised me. The rendering of Oregon's history and geography is too far removed from the truth for a novel that is supposed to be a fanciful tapestry of Oregon's history and geography--it's so fanciful as to merely annoy. The characters are not well-developed and are cartoonish. I can stand fantasy sequences (loved Dickens's Little Dorrit), but this endless ramble exhausted my patience. I kept waiting to reach the good part. I should have given up after the first 100 pages.

H. L. Davis is a little-known and under-appreciated author whose works are not of even quality. Following is my list of his works that I've read, in order of my esteem from highest to lowest.

1. The Homestead Orchard--Humorous, sad, joyous, beautifully crafted short story about a father and son--a true masterpiece
2. Winds Of Morning--novel about a young, naive lawman
3. Old Man Isbell's Wife--Humorous short story with two great characters
4. Open Winter--short story about herding sheep, sweet edging toward profound
5. The Distant Music--sweeping historical-family epic
6. All of Davis's essays
7. The Kettle of Fire--a fictional legend
8. Beulah Land--a rambling Southeast-Midwest version of Honey in the Horn
9. Honey in the Horn--spare yourself! Overlong, random, Pulitzer-prize winning, historically inaccurate, pointless

To access the short stories, get a copy of his Collected Essays and Short Stories, published by the University of Idaho Press.

A well-told tale of settling of Oregon in the first decade of the 20th Century. This Pulitzer Prize winning novel captures the spirit of the times as those hardy pioneers struggle to settle a difficult land. Mr. Davis' wry humor makes this a reader's delight. Having lived in the general area as a youth I found many of the incidents sounding like the seemingly endless tales that my father and his collegues would spend hours swapping.

Better then other teen books. I recommend this book to any parent. The younder someone learns and understands kabbalah the quicker they will escape the world of chaos.

that your father busted when he tried to ride it, back in the days of yore.
Is this guy joking? Kabbalah was nonsense when it was dreamed up, nonsense when the BeShT's followers got into it, nonsense when it AIDED NOT AT ALL against Jew-killers of whatever stamp, Hitlerite, Orthodox or Islamic supremacist.
This gibberish that made the Jews look just as foolish as the Gentiles, you should prosper in your daily life by believing it, and parading around believing it, so that everyone laughs?
Come off it, even Schneerson spent years studying chemistry, and you're not nearly as sharp as that makher. Chemistry or other provable stuff is all you've got time for. Get back to work.

I purchased this book for my 15 year old granddaughter. Upon arrival I realized it was too "wordy" for her. I read the book and loved/love it. I refer to it throughtout my week.

"I purchased this book for my 13 year old son to read. When it arrived I decided that I should read it first, just because I check everything out that affects his life to make sure it is something he needs to internally process. WOW, am I glad I did! This book is a wonderful, positive, powerful messsage for all the world to read. Since my family has read the book, we have loaned our copy to other family members with hopes of it bringing a change to their life. If you have never read or heard of these two words...Proactive and Reactive then they are something you must know about. They have the power to change your life and to change the lives of those around you!

By the way, this is a PROACTIVE statement :) !!!"

This boring look at the Industrialization of Europe by the railroad will have you hating to turn the page. It is horrifying, read 20 pages take a break (probably a nap) then try and read 20 more.

In the last few decades historians --following sociologists such as Durkheim-- have turned their attention to the ways in which new technologies have altered people's experience of space and time. Schivelbusch's small piece is a pretty good (but light-weight) example of this genre. He reveals some interesting trivia along the way: he tells, for example, how padded upolstery was invented to assuage the fears of first-class passengers brought about by the roughness of new speed; he shows that compartment design in passenger cars reflect the contrasting social values of Europe and America. But he is at his most interesting when describing the ways in which the railroad created new conceptual forms of geographical distance by obliterating the spaces in between destinations. Furthermore, by creating the need for standardized time-tables, railways nurtured a standardized/homogenized conception of time. Local idiocyncracies became less important. Doubtless true national identities could never have emerged without revolutions in transportation and communications. A book that takes these ideas much further is Stephen Kern's excellent work "The Culture of Time and Space." If this genre interests you, Kern's book is an important read.

Recently I've developed a taste for cultural histories that examine the influence of new technologies on the perception of nature, space, time, individuality (etc., etc.) The railroad is a prime example of a technology that, once adopted, profoundly altered how people perceived and interacted with their world. (And, in a very real sense, created a new world.) The railroad 'collapsed' space and time, opened up new lands to settlement (and new resources to exploitation), and inaugurated a new era of technologically-mediated experiences of nature.

