Berg Books

I'm a student at Columbia University and my Professor uses this book to teach his course on Advanced Constitutional Law: Religious Liberty.

MARCH IS WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH

If you need to know in depth, and you should, what Rosa Luxemburg's contributions to Marxist theory were and about her struggles within various European left-wing socialist parties to fight for her revolutionary perspective then this is not the book for you. You need to read the compilation of her own works edited in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks or read one of her eminent political biographers like P. Froelich or M. Nettl. If, however, you need a short primer about Rosa's theories and political struggles then this book can provide some insights about what it was like to be a leading revolutionary socialist woman in early 20th century Europe.

Mr. Abraham takes some trouble to go through the details of Rosa Luxemburg's political education in the early socialist movement in Poland; her rise in the German Social Democratic Party that was her home base for most of her career before her assassination by right-wing soldiers in 1919; and, her various trials and tribulations in connection with the Bolsheviks, particularly over the question of the national right to self-determination for Poland and other oppressed nations. He, thankfully, spends far less time on Rosa's personal life than that of Ms. Elizabeth Ettinger (see all my reviews) whose biography of Rosa while admirable in its way nevertheless almost consciously avoids politics.

I take issue with Mr. Abraham on two points, at least in part. He off-handedly tries to sneak Rosa into the feminist camp. While feminism may be the fashion in the late 20th and early 21st century it is not belaboring the point to note the contempt Rosa held for the feminism of her time. One cannot in fact understand her political career other than as one of seeing that women's liberation would occur though socialist revolution, or not at all. That, dear reader, has nothing to do with feminism. The second point is his emphasis on the efforts that Rosa made to create a `third way' for Marxist development away from the apparent sterility of bureaucratic German social democracy and the alleged rigidity of Russian Bolshevism. This again is more of a posthumous attempt to use Luxemburg's orthodox Marxist approach to create something more than her theoretical projections would warrant. Otherwise what is one to make of her long term bloc with those very Bolsheviks in the pre-World War I period and of her almost pathological fear of breaking with the German SPD when it was time, in fact past time, to do so. I will definitely take arguments on that one.


I read political biographies mainly to get a background look at what makes the subject of the biography tick. After reading this book it struck me, as it did after reading Ms. Ettinger's more personal account, that even revolutionaries, and particularly revolutionary women, cannot fully transcend the facts of their personal upbringing and their times. Clearly, Rosa was a liberated woman by any measure. However, I got the overwhelming feeling that she could never fully transcend the outsiderness of being Jewish or of the terrible strain of breaking free of the mores of Victorian Europe. It may be a truism of Marxism but true nevertheless that it will take some generations before the `new' man and women fully take on the attributes of socialist comradeship but after reading this book it is also clear that even the `vanguard' intellectuals of the movement can only go so far in transcending their capitalist environment. Nevertheless, Remember Rosa Luxemburg-the Rose of the Revolution.

"The Savannah" was originally written in 1951 by Thomas Stokes, a Pulitzer winning journalist. This book was one of a series of regional history books (61) based on the areas around American and Canadian rivers written from the 1940's through the 1960's. Like the other books, this one is in and out of print as it is periodically re-published. Some of the books in the series like "The Everglades" have become classics with multiple editions. Others are becoming hard to find. All of them are well-written by knowledgeable writers with local knowledge.

This book was so engaging that I read it in a fairly short time. These are not the current historical books that disparage and insult everyone and everything based on the current political environment in the graduate history department. There are no 'all white Europeans are evil' sentiments; nor are there 'only white Europeans are superior' sentiments.

I enjoy history books from this era because they are so apolitical and fair. And this book does a great job of expressing local sentiment and reactions without justifying slavery and other practices.

The author concentrates more on Georgia than South Carolina because Savannah (the city) and Augusta are the largest cities on the river and the South Carolina cities are smaller. His narrative is particularly strong during the founding period by Oglethorpe (1733), the Revolutionary War period, the Jacksonian era, the Civil War era, Reconstruction, the Depression and War eras. This book does not concentrate at all on the city of Savannah. It includes history all along the river. During a recent trip to Savannah, however, I found myself explaining statues and other historical items to the guides because of reading this fine book.

