Bernard Books

I dimly remember from the early to mid Sixties this episode from near the end of the THIRD Act of George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman, broadcast on Public Television with a younger George C. Scott deliciously, wisely, wearily, darkly, grippingly playing Don Juan, subtly, powerfully filling the profound and philosophical dialogue with urgent life.

I would give anything to see it again. Never was Mr. Scott so good; never theatre so well written than by this sardonic Irishman. This fine reprinting by the Dover Thrift Editions (to which this review is directed) begins not only with an excellent introduction as published a half century ago by John Mason Brown, but also a moving forward by the great actor Charles Laughton who bears a lament similar to mine own. Where now lies theatre worthy of presentation such as this? What has our great culture and civilization and technology brought us which can ever surpass this segment of a larger work from one hundred years ago?

This Dover Thrift Edition generously bears full implicit theatrical presentation rights with no need for permissions nor licensing. Anyone who possesses this book may present it upon the stage. When you do, please let me know! Or let us read and discuss it together, now, on earth.

This is a fabulous book. It is part of the larger "Man & Superman" by Shaw, and I must admit that I am very glad it has been published as a separate work, because it is a discrete entity in itself. It lays open the whole panorama of Social Darwinism: Why are we here, where is humanity going eventually, what is our purpose, and what is the ethos of evolution. Like the previous reviewer, I saw it first in a dramatic presentation. Actually nothing HAPPENS in this play... It is a discussion between four characters about the purpose of existence. But what a discussion! It debunks religion, patriotism, war, love, marriage, morals, responsibility, and "progress." It is surprisingly universal, and while it does poke fun at Victorian rigidity, its contents are relevant today. The divergent points of view map out psychology, sociology, ethics, and politics for the ensuing century. It is wonderful that an inexpensive book can be this rich!

What you have here is one man's odyssey of both mind and spirit, encompassing forty years of his life, during which time he thought deeply about all he went through.What you must know is that at the outset of this odyssey he thought of himself as a candidate for the Episcopal ministry. He was a virgin. At the end of this time, however -- well, judge for yourselves.
Of course, you must read the book. In it you will find this man's views on many subjects. What he thinks of guns. What he thinks of death, divorce, sex, relationships and love. And more importantly, most importantly, having abandoned orthodoxy generally, what he thinks of God.
His style is refreshing. He reads well out loud. And there are occasional bursts of reserved power that come like thunder claps when one hears him read out loud. He can be dramatic. But he can also be very persuasive.
For the most part in these essays he is matter-of-fact and to the point. And the gliding ease with which he guides one's mind from point to point in his arguments is pure skill, no accident.
There are poems too in this book. Philosophical poems, provacative poems, one even rather sexy poem and some that almost bring a tear to the eye. But there are no laughs. Not to say Chamberlain is humorless but in this case he is laying out food for your thought. And if you read this book, all 178 pages of it, you will find yourself doing just that, believe me.

This neat little book of essays is the chronicle of a thoughtful, sometimes iconoclastic man whose life experiences ranged from growing up in a privileged class family to mixing it up with the blue collar set, from once wanting to be an Episcopal priest to questioning some of the Church's basic premises, from pondering the what-is-it of love to musing about the meaning of it all. In between are Chamberlain's insightful views on gun control, mathematics and death and divorce.
Reading "Don't Look at Girls Who Drive Volvo Station Wagons" is akin to listening to an intelligent friend, with brandy in hand by a cozy fireplace after dinner, ruminating, dispensing thoughts and wisdom and humor and even poetry. You may not always agree, but you will enjoy the evening.

This 1979 book on my hero Mr. William C. Durant by Bernard Weisberger is a very complete & good job of covering Mr. Durant's life. I highly recommend a must read. Mr. Durant was one of the most important early automobile men that ever lived. Worth over A billion dollars at one time & died flat broke. I have two of his cars ( a 1929 & 1930 Durant's built in Oakland, Ca.)& they are a very good car. I have studied & been a big Durant follower for many years. A great history collector book. Sincerely Lance Haynes President Durant Motors Automobile Club.

This one of the best/extremely well written books I have ever had the pleasure to read ( a few times)about a genius that is responsible for many of the luxuries we take for granted today. Whenever I get stuck in my day to day operations in my business, I look to see what "Billy" would've done for the solution.

perhaps a bit out of date, but not really.....it would be cool if the Osho folks in poona would put out a new "version" of this...things have evolved much more since this book came out, but it is a living document. just picked it up at a used bookstore for around $10. worth it.

Here is an extraordinary, intimate portrait of one of our time's foremost spiritual leaders and of life in his ashram near Poona, India. Leaf quickly through the photo-filled pages of this book. You will see expressed in the faces and bodies of those who come to the ashram every human emotion, from ecstacy to rage. For life with Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh is a life in which the deepest emotions and passions are explored and brought to the surface. East and West meet here in a blending of techniques that heighten awareness: meditation * crafts * singing * dancing * chanting * music * mime * Tai Chi * karate * tantra * rolfing * Gestalt encounter * bioenergetics * body awareness * the Alexander Technique. At the center of this array of powerful feelings stands Bhagwan, integrating all by the power of his presence and his talks.

Previously unpublished discourses by the Master also appear in Dying for Enlightenment, including four basic meditation techniques never before revealed in print. " A cosmic combination of crazy house, college campus, church, carnival, and cloister," Bhagwan's ashram is a spiritual feast of unparalleled richness. Now, with Dying for Enlightenment, all are invited to join the merriment and partake of its nourishment as well.
--- from book's back cover.

Dr. Ackerman once again has produced a excellent review of a very important topic in medicine. Those cosidering the purchase of DYSPLASTIC nevus most likely will be dermatologists,pathologists and physicians who have a special intetest in nevi and malignant melanoma. This comprehensive text compiles all of the currently available pathology and scientific understanding about one of the most challenging conditions in pathology.Dr. Ackerman's review is complete, easy to read and will be a very important reference to those who are interested in the current thinking about Dysplastic Nevi. I highly recommend this book. Marvin Pietruszka,M.D.

Since 1978, when Dr. Clark published his paper on the "B-K Mole Syndrome", this has been one of the most highly charged topics in the field of dermatopathology. Dr. Ackerman and colleagues slice through this topic with such ease that it makes one pause to ask why there was ever such a controversy. However, there still is considerable controversy about this topic throughout the dermatology community. If, however, more pathologists, dermatopathologists, and dermatologists would read this book and understand the premises the authors examine, it would clear up immediately so many of the so-called "issues" about these benign neoplasms that the controversy would go quietly into the night and be heard from no longer. This book is not only interesting from a historical perspective, but it also examines every major issue surrounding these lesions.

Mark A. Hurt, MD

I have read the book and heard Jora speak -- they are both incredibly inspiring. Sustainability is one of those terms that is often used in ecological circles -- Ted and Jora give concrete examples of its application in our society, and from those examples flow hope. I bought this book thinking that I would read two scientists' view of ecology. When I finished I realized that I had not only learned some science, I had also been persuaded by the authors appreciation of the spiritual basis of ecology. Wanted: Reformers not of others, but of self.

This wonderful book gives us hope -- if we are willing to pitch in and work with others. It gives examples of how people in very different communities have come together to overcome difficulties and make significant improvements to their environments. Menominee Indians are maintaining a sustainable timber forest in the midst of land that have been devastated by loggers, and suburban Chicagoans are restoring nearby prairie lands to their original condition. Based on the authors' experiences gained while visiting these groups, the last chapter provides very helpful practical suggestions of how people can effectively be organized to bring about positive change. This book, if taken seriously by enough people, can turn us in the right direction

Una novela, con toques de ensayo. Posee una bagaje de investigación serio, que mediante un relato novelado realmente te "sube al péndulo" para transladarnos a un recorrido en le tiempo de los templarios.
Eco escribió esta novela, mucho antes que el Código Da Vince y no me equivocaría al suponer que Dan Brown pretende emularlo. Sin embargo, la novela de Eco es muy superior, en información recabada, en la estructura y en la especulación y fantasía que te puede generar, sin duda, muy superior.
No pierdas de vista, que a mi parecer, Eco lleva una liga entre sus trabajos, sus novelas, sus ensayos y esta novela. Sin duda me resultan pocas las CINCO estrellas.

Acabo de terminar de leer este libro (25-Julio-2004), y tengo que aceptar que me ha dejado impresionado. A ciencia cierta no sabría explicar porque lo ha hecho, quizá este libro invocó alguno de mis demonios, tocó algunas fibras sensibles, y a decir verdad me aterró. Será cierto que cuando uno se encuentra vacío es cuando uno se pone a buscar secretos inexistentes, que es mejor tener que buscar algo que no se sabe que existe, a no tener nada que buscar.... ¿por eso me dio miedo? o simplemente porque me doy cuenta que estoy entrando en un universo que efectivamente....da miedo. Un universo en el cual las conspiraciones y la desconfianza están a la vuelta de la esquina, el temor de estar siempre vigilado y que no sabes que es lo que una persona puede ocultar -- sí, lo se, es paranoia -- pero esa es la impresión que me ha dejado este libro, el imaginarme que las personas ocultan un secreto, para bien o para mal, pero que todos lo tienen.
A lo largo de la historia, que en ocasiones medio leía y pocas veces comprendía totalmente los personajes se sitúan en situaciones complejas, casi increíbles, pero lo mas importante es la manera en que el autor combina la ficción con la historia y no solo la historia, lamisca ficción que se ha creado de la ficción, lo que hace al texto encantadoramente complicado y rebuscado y en ocasiones sencillamente obvio, algo que puede hacer perder el juicio, en mi caso a alguien que en numerables ocasiones lo ha perdido. La parte más interesante es el último cuarto, quizá un poco mas, cuando empieza a conectar los hechos históricos más o menos contemporáneos con toda la mística y secreta historia de los templarios.
El punto focal que me encantó fue cuando Napoleón se relaciona con todo este misterio del plan, y a partir de ahí te das cuenta que todos los grandes líderes del mundo han estado en contacto con el plan, o para ubicarnos en la realidad, que todos los grandes y ambiciosos líderes han pertenecido a una "secta" de "iniciados" que han tratado de gobernar al mundo, sea como sea.
Que la historia del mundo se basa única y sencillamente en la conquista de los pueblos al costo que sea, y no simplemente con guerras armadas, sino a base de guerras ideológicas que aniquilan peor que una bomba, el matar el pensamiento es el peor crimen que se puede hacer, y eso lo menciono por los capítulos referentes a los jesuitas, y no se mucho de ellos, pero investigare, pero según lo que dice el libro son gente de cuidado, gente que no se detiene para conseguir lo que desea y que desde la fundación de la Compañía de Jesús, no han hecho mas que adueñarse del pensamiento de los débiles, y los no tanto, ya que también el poder económico esta inmerso en la conquista del mundo.
Una cosa que me llamo mucho la atención fue el hecho de que a unos años de la creación de los jesuitas, éstos promovieron la abolición de la enseñanza de los clásicos y de la historia antigua, en aras de ocultar los conocimientos de los antiguos, y así, no dejar huellas de los pasos del plan, pero si nos volvemos a ubicar en la realidad, no es lo que se esta haciendo actualmente en el gobierno de México; en el año 2004, el grupo en el poder, que pertenece a la derecha -- bien conocida por sus inclinaciones eclesiásticas -- !pretende eliminar temas importantes de la historia universal y de México de los libros de texto!, ¿será que son jesuitas?

