Burke Books

The semester for me does not start until the Fall but this is a required text that I have not even opened.

My semester for this material begins in the Fall so I have not begun to read yet but it is required.

In Japan, integrative/interdisciplinary curriculum will be introduced into schools within two or tree years. Many teachers are confused on these coming curriculum reforms. Under these Circumstances, teachers are collecting examples or information of integrative/interdisciplinary curriculum practices and learning such activities. In this book "The Mindful School: The Portforio Connection", the way to systematically design various types of portfolio is presented in a very lucid manner. Ten key issues and strategies: PROJECT, COLLECT, SELECT, INTERJECT, REFLECT, INSPECT, PERFECT, CONNECT, INJECT/EJECT and RESPECT, which are part of a portfolio system are very usefull to design and construct curriculum or learning activities.

This book surely covers the topics needed to pass the exam, and a bit more. If you use this book, go through all of the projects in it, and finishes the study by going through the Pinpoint software that comes with this book, then you will be ready to take the test!! Just make sure that you understand the tasks in Pinpoint, if you do so, you will pass! I have used this book as a instructor in MOUS Excel 97 expert, and the passrate ended up at about 70%! The book can be hard to get, but you should really try to get your hands on it if you plan to learn Excel 97, AND pass the exam!!

...you had better be up on your Civil War basics before attempting to read this book. It assumes that the reader is well aware of the main battles, campaigns, personalities and relative strengths and weaknesses of both the North and the South.

There's bound to be something new in here for everyone but the hardest of the hard core Civil War afficionados. Well-written, breezy, although oftentimes disjointed and random.

This book is also published under the titles 'The Civil War: Strange & Fascinating Facts' and 'The Incredible Civil War'.

This is the autobiography of Glenn Burke, a black, openly gay major league baseball player in the 1970's. It was written while he was living with his sister and dying from AIDS. It is a short book but very interesting. He certainly loved the game of baseball and it was a trajedy that he didn't have a better career. His describes being gay in the major league and how his friendship with Tommy Lasorda's gay son helped to shorten his time with the Dodgers. He also discusses his descent into drug addiction. His name should be more well known than it is, and I hope someday a good movie is made about him to help him get the recognition he deserves.

I've been pirating off the shores of Virginia for centuries now. Usually we split booty based on seniority and who robbed the most people. After sacking an HR conference near Norfolk one of my shipmates brought me this ingenious book to me! It's been a wealth of information for divvying up the booty, sacking and distributing the plunder has never been easier.

This book gets my highest rating. 4 skulls.

BOOYAG!!

This is a good book by the articulate (very quotable) and profound philosopher-legislator Edmund Burke, who served in the English Parliament around the time of the American Revolution. Burke (1729-97) also authored the famous and controversial (at least at the time) work, "Reflections on the Revolution in France" (1790).

Of course, the main work in the Penguin Classics edition featured here is "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful". It was notably influential on many of Burke's contemporaries, as well as on later literary artists such as William Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold.

However, some of the minor works appended to this edition, such as the 1777 "Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol on the Affairs of America" (which is like a long, eloquent letter home to constituents) should not be overlooked. Indeed, while perusing this latter piece (and others included here, such as "Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents"), I couldn't help thinking how beneficial it would be to have a few sensible Edmund Burke-types serving in Congress or the White House right now as America deals with its global military adventures. America's Revolutionary War might even have been avoided if stubborn, indignent, autocratic, and belligerent King George III would have listened more closely to and followed Burke's reasoned advice.

It's a bit hilarious and ironic to think that, today, Burke is typically thought of as a political "conservative". Read this stuff, and you will likely agree that, in many respects, he was much more a thoughtful, humane liberal.

While this is an interesting book on art education, it is clearly from a secular point of view. The writer expresses his opinion more then he backs it up and does offer some interesting debates. Overall, a nice book so long as you are sure to read other philisophy ideas by other authors.

Kenneth Burke is trying here to define the symbolic, though he makes it too empirical by speaking of symbolic action. This leads him to three levels of definition : the bodily or biological level ; the personal, intimate, familiar, familistic level ; the abstract level. We can see here that he does not encompass two essential levels : the historical, anthropological and social level for one in which the individual is animated by wider currents and forces, wider symbolisms and symbolic dimensions ; and on the other hand the purely spiritual level, very badly incorporated in the abstract level of his. He definitely misses a general purpose in human life : to reach a spiritual level of existence, in a way or another, and poetry and even all arts are one or many ways to do so, along with science, religion, meditation, etc. This is also due to the fact that this book (this collection of articles) is entirely inhabited by a binary thinking method : every phenomenon is reduced to dual oppositions. He then misses the « social aspect of authority » (p. 53). He becomes more interesting with his methodology. « The focus of critical analysis must be upon the structure of the given work itself. » I could not agree more but he then misses his own point. He reduces himself to a schematic hegelian caricature of a dialectic with the couple protagonist-antagonist. He tries to make it ternary by adding the agon, but the agon is nothing but the environment of the two others and hence is not of teh same nature. We remain binary, and that is going to be a plague further on. We can see his later approach of « dramatism » emerging, but it is still imperfect, incomplete and we jump to the artificial triad of the three voices (active, passive and middle or reflexive) and then his famous five terms (act, scene, agent, agency, purpose) without reaching any decent level of elaboration of thiese concepts. But in this book he rermains pent-up in pre-WW2 and post-WW2 unquestioned axioms. He is literally obsessed by the sacrificial dimension of politics and history and that is more than a shortcoming when he approaches Hitler. He misses the meaning of Hitler entirely by reducing him to his rhetoric, hence to his purpose, his personal aim and does not take into account how his antisemitism and his extreme capitalistic vision of economics (capitalistic dictarorship with slavery in some concentration camps and ferocious repression of the working class) articulate on the historical, cultural and symbolical heritage of the German people, of christian Europe, of Christianity at large. It is too simple to reduce Hitlerism to a machiavellian leader verging onto paranoid neurosis or psychosis. This limitation is also obvious when he approaches Freud. His vision of poetry as a creative activity that creates its own language and network of meaning is enriched by psychoanalysis. And yet. He borrows from Freud the clustering technique that deduces the symbolical meaning of an item from its articulated environment in the text, and expands it with his « prayer » and « chart » but he blocks it by deciding that the meaning of a poem can only be captured if we know the poet's purpose. He neglects the poet's « environment », including his spiritual environment. He totally neglects the fact that a poem is also built by the reader's reading, hence by the reader's environment projected into the structure of the poem by the reader, provided this structure allows the concerned projection. It is this symbolical structure that is important and can be longlasting if not everlasting, though with semantic variations from one age to the next, and Burke helps a lot in building a method to approach it, but he blocks his own potential by giving a dominant position in his approach to the personal dimension of the production of the poem by the poet. And he literally locks this up in a dual pronunciamento that you can only either follow his approach of the personal purpose of the poet, or get to a purely good-bad approach of the poem founded on the necessarily superficial analysis of the concrete empirical material form. This book is important to understand the evolution Kenneth Burke went through, but it has important limitations as compared to later productions and it reveals what he will never be able to push aside : his rather narrow and necessarily antagonistic and dual conception of Hegel's (and only Hegel's in spite of his references to Marx) dialectic (and willfully in the singular).

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Université Paris Dauphine, Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne