Berg Books

Changed Into His Image (1st book) and Created for His Glory (2nd), by Jim Berg, comprise a pair of books that is HANDS DOWN the most practical work on biblical Christian growth available. Changed Into His Image covers the biblical teaching of sanctification (Christian growth), the frustrations of an idle Christian life, and how a Christian can overcome his old sinful nature through spending time with God. The second book, Created for His Glory is just as phenomenal, and takes the Christian the next step in understanding Christianity as the Creator designed it to be. Both are MUST OWN works for any Christian desiring to grow spiritually according to God's Word. I will sing it's praises 'til my dying day--it's worth its weight in gold. Buy 1 for you and 2 to give away!

This book's stated purpose is to help us find the peace and joy that the Bible describes. I guess Dr. Berg has done a great job, because it was after I read it that I started viewing just about everything with eternal eyes and therefore experiencing what the apostle Paul called in Philippians 4 "the peace of God which surpasses all understanding." Totally life-changing, as is its predecessor, Changed into His Image.

This is the book that God used to begin showing me that He is God, that my relationship with Him can be very intimate, that I am loved by Him because of Who He is and not what I do. I would say that this book was the beginning of much encouragement and catapulted me into tracking my thinking and began my great love of reading great Christian books.
Check out the workbook too, it makes you think about what you have read!

How can i could explain what Karen means to me? Is a wisdom her self. Thanks for do this instead of still being in the confort zone.

lE RECXOMIENDO ESTE LIBRO ES EXCELENTE, ADEMAS QUE TE DA TANTAS HERRAMIENTAS PARA LA VIDA..DEBES TENERLO.

este libro es en definitiva DEMASIADO BUENO! de verdad que Karen es una extraordinaria maestra, sabe expresar de manera clara y puntual todas las ideas y conceptos que desea impartir a sus lectoras. la influencia de sus escritos es positiva y aprovecho para recomendarles tambien los libros de sus hijos y su esposo que tambien son fantasticos

pienso que sea que quien lea tenga o no devocion mistica-espiritual, este libro igual le sera de gran ayuda porque recordemos que todos estamos en la misma busqueda y vivimos en el mismo barco llamado PLANETA TIERRA. es tiempo de mejorarnos a nosotros mismos si queremos que el mundo tambien mejore porque el cambio viene de adentro hacia afuera y no al contrario

gracias a la familia Berg por compartir la kabala con el mundo y que Dios los bendiga siempre con todo lo que sus corazones deseen y necesiten

I loved this storyline. It was a great book - I stayed home all afternoon to read it - I couldn't put it down.

This is another winner from Patti. She has a brilliant talent for drawing you into her stories and holds you right till the end.

Well done Patti.

In 1938, Trevor Montgomery mysteriously disapeared, never to be seen in person or on the silver screen again. Most people back then assumed that he killed fellow actress Carole Sinclair and simply vanished to avoid the rap. Though rumors persisited that he was seen in the Sparta estate swimming pool just before his fianl disappearance.

In 1998, Adriana Howard is the biggest fan of Trevor today. She collects any memorabilla about the star. To her friends, Adriana is obsessed with Trevor. However, everything abruptly chnages when a man, insisting that he is the real Trevor, appears in Adriana's bedroom. He looks and acts just like the star, but sixty years should have at least aged him, if he was even alive. Still, Adriana finds the real thing more interesting than the image and soon the couple begin to fall in love. However, Trevor feels strongly that he must learn if he actually killed Carole and where has he been for almost six decades before he can see if a Pre baby boomer can find love with a generation X woman.

IF I CAN'T HAVE YOU is an original and fascinatingtime travel romance that will remind readers of the movie, TIME AFTER TIME. The charcaters are very interesting, especially Adriana, who allows her obsession of a dream to rule her life before her dream comes true. This book in the hands of anyone but the great Patti Berg would be a sure failure, but with the talent of Ms. Berg, the novel turns into a timely feast for fans of great romace

Harriet Klausner

This is a delightful little book that contains many great recipes and descriptions of the Irish countryside. Also contains beautiful watercolors that would be fit to be framed if I was willing to cut the book apart (which I am not!). The recipes are from many of Irelands famous chefs and restaurants and include everything from soups, breads, main courses and desserts. Well I'm off to the kitchen to try some of them!!!