I was fascinated by the Civil War era in particular and found many incidents that I knew nothing of prior to reading this. It was so good that I wish the author had written a Civil War history.

All in all, an historical work of note for its history and narrative power. 4 stars.

My daughter got this book to use as a resource for a school report, and it does have some interesting history and great sections, like the Chinese shoes. But where are Birkenstocks and Earth shoes?? These also have changed shoe history, so why were they, and other "bohemian" shoes not included? Just because they are ugly to certain people, some of us are more concerned with comfort after years of wearing fashion (feet and posture killing) shoes, and now wear these, or similar "clunky" shoes. A real history would include everything.

Skintight is an assured and engaging analysis of the current status of cosmetic surgery - not just as a consumer phenomenon, but also as the harbinger of emerging conceptions of human identity.

I found Skintight a fascinating read, partly because of the interest inherent in the subject matter and also because cultural studies falls just outside my usual academic interests. Given my training in medical history, I was particularly interested in Jones' contention that our era is a time when ontological understandings of our own bodies are in flux. In particular, she proposes that first-world citizens are living through the emergence of a `makeover culture', where cosmetic surgical procedures are not only normalised, but become normative: it will soon be eccentric not to have `work' done. Jones takes us deeper than this, however. She suggests that the key to makeover culture is the process of transformation itself: good makeover citizens display rather than disguise their cosmetic procedures in order to valorise both their suffering and their striving to stay in `good shape'.

Given the current Foucauldian obsession with boundaries and bodies, Jones' work on cosmetic surgery therefore raises important questions about the body as a site of cultural inscription. In particular, she draws attention to changing perceptions of the body's surface, both as a text in itself but also as a locus at which previously interior processes are increasingly - and even flagrantly - exteriorised. I felt the strongest sections of the book were those in which Jones interrogates high-profile consumers of cosmetic surgery - including the artist Orlan, porn star Lolo Ferrari, socialite Jocelyn Wildenstein and performer Michael Jackson - to illustrate how aesthetic procedures are superseding their normative origins. These consumer-practitioners, she asserts, deploy cosmetic surgery in a transgressive manner to create deliberately artificial visages: they become `beautiful aliens'.

Jones' arguments in this regard are compelling, especially as they parallel the transhuman/posthuman debate that centres on emerging genomic technologies (for which makeover culture may be a surgical vanguard). Indeed, while her analysis draws primarily upon interviews, reality television, celebrity magazines and artistic works (including architecture!), many of these processes have been prefigured in fiction for some time. For instance, I recall tangential references to vigorous cosmetic manipulation in Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man (1953), while the violability and mutability of `meat' was certainly a startling feature of the early 1980s cyberpunk movement and its film offshoots. In fact, one of my few disappointments with Skintight was its relative brevity; I could happily have read another hundred pages detailing such wider cultural linkages.

At a technical level, Jones' prose is commendably lucid, especially given that she addresses many complex constructs. I was particularly impressed with the respect and dignity which she afforded all of the actors in her analysis; too many accounts of medical processes perpetuate a dated leftist rhetoric of dominance and oppression rather than more subtle and fluid conceptions of hegemony and agency. This in itself is an important lesson that I will be taking from Skintight, while her arguments and analysis have prompted many tangential thoughts that will inform my own work. And that, after all, is what good intellectual writing is all about.

`SOA for Profit: A manager's guide to success with Service Oriented Architecture' is the result of a joint effort by IBM en Sogeti, both leading ICT companies and both comitted to SOA. A first bonus is the book's publication under the Creative Commons Share Alike 3.0 Unported license: its content may be copied and adapted freely, provided the adapted material is published under the same license and references the original.

But there is more to win you over. Scanning the Table of contents shows that indeed the relevant SOA-issues are addressed, starting with the `why' of SOA; next the `what'; the `when', the prerequisites for SOA - your business characteristics, organisation and available human resources; the `how' which is divided into three stages of a SOA life-cycle; and finally the pittfalls. This is concluded with a comprehensive model and survey-tool to self-assess your organisation's SOA maturity level.

This however requires you to study 256 pages of text, case-boxes, tables, figures, checklists, etc., including the introduction and appendices. Therefore the `manager' in the book's subtitle will probably come from the ranks of CIOs, ICT managers, systems architects, and business consultants with an ICT leaning, but not so much from those of CEOs.