I only hope that this author and friend continues to put out a book from time to time for those of us who enjoy good literature and good mystery with a good taste of history (and not revisionist history, but as the old U.S. TV show said, "But, You are There."

Crowner John or to give him his correct title is one of my all time favourite characters in medieval mysteries and if you read or are going to read this or any other of Bernard Knight's Crowner John Mysteries, you will probably understand why.. Dour and more than a little fierce looking but totally honest and incorruptible and a staunch follower of King Richard the Lionheart. He is the total opposite of his brother-in-law the Sheriff of Exeter, apart from the fact that the both have an eye for the ladies.

Prince John is continuing to plot the seize the throne of England away from his brother Richard and he has a staunch and influential ally in Philip the King of France. Philip offers to help solve Prince john's financial problems by sending him an alchemist who claims to be able to transform base metals into gold. But both the ship the alchemist was on and all of the crew are found ship wrecked and murdered off the Devon coast.

Later a knight living close to Exeter is found murdered under mysterious circumstances. It's up to the Crowner to piece the puzzle together are two deeds connected and what is his brother the Sheriff and a staunch supporter of Prince John attempting to hide?

I don't think that Bernard Knight has written a bad book, certainly not in the Crowner John series and this one certainly lives up to expectations. I loved reading it.

My context is as a student researching Thin Client computing. This books is excellent, covering many of the hardware and software technologies relevant to net-centric computing. The breadth in this books is superb.

This book is all the descriptive material above says and more. Cole's breadth of knowledge is astonishing in these days when it's hard to stay knowledgeable and uptodate about even one small segment of electronic technology and design. In my opinion, this book is essential reading for design engineers, electronics students, and anyone else who is involved in the future of computing.

What can somebody who is a science of consicousness freak say about a 1000 pages book about the psychological, cognitive, theorethical, neurological, and historical bases of consciousness? ......well, maybe "finally". This is THE definitive collection of papers on the science of consicousness, something that could only be said before about all three volumes of Towards a Science of Consicousness, edited by Hameroff.

Everything one needs to know to START an inquiry into this interesting field is here. Represented are those papers that started the whole cognitive revolution, all the way to the most recent theoretical investigations on consicousness. The only thing one who is familiar with the literature can disagree with is witht he inclusion and omission of certain key papers, but I am sure the editors had their hands full in making the books size acceptable and at the same time representative of the field. That said, it is impossible to ignore that Baars seems to have chosen some contributions on the basis of how much they are supportive of his global workspace model. I doubt this was made on purpose, however. Another objection could come from the absence of a neurochemistry of consicousness chapter, or a consicousness in quantum physics chapter. The former seems to me impardonable to have been left out, and the latter probably should have been there simply because of the popular attention paid to it, if not because of its shaky scientific foundations.

It is a custom of mine to declare a book on consicousness a must-have, but this one has the most merits to deserve such title. No one who has pronounced the word consicousness in a scientific context can do without this volume...it could also work quite well as a textbook for graduate level consicousness courses. One only hopes that many more editions are published, and that it can be someday extended to various volumes.

If thought about in retrospect, it is perhaps flabbergasting that the study of consciousness was not considered, and could not be considered, part of science. The impact of the behavioral school of psychology was no doubt both a symptom and a cause of this exclusion. The reasons though for excluding the study of consciousness from science are now properly given to historians, for, as this book is an indication of, extensive scientific research is now being done in this area, and this research is a fascinating story. Once thought to be the domain of mysticism and philosophy, research into consciousness has, finally, entered the domain of the laboratory. The arm-chair speculations of Edmund Husserll are now replaced by the fMRI scan and careful observations. In the words of Francis Crick and Christof Koch, who have written an article for this book, "the time to start the scientific attack is now."