Ireland Memories is brilliant! I read the book at one sitting. Both the writing and the artwork are outstanding. The recipes all sound so good and we are going to use the Chicken with Goat Cheese at our next catering luncheon. Anyone who has been to Ireland or anticipates going should have this book in their library.

This is a great book for anyone who's been to Ireland. Beautiful water color sketches interspersed with some great recipes are bound to generate fond memories of great places in a beautiful country. Makes a great gift as well.

As a long-time reader of Isherwood's novels, autobiographies and diaries, I thought I knew everything there was to know about him. I was wrong, and I'm happy to say that I learned a great deal about the intimate Isherwood (as opposed to the person he chose to reveal in his work) from this collection. The informal Isherwood is here in memoirs and reminiscences, first and foremost by his partner Don Bachardy. As you would expect, Bachardy's portrait of Isherwood is precise, detailed, affectionate and harrowing (his series of drawings of Isherwood's last days are included), but the memories of former students of Isherwood as teacher, mentor and friend are equally revealing. The professional Isherwood appears in previously unpublished interviews and memoirs by such colleagues as Carolyn Heilbrun, whose piece about her few intersections with Isherwood as a literary subject takes an interesting turn into recalling his profound kindness to her in a time of spiritual crisis. And the lively and accessible essays by literary scholars served first to remind me of what an original and vivid writer Isherwood was and second to send me back to the novels that so inspired me when I first encountered them. Isherwood achieved thrilling literary effects by combining witheringly accurate observation of his characters with a sensual evocation of time and place as if by magic. It seems only fitting that when the many writers here take very different beads on this complex man and artist what emerges from the collage of viewpoints is a surprisingly emotional and coherent portrait of the man himself.

The Isherwood Century is an impressive collection of essays and interviews on the life and work of Christopher Isherwood, including a fresh, in-depth view of his literary legacy and continuing influence. Included are Katherine Bucknell (Who is Christopher Isherwood?); Dan Luckenbill (Isherwood in Los Angeles); Stathis Orphanos (In the Blink of an Eye: Evolving with Christopher Isherwood); Michael S. Harper (Ish circa 1959-1963); Michael S. Harper (Reading from Isherwood's Letter circa 1959-1963); Robert Peters (Gay Isherwood Visits Straight Riverside); Carolyn G. Heilbrun (My Isherwood, My Bachardy); James P. White (Write It Down or It's Lost: Isherwood as Mentor), and sixteen other informative and insightful contributors. The Isherwood Century is a "must" for all students and fans of Isherwood's accomplishments and thoughts.

"The Isherwood Century". What a great choice of title for this invaluable (and well edited) collections of essays, interviews, ruminations on the life and influence of Christopher Isherwood. While his is a household name, primarily beacuse of the worldwide success and endurance of "Cabaret" the musical based on his Berlin Stories (I am a Camera, Goodbye to Berlin, etc), this informed and endlessly interesting survey provides a fine documentation for Isherwood's position of importance on 20th Century literature, his positive role model for gay writers and all gay people who care about significant relationships, his courage as an early pacifist, his impact on those students fortunate enough to have studied in his unique classes. Reading first hand encounters from such a broad spectrum of friends and reporters always give a more fine tuned view than a straight out biography. And for a man whose literary skills polished the concept of autobigraphy that is matched by few others, this is quite an achievement.

Reading "The Isherwood Century" is discovering an involved panorama of life in the past century - politically, artistically, internationally, psychologically, and spiritually. More than a memoir, this book remains intimate despite its scope. At last we have a reference (outside of his own wondrous diaries) that validates the greatness of this significant human being.

good quality
moderate in its charges
its price in Guangzhou academy of fine arts is rmb 375,in amazon just rmb 265,make me happy

This book on Luc Tuymans is an excellent introduction to the strange world of this internationally reknowned Belgian Painter. What is it that stirs up the bizarre fascination of cognoscenti for this artist? At the very least, it is attributable to the deeply psychological expression that this artist conjures from his sometimes murky palatte, as well as his subject matter. He addresses these ideas in relation to living as an artist in this modern world and a Freudian psychoanalysis of history that seems all to prevalent in this information age; including, everything from the New York art world as evidenced in his painting "Heritage", which alludes to Jasper Johns flag painting and the Holocaust in paintings like "Our New Quarters". This artist also takes these issues to subjects like the body, which through his investigation and isolation of its various parts he formulates the queerness that follows a banal rendition of the functions of that space. In addtion, as a psychoanalytical historian this artist attempts to fuse the mundanity of the conscious world with the fanatsy of the world of dream, which always seems to be off center, and could be related to the work of Alex Katz and Robert Gober. At any rate, this book provides an excellent insight into the world created by Luc Tuymans, and comes highly recommneded by art lovers and aficianados alike.

The illustrations in the book are very fine. The interview with the artist gives more insight into his work than any of the writings in the book including his own. There is a good deal of critical double talk and bullshit, but biographical information, and useful details seem to slip through as well.

When I worked as a clinician I often felt frustrated that so many "psychologists" (with a degree that said so) were in fact neurologists, biologists, and physiologists, dealing as they did with psyche (which they called mind, or brain) in terms of its literalized mechanics: soul as circuitry, heart as pump, world as background to human concerns. What I could have taken heart (not the pump) from, and what Robert Romanyshyn provides in this book, is what he calls "a psychological reading of the historical appearance of the science of psychology." A psychological reading: a reading that takes psyche on its own terms and disassembles psychological empiricism into a series of working fantasies, a dream too often untended as such.

Using the metaphor of the mirror, Romanyshyn brings into his study a sustained reflection in which the reflected-upon and the reflecter transform one another. This mirrorlike dissolving of watcher into watched, which eludes captivity in numbers or in graphs depicted in psychology texts, cannot be called a property of psyche, for psyche is not a thing or a substance. "Between persons and things, man and world, subject and object, a story appears, a story which is expressed in terms of a way of seeing and speaking about the world. The story which appears is the appearance of psychological life."

What does a psychology offer when it has forgotten this storied quicksilver aspect of its subject? Automata; a subject without subjectivity; or as the author puts it, an animated corpse. Read a mainstream psych text and see for yourself: drives and their derivatives, but no person; mechanisms and libidinal hydraulics, but no soul. Spiritless schemata whose vocabulary might have been dried in formaldehyde before ever hitting the page.

As one of archetypal psychology's original thinkers, the author points out that behind the most "objective" observation lurks a fantasy, an image; and perhaps nowhere is this truer, and with larger psychological consequences, than in psychology itself. "Psychology, however, forgets this vision. Focusing on the events of physiology as the facts of psychology, it forgets that these events are primarily ways of seeing psychological life. Focusing on what it sees, it forgets how it sees. And in this forgetfulness what originally matters metaphorically is taken literally."

What always strikes me about Romanyshyn's work (see my review of his book THE SOUL IN GRIEF here at Amazon.com) is how vibrantly relational its own metaphors are. They image, connect, dream into each other, now at rest, now in motion, but never static or sealed in glass jars. Loosening itself from the customary constructs we bring to it, the world he paints for us shimmers into enactments, poetics, that dance around the details he shows us: the face in the mirror, the old man in the park. The style of writing reminds us of the worlds of difference between the imaginary and the imaginal, the spatial and the spacious, the mind and mindfulness.

Psychology the Science, so precise, so factual, and so possessed by physics envy and blind to its architecture of assumptions, moves in this book into psychologizing, from self-distracted noun to alchemically self-reflective verb.

Romanyshyn explores the assumptions regarding person, others, body, and world, that are the cornerstones of scientific psychology, anad he compellingly dissolves these in terms of the metaphors of our cultural history. In doing so her articulates the irreducibly metaphorical character of psychological life and opens the possibility of a phenomenological depth psychology. This little book is a classic in phenomenological psychology and metabletics. Its gifts are numerous, and it is essential reading for anyone concerned with the meaning and direction of psychology.