The book's overriding message is that SOA should start and end with your business, with technology in a supportive - and not leading - role. Those looking for elaborations on XML, SOAP, WSDL and other such abbreviations therefore will be disappointed: these are not covered by the authors. This by no means implies a `soft' approach to SOA as often found with advocates of the `service oriented approach'. The `hype-level' of the book is low, and the conditions required to indeed realise `SOA for profit' are clearly spelled out: without firm ICT governance SOA will only cost you money; those looking for simpe solutions to complex problems should go elsewhere; SOA is not a `one time activity' but requires long-term committment; if you are not operating in a dynamic, highly competitive environment with a strong ICT-dependency, it may be hard to come up with a convincing business case for SOA ........ To treat SOA mainly as an ICT supplier-issue therefore is considered a viable option for those organisations that do not meet these requirements, as long as this is a conscious decision. But whether actively implemented by the user organisation or through the new generation of products from their ICT suppliers, the authors leave no doubt about the fact that SOA is here to stay.

The least convincing part of the book - surprisingly - covers the attempted integration of IBM's Component Business Modeling approach and Sogeti's Dynamic Enterprise Architecture (DYA) method. This however is more than compensated for by the many practical tips and tools provided in the book. To name a few: the SOA maturity assessment tool mentioned earlier; how to define your most viable SOA projects through a limited number of workshops; and very relevant: what are the crucial questions as a CEO to ask your architect about SOA, and how to prepare for such an event as an architect!

Overall: highly recommended for those who are considering `to go SOA', and for those who have already done so but want to validate their strategy.

Before reading this book, I had no idea that this type of revolt had been carried out during the Holocaust. The book is extremely detailed, to the point of reminding me of a history textbook. Schelvis has clearly done his research; he makes a point of citing his sources. The end of the book includes an impressive list of all known victims and survivors to go through Sobibor. Schelvis gives a complete history of the camp itself, beginning with its construction and ending with the place's status today. Maps are included as well.

This is not an emotional read. Although Schelvis survived a stint in the camp himself, he barely mentions that experience. Rather, he seems determined to present the facts, the who, what, where, and when of Sobibor. Considering the atrocities carried out there, reading an account of this death camp might be impossible for many were the account not so unemotional. It is not a book I will read a second time, but I am very glad I read it once. Even without emotional drama on the writer's part, the story of these prisoners' refusal to die quietly is both inspiring and tragic. I had sometimes wondered why concentration camp prisoners never (as far as I knew) rebelled. Now I know.

Long before the late David Brower's environmental activism at the helm of the Sierra Club and after led to his designation as the `arch-druid,' John Muir was making epic journeys through the (then much more truly wild) wilderness of the U.S. western states and jotting down his observations as well as his thoughts on Nature and life in general. "Steep Trails" is a collection of pieces covering Muir's various travels through and about Northern California, Nevada, Utah, Oregon, Washington and the Grand Canyon. Writing mainly in the second half of the 19th century, Muir describes the terrain and its characteristics in simple and effective prose, but with the meticulous attention to detail and accuracy of a hard-nosed naturalist. One also cannot help but be impressed with the fact that Muir usually set off on his wilderness treks (often during the winter) with only the most meager of supplies and without the high-tech equipment and various Gore-Tex accoutrements deemed indispensible by today's rugged outdoorsmen. What comes out of Muir's writings and sets him apart from most of his contemporaries is his view that America's vast natural wealth and beauty should be appreciated in and of themselves, above and beyond their functional and economic value as natural resources to be exploited. Despite his firm belief in `progress' and `civilization' as these terms were understood in the nineteenth century (hence his often disparaging commments about the local Indians), at several points Muir showed that he understood the potential dangers of excessive economic development and industrialization.

Everyone should read this book. Because identity, power, and the present are so wrapped up in how we interpret the past, the book is essential for understanding how there are multiple valid interpretations of history that can exist and be interwoven. Warning: some knowledge of Stonehenge is required to comprehend certain parts of the book.

I am reading this book now and enjoying it. The portrayals of both the black and white characters ring true to me. Well-developed characters and settings. Reading it really carries me back to a time and place that I want to know more about. Can't wait to read more.