The book is a collection of articles written by active researchers in the field. The preface and the introductory article are excellent and not only introduce the reasons for the book but also put the articles in historical perspective. The author addresses the skepticism of some scientists on whether there is any evidence of conscious experience as such. The articles in the book were selected according to their approach as treating "consciousness as a variable", similar to any other topic of scientific inquiry. He is aware of the problems associated with such a view though, since consciousness, he says, cannot be varied "from the inside". Decreasing it will cause us to lose the ability to observe anything, and the consciousness of others is not accessible directly. The author stresses though that contrary to the assertions of some philosophers, consciousness is not beyond scientific study. We need not depend on "plausible intuitions, thought experiments, or rhetorical brilliance", but can instead rely on experiments and testable hypotheses. He calls this a "verifiable phenomenology" in contrast with the philosophical movement of the last century.

The article by George Mandler also expresses this attitude, asserting that the study of consciousness has been plagued with "philosophical, theological, and pedestrian semantic debris". For Mandler, the "mind" refers to the "totality of theoretical processes ascribed to the individual", and this viewpoint, he believes, will avoid the collapse into solipsism and sophistry that so often accompanies the philosophical view of the mind. Mandler gives an excellent overview of some of the approaches taken in the scientific study of consciousness. He also outlines his personal views on the subject, asserting that for him, consciousness is tied to a system of limited capacity, this limitation referring to the number of "functional units" that can be kept in consciousness at a particular point in time. Mandler does believe though that psychologists and philosophers are correct in their assertion that the content of consciousness is not directly available, and so other strategies must be invented to deal with this content. Most interesting though is that the author does not view consciousness as primary, but instead views it merely as one particular mode of processing. Conscious processing of information cannot therefore be said to have more status than processing that does not.

There are many interesting articles in this book, and space constraints do not permit a detailed review here. Some of articles that this reviewer found interesting or exceptionally well written are: 1. "Consciousness and Isomorphism" by Stephen E. Palmer, which addresses the "inverted spectrum argument". This has been a source of philosophical argumentation ever since John Locke first proposed it in 1690, and asks for a demonstration that the visual experience of colors between two individuals are the same, or whether they are spectrally inverted. The author discusses his reasons for rejecting Locke's assertion that there is no way to tell whether the spectrums are indeed inverted without the two persons "getting into each others heads." 2. "Strategies and Models of Selective Attention" by Anne M. Treisman. The author outlines her strategies for classifying attention tasks and experimental procedures to study them. She restricts herself to tasks that require immediate perception and response, wherein the experimental subjects are subjected to information overload. Her goal is to find out to what extent the mechanisms of selective attention can be encapsulated into a single mechanism. 3. "Aspects of the Theory of Comprehension, Memory, and Attention" by Donald G. MacKay, which attempts to provide evidence for a "modern" version of Wundt's theory, the latter of which asserted that the processing of sentences takes place at two distinct levels, one involving preattentive processes and the other attentive ones. The "modern" version asserts that the perceptual mechanism consists of two distinct and interrelated levels of components, with the first involving limited capacity short-term memory, and the second a large long-term memory. 4. The article "Conscioussness and Complexity" by Giulio Tononi and Gerald M. Edelman. This article, like all the rest in the last part of the book, called "Theory" is fascinating, again because of its attempt to respect the role of experiments. The authors attempt to identify the types of neural processes that account for the key properties of conscious experience, emphasizing that conscious experience is integrated but simultaneously also highly differentiated in that one can experience a large number of different conscious states within a short time. The authors discuss tools for measuring integration, which they call `functional clustering' and for measuring differentiation, which they call `neural complexity'. Then they give criteria for determining whether in fact a group of active neurons can contribute to conscious experience. These criteria are encapsulated into the `dynamic core hypothesis', which they claim is a testable hypothesis on neural contributions to conscious experience. Recent experimental findings are discussed that, in the author's view, show that this hypothesis is viable. These measurements of neural activity shed light on what kind of neural circuits are needed to perform different types of tasks, these tasks sometimes needing conscious control, and sometimes not.