Of all the books I have read, very few so profoundly affected me so as to literally change the way I see the world. This is one of them, among a select few. I am amazed how Dr. Romanyshyn can write with such lucidity about ideas that are so profound and otherwise complex; it speaks to his essence as a teacher, who knows how to provide a perfect balance between the concrete and the abstract.

In the very beginning of the book, Dr. Romanyshyn begins with the example of looking in a mirror, and from there he unravels with apparent ease the basic assumptions of modern psychology, and in its place, builds the foundation for a different "psychology" that is concerned with "psychological life." Such a psychological life is profoundly metaphorical in nature--and yet unmistakably grounded in concrete experience.

Make no mistake, Dr. Romanyshyn's thesis, if taken seriously (as it should be) has widespread significance for what it means to understand, teach and practice the discipline of psychology. Psychology from the perspective of psychological life will be a psychology that is not reducible to a natural science, nor to philosophy, nor to literature. But, rather, psychology as a way of seeing comes into its own--and for the first time in the history of the discipline, would finally come home, in the sense that it would for the first time have its own identity.

Certainly, Romanyshyn is standing on the shoulders of giants: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sigmund Freud, Paul Ricoeur, Carl Jung, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Wilhelm Dilthey, Michel Foucault, and many other thinkers in the history of the philosophy of the human sciences. But no one has quite synthesized and formulated psychological life the way Romanyshyn does so in "Mirror and Metaphor." I have no doubt that if Dr. Romanyshyn's text were to be read widely and carefully, psychology as we know it would never be the same.

It is a must read! Don't miss it!

It's too bad that this book is out of print. Probably it stopped selling because of its title -- people must have assumed that it was only relevant for the Nixon era. Not so! The book is valuable today for the evocation of the early part of that time (especially the summer of 1968), but more than that, it is a masterful analysis of that collection of shared intellectual assumptions that make up a great deal of American political (and other) impulses -- specifically, that set of post-Lockean interpretations of social, moral, economic and political life which fall under the rubric of "liberalism". Wills details the connection between Nixon and this background, and the results are far-ranging. Many of the great American assumptions about life are implicated and their mythical foundations revealed: equality of economic opportunity, electoral "mandates", democracy via fair elections in countries that do not have them, fair competition of ideas in academia, and others. Wills leaves no stone unturned. The book deserves to be reprinted again.

Original review above was July 1998; Below added Jan 2003:
Hurrah! It's back in print! Get your copy before it disappears again!

I should have mentioned that, in addition to the fun of watching Wills dismantle the superstructure of liberalism, the book provides great pleasure through its style. Wills writes non-fiction better than most poets write sonnets.

The English poet and Cromwellian revolutionary John Milton had his Samson struggling against forces that he did not understand and that in the end he was unable to overcome. Professor Wills in his seminal contemporaneous study of the career through his successful run in 1968, up close and personal, of one Richard Milhous Nixon, former President of the United, common criminal and currently resident of one of Dante's Circles of Hell tries to place the same spin on the vices and virtues of this modern "Everyman".

Wills takes us through Nixon's hard scrabble childhood, the formative Quaker background in sunny California, the post World War II start of Nixon's rapidly advancing hard anti-communist political career, his defeats for president in 1960 by John Kennedy and for California governor in 1962 by Pat Brown and his resurrection in 1968 against Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey. And through his discourse, as is his habit, Professor Wills seemingly writes about every possible interpretation of his rise to power and what Nixon symbolized on the American political landscape. If one has a criticism of Wills it is exactly this sociological overkill to make a point but make your own judgment on this one as you read through this tract.

However, as well written and well researched as this exposition is it will just not wash. Nixon knew what the score was at all times and in all places so that unlike old Samson there was no question of his not understanding. As Wills points out Nixon had an exceptional grasp of the `dark side' of the American spirit in the middle third of the 20th century and he pumped that knowledge for all it was worth. Moreover, rather than cry over his self-imposed fate one should understand that Nixon liked it that way. There is no victim here of overwhelming and arbitrary circumstances clouding his fate.

It is perhaps hard for those who were not around then, or older folks who have forgotten, just what Nixon meant as a villainous political target to those of us of the Generation of 68 for all that was wrong with American political life (although one Lyndon Johnson gave him a run for his money as demon-in-chief). Robert Kennedy had it very eloquently right, as he did on many occasions, when he said that Richard Nixon represented the `dark side of the American spirit'. For those who believe that all political evil started with the current President George W. Bush, think again. Nixon was the `godfather' of the current ilk. Some have argued that in retrospect compared to today's ravenous beasts that Nixon's reign was benign. Believe that at your peril. Just to be on the safe side let's put another stake through his heart. And read this book to get an idea of what a representative of a previous generation of political evil looked like.

Although the Nixon saga is the central story that drives this book Professor Wills, as is his wont, has a lot more to say about the nature of those times. He takes some interesting side trips into earlier days in California where Nixon grew up. He draws a direct line on the various other personalities like Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney (Mitt's father) and a younger Ronald Reagan who fought Nixon for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968. He gives an interesting overview of the state of liberal and radical thought during 1968 and how the tensions between them were fought out at the Democratic Convention and in the streets of Chicago.

Wills also tries to draw out the meaning of the virulent George Wallace independent third party campaign and how that kept everyone on their toes on the question of law and order the code word then, and today, for race. In short, Professor Wills has enclosed the Nixon story in a hug sociological and political survey of the times. Some of his observations had momentary importance; some have a more lasting value. Others seem rather beside the point. Collectively, however, they give a helpful history of the key year 1968 in America. The proof is in the pudding. The `culture wars' on the nature of personal rights, political expression and lifestyle choices that we have been fighting for the past forty years have their genesis in this time. Give this book a good, hard look if you want to know what that was all about by someone who covered many of the events closely.

Revised: May 14, 2008

A colleague just asked me if this is an apologia of Nixon - it is not. I read this and most of the other burst of books that came out in the 1970s right after Watergate, and they were all great reads, especially with the fire of those times still burning -- and Nixon Agonistes was one of the enduring best, engrossing and well rounded. Nixon was a peculiar character but Wills does a good job of being the good historian, with balance and insight. And as I say, it was engrossing -- I read it all the way through. College poly-sci majors in particular should add this to their must-read list.

Rosenstock-Huessy has described "Out of Revolution," his history of western man, as his favorite book. This book is an entirely fresh version of his landmark "Die europäischen Revolutionen," and was written after his immigration to the United States. It presents the reader with Rosenstock-Huessy's method of perceiving man, history, and society. He reweaves strands of the old disciplines of philosophy, theology, and history into an entirely new fabric.
In his introduction, Harold Berman writes:
"That this book - written six decades ago - is without any question an extraordinary book, a remarkable book, a fascinating book, has not saved it from relative obscurity. It is directed against conventional historiography, and for the most part the conventional historians have either ignored it or denounced it. ... I have no doubt that one day - perhaps soon - the academic historians will discover that Rosenstock-Huessy was also one of the great pioneers in a new and significant interpretation of the history of mankind.
'Out of Revolution' is history in the best sense of the word. Although it embodies original scholarship of the highest professional quality, it is written primarily for the amateur, the person of general education, who wants to know where we came from and whither we are headed. But it is also a theory of history: how history should be understood, how historians should write about it."
"Out of Revolution" has been reviewed by others:
The historian Page Smith considers this Rosenstock-Huessy's greatest work in English. He wrote in his book "The Historian and History" (Knopf 1964):
"Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy was one of those Europeans who at the end of World War I decided that the war had made familiar categories of thought obsolete. He undertook, in a series of books and articles, to illuminate the relation between history and the human experience and to explicate the progress of man through history toward a common future. ... The revolutions of mankind, Huessy wrote, 'create new time-spans for our life on earth. They give man's soul a new relation between present, past, and future; and by doing so they give us time to start our life on earth all over again, with a new rhythm and a new faith.' This is the framework for Huessy's history of Europe and it may safely be said to be the first historical work written under the new dispensation. As such, it is of profound significance for contemporary history, but its very uniqueness has left it high and dry on the banks of academe. Nobody knew what to make of it because nobody had seen anything like it before."
Reinhold Niebuhr said of "Out of Revolution":
"Really a remarkable book, full of profound insights into the meaning of modern European history. I have not read a book in a long time which is so imaginative in relating the various economic, religious and political forces at play in modern history, to each other. Ordinary historical interpretations are pale and insipid in comparison with it."
Lewis Mumford wrote:
"Rosenstock-Huessy's is a powerful and original mind. What is most important in this philosopher's work is the understanding of the relevance of traditional values to a civilization still undergoing revolutionary transformations; and this contribution will gain rather than lose significance in the future."
"Out of Revolution" can also be ordered from Argo Books (www.argobooks.org), as can all the rest of Rosenstock-Huessy's English language works, including many of the lectures he gave on these topics. The lectures alone comprise more than 5000 pages of spontaneous comments he made to students from 1949 to 1968.

