Bradford Books

This book, edited by Mr. Bradford, is one of the best overviews of US military history that I've read. Ranging from 1512 until ca. 2002, it doesn't go into depth but there is enough detail to satisfy most history buffs, and undergrad students. As one might expect with an Oxford atlas, the maps are numerous and detailed. Each chapter is written by an expert in that time period-all are excellent, but IMHO where this book really shines is the chapters on "Colonial Wars: 1512 - 1774" and "America's Rise to World Power: 1867-1917". Both of these in a few pages, go far beyond what one might get in an undergrad US History class; certainly more than a HS class. Having said that, the prose is written for someone with a popular interest. This would be an excellent addition to those classes-as the popular media would have one believe the US fought in WW2, Vietnam, and the Middle East...Highly recommended.

A Western Classic by a Classic Western writer. Bradford Scott,the author of this novel was born in West Virginia, and during the Great War, spent four years in the French Foreign Legion in trenches.In the 1920's he worked as a mining engineer in western American states and China before settling in New York.He wrote a large number of Western Novels and one can find 120 0f them shown on "Fantastic Fiction".I was unable to find a biography for him and am unable to find if he is still alive,but having served in WW1,it is highly unlikely.
This novel was published this year,but was Copyright 1957 and again in 1985.
It is an excellent western in every respect;and shows that well written westerns can certainly stand the test of time.A note on the cover states that there have been "More than 8 million Bradford Scott books sold". After reading this one,it is not surprising.
It is a well constructed and written saga with excellent characters and while a good action story,it gives a good account of the experiences that pioneers went through in the Old West; trying to carve out lives for themselves and their families. This was done during times of extreme struggles with the unforgiving land and enviroment.This went on in a time when law and justice was rough and wild and in many cases it had to be tackled by oneself,if one hoped to survive ,particularly against unscrupulous barons or outlaws.
This novel reminds me of the western movies and TV series that were much more common in the 60's than today. If you remember the great TV series like "The Big Valley"(1965-1969) with Barbara Stanwick,or "Bonanza" with Ben Cartright; this novel will bring back fond memories.
I have enjoyed recent TV series like,"Dead Man's Gun" and "Deadwood";but the westerns of the 60's were very different.
"A Tip of the Hat" to Dorchester Publishing and Golden West Literary Agency for keeping this great western literature alive and available.

The debut collection of Michael Bradford's published poetry, Personal Effects is a collection of intensely personal poetry providing the reader with portraits and letters form the heart, articulated with an insightful passion as only a lyric passage verse can transmit. After Moving Day: In this sun-filled kitchen/light waits for the past/in your unpacking,/old cookbooks, say,/or the merry-go-round teakettle/that yesterday whistled its horses/into an orange and blue frenzy/all a blur and gallop/trailing steam./We are still, now, and I/who have listened for a step/all afternoon, hear it/already falling away,/the sun quietly collections/pieces of you everywhere.

This is the MIT Press' 1987 one-volume critical edition of "George" Santayana's autobiography. It includes much material not found in Scribner's original, 1940s, three-volume publication.

This RICHLY AND PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED MIT Press edition is THE ONE TO HAVE.

Although a major figure in American philosophy, writer of one of the finest novels set in America (The Last Puritan) and an aknowledged master of English prose, Jorge Ruíz de Santayana (1863-1952) was born in Ávila, Spain, of Spanish parents and retained his Spanish nationality until his dying day, never becoming an American citizen.

He wound up in Boston because his mother's first husband, the captain of a yankee clipper, was a Sturgis from Cod city. They met and married in the Philippines, then a Spanish colony. After this brief marriage, which produced 3 Sturgis children, including the only person Santayana ever truly loved, his half-sister Susana Sturgis, the widowed Mrs Sturgis married Santayana's father, an elderly Spanish colonial official. They soon separated and at age 6 little Jorge, who could hardly be brought up in Ávila by his old father alone, was sent to his mother, who had taken up residence in Boston with her first husband's well-off relatives.

While outwardly a successful émigré student, Santayana nursed deep anger against his mother (her portrait in these mémoires is devastating) and never forgave the slight done to his father, whose austere Castilian livelihood had not been able to compete with those Yankee greenbacks.

Santayana studied at Harvard and in Germany and was aknowledged to be so brilliant he was offered a teaching post at Harvard when hardly out of graduate school. But the powers-that-be there never liked him, or he them. His haughty, very "foreign" outward appeareance, all dressed in black like a Castilian; his cold sardonic humour; his atheism; his paradoxical love for the Catholic esthetic; his political conservatism; his homosexuality: all these were inimical to the worthy Brahmins who ran the University.

On his side, he despised their sentimental, smug progressivism; their senseless liberal religiosity; their childish moral earnesteness--all concealing a brutal sense of entitlement and power.

Santayana's successive promotions to eventual full-professorship were systematically delayed, notwithstanding his being one of the most celebrated members of the faculty. Once the crown was conferred upon him, though, he threw it in their faces, resigning his professorship in 1912. The proud Eternal Outsider moved to Europe (England, Spain, Italy) were he lived the remaining 40 years of his life. He never set foot in the US again.

