Bernstein Books

PLEASE VISIT MY WEBSITE: WWW.BERNSTEINBOOKS.COM TO ORDER A SIGNED, PERSONALIZED COPY OF MY NEWEST BOOK. I FED-EX THEM OUT EVERY DAY SO YOU WILL GET IT BEFORE CHRISTMAS! THANKS!
ROSS BERNSTEIN, AUTHOR

A friend showed me this book after I mentioned to him the problem I was having located good information about women scientists, especially those who had made contributions in the field of geology. This book is a great place to start this research! Written for grades 5 and up, it provides biographical sketches of women who have made contributions in a variety of the sciences. It also includes fairly simple activities that allow students to get a taste of what it's like to work in the particular field of science. A glossary and a short bibliography make this a great resource for the shelf of any science teacher.

"My Way" offers a contrarian and Emersonian shakeup (and shakedown) of US poetics and its normative liberal pieties. I find these mixed-genre essays to be stimulating,energizing, dismantling, inventive, taking the grounds of "a poetics" into a newfoundland of play, risk, and stylistic mixture. By this, I mean that the prior senses of voice and forms of genre, not to mention the stabilities of "poetic diction," are taken into stranger post-ego areas of language risk, secular conversion, and fun. Sinatra did it "my way," and Charles Bernstein (like a zanier Bob Dylan watching a Marx Brothers movie while reading Deleuze and composing the Greenwich Village Joe Hill Blues on a used mouth harp) did it his, and "official verse culture" in the United States will never be the smug same old poesy again. Not for those whose version of pastoral is still made of petunia flowers, tylanol, and sheep.

Like Mussorgsky's great composition with the similar name, Seymour Bernstein's "New Pictures at an Exhibition" is a group of pieces inspired by paintings. While Mussorgsky used pictures that were basically unknown and frankly disappointing, Mr. Bernstein selected great paintings by famous artists, including Picasso's "Guernica," Raphael's "La Belle Jardiniere," and Watteau's "Mezzetin." The music shows a wide range of styles and influences, embracing essentially everything from Baroque through jazz. I once performed one of these pieces as an encore (the Raphael piece, entitled "The Madonna"), without stating the composer, then asked the audience to "vote" on who they thought the composer was. The winner was Chopin by a landslide, with Bach second.

There's quite a bit of humor in some of the pieces too. "The Twittering Machine" (Klee) is a riot, and you'll also smile over "At The Moulin Rouge" (Toulouse-Lautrec).

When studied seriously and performed well, these pieces are extremely effective in recital. I often perform the final two pieces as a set (the stormy and spectacular "Guernica," followed by the sublime "Epilogue"), and audiences invariably are blown away.

Most of the pieces are very demanding technically but some of them can be played by students of any level. Each piece also has its own poem, written by the pianist/poet/psychiatrist Owen Lewis. The most complete "multi-media" performance of the set would include recitation of the poems and display (or projection) of the pictures, although pure performance of the music is fine. In my opinion, the best experience is to dispense with the poems, wonderful though they are, and to work with just the music and projections of the pictures. It is well worth coordinating this with the hall's tech people. If they dim the lights "just right" before you start playing, then project each painting right before you start each piece, the effect can be mesmerizing.

The printed score is a beautiful little booklet. A mild complaint is that the paintings are shown just in black-and-white, but I'm sure this helps keep the cost as modest as it is. If you have even half a thought to get this music, please do. It may be the best $15 you'll ever spend on a piano score.

Oregon Byways is an excellent book. The trail descriptions are extremely accurate, concise and helpful. I liked the photographs because they give a perspective on a drive. The list of resources, parks and places of interest in the back of the book is invaluable. I wish I had time to go on all the drives. Good job.

A MUST READ -- After being so confused from all the hair loss ads; Rogaine, Propecia, Mini-micro-grafting and the "new-new thing" called Follicular Unit Transplantation,I was able to make sense of it all. This book by Rassman and Bernstein walks you through the whole process. It explained in a way I could understand what actually caused my hair loss, the newest medications, the latest surgical procedures, and how to evaluate doctors to get the best possible treatment. The book's photo album is the best I have ever seen. But the proof is in the pudd'in. After reading the book, I did my research and ended up seeing the author [Dr. Bernstein] in one of the many consults I went on. He did a procedure on me in December '99 and its already growing in.. and it looks fantastically natural. STOP AND READ THIS INFORMATIVE BOOK BEFORE YOU MAKE ANY DECISION !

What Berstein sets out to do in this 190 page book is to trace the rise of economist as a profession. Starting with the formation of the AEA in the late 19th century, Berstein traces this process all the way up to modern times, though the lion's share is dedicated to the years leading up to the sixties.

The prose of the book is great, flowing easily without loosing rigour. The historical details and the depth of the research is purely amazing.

For me however, what is most marvelous about this book is the way in which it manages to show how neoclassical economics won out against other competing schools of thought as a direct result of WWII. Not Poperian scientific progress, but rather Kuhninan revolutions and McCloskean rhetorics explain why the neoclassical approach, with its emphasis on rigorous mathematics, came to rule supreme.

There are a few books on why economics became mathematical out there (Weintraub, Mirowski). In my opinion, this book is the best. This is a must read for anyone interested in the modern history of economic thought or the economic profession as such.

William James is best-known for his development of the American philosophy of pragmatism and for his pioneering work in psychology. But in addition to pragmatism, which he described as a method and as a theory of truth, James expounded a broad philosophical doctrine which he called radical empiricism (pluralism). Radical pluralism, as James explained it, constituted a metaphysical position -- one describing the nature of reality -- rather than a method. In his book, "Pragmatism", James maintained that his commitment to radical empiricism was separate from his commitment to pragmatism; but in the Preface to his book, "The Meaning of Truth", James maintained that the success of the pragmatic account of truth was vital to making radical empiricism prevail.

James's fullest development of the theory of radical empiricism was in his book "A Pluralistic Universe" published in 1908. This book consists of the text of eight lectures James delivered in that year at London and at Harvard. In common with James's other works, "A Pluralistic Universe" attacks the monistic idealism derived from Hegel and followed by many of James's contemporaries in England and the United States, such as his colleague, Josiah Royce. But James goes much further than he had in his earlier writings. He offers a critique of logic, conceptual thinking and what he describes as "intellectualism" in philsophy. He urges a return to immediate experience as the basis for philosophical thinking. He develops a philosophy which is pluralistic and contingent -- which leaves room for chance, surprise, and moral action -- and which is essentially idealistic. The driving force behind the philosophy is spiritual, as James argues for panpsychism, pantheism, a finite god (or gods) and the possibility of growth.

James gives two philosophers a great deal of attention in developing his position. The first is the German thinker Gustav Fechner (Lecture IV in "A Pluralistic Universe"), who developed a theory of earth-soul holding that everything in the universe was alive with mind. Fechner's work became the basis of James's pansychism and of his theory of compounding consciousness -- that mind could grow from one thing to another and that there was an interrelationship between the human mind and the mind of a finite god. The second major influence on "A Pluralistic Universe" was the French philosopher Henri Bergson (Chapter VI). From Bergson, James described his critique of intellectualism and conceptual thinking. James argued that concepts were useful in understanding reality for limited purposes, (here James seems to be downplaying his own pragmatism) but that they ultimately distorted reality. Reality was a flow, a stream, in which one moment glided imperceptibly into the next and arose from a past moment. In this view of perception and reality, James rejected the atomistic, sensationalist view of experience of the British empiricists, describing this view as conceptualist in its own right. His view of consciousness was similar to that of another German philosopher, Edmund Husserl, who admired James greatly.

James best sets out the goal and the heart of his teaching in his opening lecture, "The Types of Philosophic Thinking." In this chapter, he stresses the importance of vision in philosophy -- the presentation of a convincing and inspiring view of life -- and downplays the importance of the arguments that are brought to bear in support of the vision. He also limits carefully the scope of his discussion. James at the outset rejects philosophies of materialism or scientism in favor of a philosophy that teaches that "the intimate and human must surround and underlie the brutal." He dscribes this teaching as the "spiritual" way of thinking.

James next distinguishes between a theistic conception of spiritualism which posits God as a creator separate from the universe and a pantheistic version, which argues that God is immanent as "the indwelling divine rather than the external creator, and of human life as part and parcel of that deep reality." James rejects the theistic position and opts instead for a pantheistic view of spirituality. It is important to see these self-imposed limitations on James's thought and to see as well how close James was to the absolute idealism of his day even when he criticized it severely. Hegel and Royce have, in spite of the criticisms he levelled at them, a large role in James's thought.

In the final lecture of "A Pluralistic Universe" James resumes themes he had raised earlier in "The Varieties of Religious Experience." He argues that accounts of individual religious experience suggest a way of approaching reality broader and more profound than anything that "paganism, naturalism, and legalism pin their faith on and tie their trust to." James argues that "the drift of all the evidence we have seems to me to sweep us very strongly towards the belief in some form of superhuman life with which we may, unknown to ourselves, be co-conscious. We may be in the universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all." James distinguishes his position from absolute idealism by working from the bottom up -- from individual, plural consciousness rather than from the top down -- from an abstract, intellectually conceived absolute. He advocates a philosophy of meliorism and activity in which individual persons work to bring the good to pass.

This book, James's last sustained work in philosophy, moves towards its own unique form of idealism and establishes James as a thinker in a large manner. The book seems to me to rest uneasily with his pragmatism at many places. "A Pluralistic Universe" is a provocative and moving work by a major American thinker.

Robin Friedman

A very helpful book With great pictures and good price quotes from a highly regarded auction house that seems to have a couple of important Royal Bayreuth auctions every year.

The Portable Ethicist for Mental Health Professionals should be in every psychologist, counselor, and therapist's library. It's strengths are many but I particularly like it's Flash Points sections which offer a discussion point for helping understand when a person can be liable for certain actions. It then relates these to the Professional Code of Conduct for different disciplines. It's concrete and practical.

The book is easily readable, but well researched. Anyone who has heard either Bart Bernstein or Thomas Hartsell, Jr. Speak, knows these guys have "been there and know this stuff." It's one of my favorite books for anyone who counsels or helps others. If read and followed, it should keep us out of the courthouse and in the counseling field helping those in need. Joel Blaylock, Allen, TX