'Our passions give life to the world.' That's the premiss upon which Rosenstock-Huessy begins his brilliant study of the 'total revolutions' of the last millenium. He may not always be right about the details or even his conclusions about the origins or meanings of the great revolutions, but he is always insightful, and he always takes you into areas which are worth exploring further. Rosenstock-Huessy knows that catastrophes are the cauldrons of creation, and while there have been critics and advocates of revolution aplenty, few have attempted to trace in such detail the alchemical processes of the great revolutions of the Western world. This is a masterpiece by a thinker who simply knows more about more things than any other twentieth century figure I have read. In addition to being a great historian and sociologist, he has a tremendous understanding of the human heart. His other books are also definitely worth checking out.

Eugen was a friend of mine and the teacher of my colleague--Page Smith--one of the great American historians. Eugen came to teach at UCSC after his retirement from Dartmouth. His book on the history of European culture is one of the relatively unknown treasures of modern letters. Eugen was clairvoyant in his unique ability to portray the national character of the major cultures of the West, on the theme of revolution. Although he was a scholar of profound learning, he never lost the passion of his personal voice, which infuses everything he wrote; how appropriate as one of the figures in the I-Thou circle of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. The book was born out of the agony of the trenches of the lst world war, at Verdun, where the curse over Europe was uttered in the 9th century at the Treaty of Verdun. Eugen gives us the integration of European culture in all of its unique individuality, from nation to nation. Absolutely essential reading for those in charge of the current European Commission and the Council of Europe and the Museum of Europe in Brussels.

This is the book about the unified cultural heritage of Europe.

Smith and Berg have wrouth - written is too modest - a briljant insighful and wise guide tour behind the coulises of our lifes. It is the best guide book I know to the place you live in: the group. You can use it in almost every situation. They show how we are caught in our webs, our own frames of mind, our relational swamp. Such is life and it is getting sucher and sucher all the time.
I recommend this book to every one dealing with groups AND individuals, because there is no better way to start to understand what life ' is'.

This insightful book has accompanied me through grad school, two corporate reorganizations and numerous consulting projects. The authors have written an excellent text on the contradictory forces/movements endemic to group life. Their use of paradoxical thought as a lens for thinking about and successfully navigating the territory of group life is both practical and innovative. If you're looking for the usual book about conflict resolution, please look elsewhere. Smith and Berg advocate reclaiming rather than repressing or eliminating the fears and anxieties that define many aspects of group life. Their explanation of concepts such as group paralysis, oscillation, group-as-whole, splitting and individual ambivalence are clear and highly cogent when integrated into a paradoxical framework.

Paradoxes of Group Life is a masterful explication of the concepts its title announces. This readable volume will serve the newcomer to Group Dynamics as well as the more experienced cognoscenti. People are often fundamentally ambivalent about ourselves and our participation in groups. Smith & Berg explain these (often unconscious) dynamics with great clarity and force. Treat yourself to this compelling analysis. I highly recommend their important work!