This autobiography is one of the most fascinating such documents ever created. All people depicted are unforgettably etched in acid, with a calm Pascalian insight into their souls that is almost terrifying. Santayana was a profound skeptic of human sentiments, an austere, stoic Spanish Epicurean writing the richest Emersonian English. A thousand times more percipient than Tocqueville, Santayana's point of view, the magisterial clarity with which it is propounded, are indeed uniquely prepossessing: here was the last philosopher of antiquity, mysteriously issued forth from medieval Ávila to address, in English, the corny foibles of the American century...in lucid Lucretian periods.

One can scarcely conceive of another book quite like this.

Profitable Renewable Energy details a plan to allow every business and residential consumer to invest in large-scale renewable energy projects in order to offset or eliminate one's electric bill for the life of the project, typically between 20 to 30 years or more. The book covers the current jumble of expensive and marginally successful government subsidies, tariffs, and production tax credits and demonstrates how this plan can replace them all, dramatically reducing the cost of the projects while it is profitable to every consumer by allowing them to avoid future energy price inflation.

Current public policy requires government to invest billions through tax incentives that benefit only very wealthy individuals and corporations. This plan eliminates the subsides altogether and allows everyone to invest as little as $10. The benefit is just as attractive to small time investors as it is to the same wealthy investors that currently profit from tax credits. The plan is not tied to any form of renewable energy and can be used to fund wind farms, solar plants, geothermal or hydro among others.

The book also presents a number of emerging and imminent technologies and even a plan for balancing the intermittent nature of most renewable sources. It is an interesting democratic and market driven plan that should be read and understood by every consumer, every business, and most especially our state and national leaders.

a cliff notes version of radiology no fluff, all pearls. besides, my son wrote it!

I have not read all of this book, but I have read through enough of it to know that I want what it has to offer. So I have begun to read it from the beginning. It is fascinating.

In the meantime, I want to let others know what I've found here. I have chosen to post this review as a provisional review. I will return to update it when I have finished a thorough analysis.

This book is not about rationalism, as Bishop Berkeley took it. Unfortunately, the word "rational" has been ruined by ideologues. Nor is it about transcendence as Kant took it, or spiritualism as Hegel took it, or causation as Hume took it. Hanna takes these into consideration, but does not dwell in them.

This book is about rationality contrasted against irrationality. It is about rationality as being reasonable and competent to survive and think properly.

This book is not about the social construction of the field of logic. It is not about moral relativism.

It is about humans being essentially logical. About logic being an innate ability in rational animals, which some of us develop more formally. This viewpoint is fortifying. It is hard to find nowadays in philosophy.

Note: there is a decent review of this book by Gila Sher you can find on the web through Notre Dame book review using the search term "logical cognitivism." But the book is more reader-friendly and everyday-relevant than that review makes it seem.

I am finding this book follows nicely my other recent reading in ontology. A correct ontology is prerequisite to understanding anything here. And this book adds satisfyingly to my understanding of what rationality really means.

Peter Ludlow has also edited a volume on the Philosophy of Mind, and has written a book on Semantics. In this volume, he offers perhaps the best single volume compendium on this difficult subject. Note that this is for serious students and is hardly a beginner's introduction to the field. However, as a companion to a course on philosophy of language, or for more serious students, it should be quite valuable.

The analytic philosophical approach could be complemented by more material from continental schools of thought on language. If you are interested in that, I would suggest looking elsewhere for some supplementary material.

This two volume set is an overview of modern color theory. Volume two, "The Science of Color" is useful to me today. The amount of empirical data in volume two surpassed anything I had learned before, while the suggested reading list opened the door to still better sources of information. Volume one is less useful to me, on a practical level, but provided thought provoking reading. I favor Edward Wilson Averill's nonanthropocentric account of color, which addresses color as a secondary quality of objects. Where volume one is psychological, volume two is scientific; and though they address different issues, each book illuminates the other. I reccommend buying both of them.

Sober has spent much of his academic life trying to figure out why we prefer the most simple explanations in science and what the underlying empirical assumptions of such a preference are. In "Reconstructing the Past", he takes on to advance the discussion of parsimony as an inferential method in systematics, focussing on the discussion among Farris and Felsenstein throughout the 70s & 80s. Sober is (in my opinion) a very sophiscated empiricist philosopher, so he attempts to motivate an argument in favor of parsimony, yet adopts a likelihood-kind of solution to the problem of phylogeny reconstruction - the so-called "Smith/Quackdoodle Theorem." Whether this particular solution will advance our understanding of systematics remains to be seen, yet I consider this book invaluable in another sense: it drives home very convincingly the claim that parsimony has no a priori justification in systematics. Rather, using parsimony reliably requires that we make some approximately correct inference about the abundance and directionality of homoplasy in cladistic characters. Sober interprets Felsenstein's seminal 1978 paper (about "positively misleading" parsimony) philosophically. That is, if we can conceive hypothetical examples in which parsimony fails, this must mean that using parsimony cannot be deductively valid as some Popper-oriented cladists have tried to argue. This doesn't mean in any way that parsimony shouldn't be used, but rather that using parsimony must have an a posteriori, inductive justification. I believe that these widely ignored insights will eventually have an impact on the current debate between cladists and likelihoodist. If you are interested in the conceptual aspects of this debate, Sober's book is a must.