Wolfgang Schivelbusch's book is not only a good, concise history of the railroad (focusing on England and the United States), but a pioneering study in the cultural impacts of new technologies. It's a bit old, and in places shows its age, but is an excellent place to start for readers who share my interest in the culture/technology interface. What is particularly valuable is the realization that many of the cultural shifts associated with 'postmodernity' today (particularly 'time-space compression') are in fact rooted in such eminently modernist achievements as the railroad and (contemporaneously) the telegraph.

Also valuable is Schivelbusch's discussion of resistance to the railroad. While early promoters had the idea of reorganizing transportation (of both goods and people) through a widespread adoption of rail, there were just as many - and just as vocal - dissenters. Opponents of this new technology were concerned that it would further isolate people from nature. The relentless motion of the train displaced the feelings of fatigue and physical exertion that come with long-distance travel; the speed of the train turned landscape into simply passing scenery. (In other words: the same arguments that people had and continue to have about the cultural impacts of the automobile were already taking place nearly 200 years ago!)

To continue a thread of discussion in these reviews, I suggest that a book like this (and Schivelbusch's other excellent work on technology: "Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century") be read alongside broader histories like Stephen Kern's "The Culture of Time and Space", and more focused studies of technology like David Landes' "Revolution in Time." The weakness and strength of Schivelbusch's study, when read along with these other works, is its conciseness. Schivelbusch does not delve very deeply into concurrent technologies; nor does he make broad generalizations or indulge in speculation (however warranted that may be). Instead he culls nuggets of insight from original sources and provides enough interpretation to whet the reader's appetite - perhaps for their own researches.

Well written, well argued, and a quick read.

The Railway Journey is a straightforward but deceptively sophisticated work of social/cultural history that chronicles the rise of train travel and the effect this had on perceptions of space, time, travel, commerce, and ultimately 'modernity' (though the author avoids that loaded term). Schivelbusch draws mainly from primary sources and presents arguments about how significantly train travel affect the consciousness of 19th century travelers, and how the effects differed in America and Europe. The strength of the book lies in Schivelbusch's mastery of the details; the reader discovers exactly why British rails were straight while American rails curved around the landscape... the answers are rooted firmly in the economic differences between the two nations. And you learn about how the imprints of class structure differed for British and American train passengers, because British train cars evolved from stagecoaches while American train cars emulated river steamships.

The goal of so many histories of science and technology is to show the connections between the physical, technical world of scientists and engineers and the broader cultural world, and how the connections run both ways. Of course it is usually easy to show how science and technology change culture, but much harder to show profound influences of culture on science and technology. But Schivelbusch does just that, and does so with crisp writing and very clear evidence; his conclusions are often profound, yet it is very hard to take issue with the connections he makes.

Another reviewer recommends Kern's Culture of Time and Space over this book; while Kern takes a much broader view of the connections between culture and science, his work is so loosely constructed that it is hard to take his overreaching conclusions seriously. In particularly, Kern has a very thin understanding of the history of science (especially regarding the technical details), which frequently undermines his narrative. The Railway Journey is far more satisfying; it is a model of how cultural history of science can be done without ignoring the actual history of actual science.

It took 3 seconds to decide to buy this book. A book to savor, chapter by chapter, to carry along when you need to read for an hour or so somewhere in your travels, to have bedside, and a companion for afternoon cool-down time. At this skill leval, many fine recipes, revealing even more of the cooks character and desire to do well. Fills those little niches of lonliness most of us feel , brings us in close to the discussion around the table with other women.Treasured moments! There are profound intellectual meanings as well.Steven King might enjoy the poem by Marge Piercy, "What is that burning in the kitchen!"Very funny and sooty!

For the two weeks my grandchildren join their dad at our house every summer, we celebrate: Thanksgiving dinner one evening, an Easter Egg hunt early on a cool morning, and always a Father's Day picnic with fried chicken and potato salad. It's the only time all year we're together, and family memories are more important than the calendar. Food is an important and essential part of the memories. Writing in Through the Kitchen Window, Helen Barolini sees the kitchen as "an embassy of cultural tradition." We are ambassadors of our heritage.

In this fine book, Arlene Voski Avakian presents a collection of American women's essays, poems, and recipes considering the importance of food, cooking, and kitchens in women's lives. These glimpses through kitchen windows provide diverse views: Julie Dash's admonition never to stir Geechee red rice after it comes to a boil appears together with Joan Ormondroyd's wonderful memories of her Russian-Jewish grandmother's beet borsht.

These kitchen memories come sweet and sour. Letty Cottin Pogrebin takes pleasure in holding a cookbook with her mother's handwritten recipes. Maya Angelou recounts with pride how her mother used her kitchen and cooking skills to open new doors for her family. But Marge Piercy sees a burnt meal as "not incompetence, but war," and Helen Barolini says, "growing up I had deliberately stayed as far awaya from my mother's kitchen as I could."

There is great value in Through the Kitchen Window, not only in the glances into other lives and the feeling of togetherness (and sometimes separateness) that the stories evoke, but also in the way they call back memories of our own lives. I started a list of food and kitchen memories while reading the first essay; and by the time I laid the book down, the list was pushing seventy-five entries. Now it lies on my counter, still growing with memories as varied as the tales in this book. A gallery of good taste indeed!

Read this book with your notebook in your hand and a napkin tucked under your chin. And stir up the ginger crinkles on page 63, and be a little girl again.

by Patricia Nordyke Pando
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

Avakian's "Through the Kitchen Window" offers a delicious medley of stories, anecdotes, and recipes from some of today's most celebrated women writers. Authors as diverse as Maya Angelou, Ester Shapiro and Dorothy Allison share rich and distinctly different perspectives of the significance of food and cooking in their lives. Numerous stories in this collection take the reader on inspiring journeys across cultural and ethnic borders, landing in wonderful and curious foreign worlds. Everyone from West Indian slaves, Cuban Jews and Irish peasants, to name a few, are represented along with their culinary legacies. However, these stories represent much more than food; they are personal portrayals of identity, character and intimacy. Extraordinary narratives about family, friends and spirit each intertwined with hidden meanings and secret hungers of food and life. These tales will move readers to recall occasions and loved ones indelibly marked by meals or food in our own hearts and minds. From tales of struggles between mothers and daughters, the sacrificial lamb of forbidden love to cafeteria food and lime Jell-O, each reader will find at least one story that warms the heart, as well as, feeds the soul. One of my favorite stories in this collection is by the popular women's historical author, Sharon L. Jansen. Her personal narrative of her relationship with her mother is far removed from her usual chronicled style. Her story '"Family Liked 1956": My Mother's Recipes' reflects her personal feelings of the exceptional 20-year correspondence with her mother through letters and recipes. Women, cooks, or anyone who ever found delight in the pleasure of eating, will treasure this book. Add it to your library and read it again and again. You'll never tire of the warmth, love and inspiration you will find in each and every story.

As with any anthology, the appeal and the quality of the essays here varies, but what prompted me to write a review is the extraordinary tone of smug superiority that wafts off of all too many of those found here. The most egregious example of that smugness is to be found in a vicious little piece by Sally Bellerose in which she regales the reader with her saintly forebearance as she describes the horrors bestowed upon her delicate consciousness when she deigns to honor her reactionary parents with her presence at their dinner table. And could you have a book of this kind without including that Queen of Noble Suffering, Maya Angelou? She's represented here with a snippet from her often anthologized book "Wouldn't Take Nothin' For My Journey Now." There's also the pro forma male bashing in many of the essays ("Now I cook as a woman, free of that feeling of enslavement with which a male culture has imbued the process of preparing food.") There's also the stereotyping that often goes along with this kind of generic thinking; eg. "Everyone knows that TV dinners are mainly the province of heterosexual males and the career woman who lives alone. Gay men often enjoy cooking and are generally as good at it as the most creative woman." The editor is a professor in the women's studies program at U. Mass, Amherst. I doubt there's much room for discussion in her classes, unless that discussion serves her dogma. It's not the politics I disliked so much as it is the unquestioned assumptions and the tone of sanctimony that cling to these memory scraps. If you're already in the choir, this book will be happy to preach at you, but if you have yet to sign off on every blessed stereotype of oppression, you may find it annoying in some places,offensive in others,

Gotta give it for France for bringing so many heavyweights in the Postmodern ring of thoughts. Baudrillard is something of a post-Marxist academic gone wild, hitting you from every angle, slowly decentering the virtual world of the subject into the ritualistic world of objects. A must-read, Worth the time deciphering through the countless paradoxes and hints of esoterism.

This review is admittedly brief and frankly only directed at those familiar with Baudrillard's work, since it's not really possible to buy the argument of The Intelligence of Evil without having bought the notion of the Impossible Exchange. That being said, the editor's word "summation" to describe this work in relation to Baudrillard's career is a little flattering--nothing significantly new appears here, and the kinds of things Baudrillard tends to say are fairly derivative of standard polemics a la Nietzsche, Bataille, Marcuse, and so on. Baudrillard once complained that no one describes his work as being 'serious', even when he thinks there are philosophically serious things in his works. One wonders why he feels entitled to that description when nothing in his writing invites the kind of attitude he thinks should be taken to his work. It is one thing to be philosophical and quite another to do philosophy. At best Baudrillard qualifies for the former since nothing about the way he writes could pass for 'philosophy', even if one is not particularly wedded to an Anglo-American idea of what 'philosophy' should be (as I am not myself). His paragraphs are at times provocative, but rambling and more often than not vague. The translator calls Baudrillard's work "philosophical analyses of current events in the best Deleuzian fashion", which again is a little flattering--Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1 and 2 are incomparable with regard to the intellectual and philosophical challenge they present to the reader, regardless of whether or not one finds their arguments any more or less compelling than Baudrillard's. Baudrillard's jargon and terminology simply have nowhere near the rigor or historical depth of many of his compatriots.

The title 'The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact' relies on a Platonic reading of a line from Adorno (strange in itself!): "It is no longer a question of a thought critical of reality, but of a subversion of reality in its principle, in its very self-evidence. The greater the positivity, the more violent is the--possibly silent--denial. ... But this denial does not lead to hope, as Adorno would have it: 'Hope, as it emerges from reality by struggling against it to deny it, is the only manifestation of lucidity.' Whether for good or for ill, this is not true. Hope, if we were still to have it, would be hope for intelligence--for insight into--good. Now, what we have left is intelligence of evil, that is to say, not intelligence of a critical reality, but of a reality that has become unreal by dint of positivity, that has become speculative by dint of simulation." (I read Baudrillard's reading of negation and transcendence as Platonic in this context.) In other words, Baudrillard is rehashing comments about hyperreality in Simulacra and Simulation or the kinds of things said by any number of social critics since Simmel, Marx, and Nietzsche that talk about the outstripping of the subject by the objective world. (Incidentally, Baudrillard's conception of the dual illusion of subjectivity and objectivity is one that I find incoherent with other criticisms he gives about the failure of transcendence and the loss of reality.) As for the "pact" part of "the lucidity pact", this relies on a distinction between a "pact" and "contract" which is interesting, but undeveloped.

Regardless of Baudrillard's work as a whole, what I really wanted to say about this work in particular is simply that it's only really useful either for those who have already read others of Baudrillard's works or those who are tired of (in my opinion) better social critics saying much the same thing about the loss of reality (the other theorists with whom Baudrillard aligns himself, such as Zizek and Agamben, seem to have more understandable criteria for knowing when we are actually experiencing reality) and/or ungrounding the war on terror. The motive is admirable even if the execution is not.

For anyone casting about for a place to begin with Baudrillard, this might be a good place to start. It is a sort of summing up of his main themes, and the curious reader who has heard about such things as 'simulacra,' 'virtual reality,' 'integral reality,' and the like can rest assured that he will find Baudrillard discoursing here upon the themes which made him most famous.

Is there enough room, Baudrillard asks, for both the world and its (virtual) double? As we attempt to seal the world shut beneath a dome of virtuality that attempts to eliminate all forms of noise and chaos, the inherent evil in the world continually resists this Western sanitization in the form of accidents, crashes, terrorist violence and natural disasters. The attempt to virtualize the world is simultaneously an attempt to eliminate all forms of evil from it, but Baudrillard seems fairly confident that this will never happen. A complete sealing shut of the world behind a dome of virtuality can never be a success since evil is part of the very nature of the world that is in process of being cloned. To clone the world is also to clone its evil.

Baudrillard is at his best when discoursing upon the death of the spectator or the effects of electronic technology upon society, but he is less effective in his discussions of ethics and evil. The reader constantly finds himself fighting the urge to categorize Baudrillard as Manichean, but this is a myth that is too radically certain of itself to fit comfortably within Baudrillard's nihilism, with its decentered and ironic gaze. At times, though, one suspects Baudrillard of being a closet mystic. Wouldn't THAT be a wonderful irony! At the root of all his sceptical perspectives would lie an urge to be free of Western culture forms and to dissolve himself into the white radiance of a non-existent certainty.

--John David Ebert, author of Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society

An outstanding blend of technology and superb character development. Unusual setting for a crime novel which I found intriguing. I will never walk up a lonely stairwell again!

A compelling, quick paced mystery featuring a complex and likable detective named Eric Berg. There is something for everyone - interesting ethical issues, mid-life crises, academia at its worst, theology, intriguing forensics and, as pointed out on the dust jacket by mystery author Gregory Mcdonald, "unique insight into the general human condition." I recommend this book to everyone who enjoys a good who-done-it. I am looking forward to the next Eric Berg mystery!

The Labcoat is a slender volume, and for good reason. The book seems almost skeletal, as if it's waiting for a more accomplished writer to provide the flesh. The weakest plot point (and boy do you see it coming) is that a professor of ethics might suffer from a lack of integrity. But we never care enough about the main character to be shocked. The Labcoat is merely an adequate book. I suppose it rates a C, even though the last page contains this third-grade error: "He told his story and Kate her's." This is Soderquist's ninth book. Perhaps he should put more effort (if he has the skill) into developing a truly good book rather than rushing off number 10. Maybe he should read The Goldbug Variations to see that a novel can be complex and intriguing.