Gregory Books

This book has completely blown my mind. Chapters such as "Kill Kill Kill" really brougt me to a new emotional depth, one that I hope I never experience again. I remember crouching in a dark corner reading I.S.O.S., eyes bloodshot and mouth foaming. I would lie in my bed for days at a time pouring over the pages in search of my own sanity. Then I stopped reading it and I became a happy bus driver again.

I really can't describe very well what this book has done for me. It gave me a new insight into the realm of the psychologically ill. I really started... feeling what the author went through. I could feel what he felt, I thought the things he did. I simply underwent the same experiences he did, through this book. I believe that Gregory Stefan has achieved a new level of writing, one that can funnel raw emotion into the readers' mind.

Probably the best book available on its subject. Recommended for students of comparative politics and anyone with leftist political values.

The book offers a stimulating and enlightening analysis on contemporary social democracy and the social democratic party politics in Europe. To note only few of the book's strengths, reference should be made to: the extensive comparative material incorporated, the informative historical account included, the multiplicity of parameters explored and their in depth examination (for example, the study of the electorate in comparative perspective, the examination of the relations between social democratic parties and trade unions, the analysis of the social democratic party political platforms). Apart from suggesting a new perspective for the analysis of social democracy, through what is identified as a process of "great transformation", the book provides an excellent basis for the study of the developments evolved in the politics of the social democratic tradition in the European party systems, suitable for both the student and the expert.
Last but not least, the merits of the book include, an enhanced relevance for the political scientist and the researcher of party politics in Europe. The current juncture in European politics and the new challenges that social democracy is facing in Europe (ex. the case of France) have reinforced the significance of the author's arguments on the fragility and vulnerability of social democracy's electorate force and on the loosening of its ties with its traditional social base.
An excellent book, well written, easily read, substantive on its subject matter, which is worth purchasing.

I just began reading Reck's book and it seems to me that it will be very informative and enjoyable. I suppose I have no buisness writing a review when I haven't even completed the book, but I can recommend that Reck's voice be heard by all interested in the effects of globalization on independent cultures through the anthropological scope. I am in one of Reck's classes now, so I can put my word behind this novel. I know what he says is not only out of great knowledge of what he's talking about, but also of tremendous compassion for his subjects. Read this book.

I had the benefit of taking some of Dr. Reck's anthropology courses and reading this book. From what he tells me, there were many who were reluctant to call it anthropology at the time it was written because it was written as a story rather than a positivist ethnography written with a "voice from nowhere." One might criticize the book for not going far enough and demonstrating reflexivity by including himself within the text, but this is a minor point. This book conveys something about the culture in a readable way, which is the essence of a good ethnography in my opinion.

Dr. Hinrichsen offers an extensively-researched, beautifully written volume detailing the application of IPT with older adults along with the theory and evidence base for this therapy. This book is a must-have for any practitioner working with older adults.

Comprehensive and insightful. Interesting and helpful case studies. A vital addition to the library of any professional working with older adults. Highly recommended.

This book is an essential resource for any psychologist or other mental health professional who conducts evaluations when there is a disputed confession or a question concerning the competence to waive Miranda rights. It is an invaluable resource for criminal defense attorneys as well as for anyone who wants to understand coerced and nonvoluntary confessions. I recommend it highly.

This is simply the best book available on disputed confessions and the psychology of interrogations. The author provides a thorough but readable overview of models of interrogations and false confessions, as well as a practical guide to performing assessments in this growing area of forensic practice.

Gregory Dawes is a senior lecturer in both religious studies and philosophy at the University of Otago in New Zealand. His Introduction to the Bible is designed for the general reader and also as a prologue to the New Collegeville Bible Commentary series (Liturgical Press). His goal is to help readers begin to understand the Bible and the process of interpretation, reminding us that it was and is carried out by "fallible human beings, bound by the limitations of their time and place."

The first part of the book looks at the way in which the writings that were to become the Old and New testaments were collected and elevated to the status of Sacred Scripture. The historical background is accompanied by lists of books in both testaments, with a division in the Old Testament to show the difference between the Hebrew and Catholic canons. The second part of this work explains the history of biblical interpretation beginning with the Church fathers and ending with the postmodern era. In his introduction, Dawes emphasizes that "while the Bible may be God's word, it is also an artifact, a product of human culture," an idea expressed clearly in Vatican II documents. That understanding, Dawes continues, underscores our need to appreciate the ways in which the Bible has been interpreted throughout Christian history. The book is graced with artwork ranging from Michelangelo's depiction of the Prophet Jeremiah to a photo of Pope Pius XII. Maps of the Old Testament world and the world of Paul are included.

Dawes certainly has met his goal of presenting a clear overview of the origins of the Bible and its interpretation. His concise writing style, logical organization, and helpful format devices make this a work suitable for individual and group use.

Author Gregory W. Daws, a senior lecturer in religious studies and philosophy for the University of Otago New Zealand, has created Introduction to the Bible especially for novice students who might be put off by their first glance at the Bible's great length. Discussing how the Old and New Testaments came to be assembled, Introduction to the Bible offers an overview of the biblical history, thereby giving a framework by which the Bibles tales can be better understood, as well as a solid grounding in basic biblical vocabulary and concepts. "The modern biblical interpreter is inclined to judge the correctness of an interpretation by the method through which it is achieved... if one observes certain safeguards in dealing with the text, then one can be confident about one's result. The church fathers and medieval scholars, on the other hand, enjoyed a great freedom when it came to methods of interpretation... at the end of the day an interpretation was judged acceptable primarily on the basis of its content. St. Augustine, for instance, can accept the possibility of many legitimate interpretations, but only if they are all 'in harmony with our faith.'" Highly recommended for novice to intermediate biblical students and scholars.

Steganography is the hidding of messages in plain sight, it hides a message within another message that looks like a normal message. This is different from Cryptography in which the secret message is converted to what looks like a meaningless jumble of characters.

Example: You mail a letter. It currently takes 37 cents in postage. Instead of using a 37 cent stamp you use stamps of the following values: 9 cents, 2 cents, 3 cents, 1 cent, 9 cents, 4 cents, 9 cents. That's the right amount of postage so the letter goes through. But the letter is meaningless. The message you sent is 9-2-3-1-9-4-9. Perhaps this means September 23, 1949, or perhaps it's comething else that the receiver understands. Or perhaps the message is in the green ink that you used to address the envelope.

When you get to computers you can be far, far more secretive. A movie or audio file can be millions of bytes long. Changing a few bits here or there would be completely undetectable but could incorporate a huge message.

This book is intended to be a guide to law enforcemtn investigators and cyber-forensics. It describes the techniques and the literally dozens of programs that exist (usually free on the web) for hiding messages and several programs for detecting these messages. This is an area that has received little attention in the past and this book does a very good job of bringing this field out into the open.

As a security focused manager the more I learn about steganography, the art of hiding messages, the more concerned I become about its security implications. These techniques allow an individual to use secrecy in communications.

I am sure the book aids the investigator, but it helps a manager understand how secrecy has been used in the past and the present as well. A tremendous amount of research must have gone into the book to be so comprehensive. I was already familiar with S-tools and a few other picture file related techniques, but had never considered slight alterations of the space between letters and had never heard of Civil war quilts. The beginning of the book is packed with technique after technique.

The author, Greg Kipper is to be congratulated for such clear writing especially considering how complex the subject gets.

The publisher, CRC Press, went the extra mile to create a very detailed table of contents so the reader can find what they need fast.

The bottom line, this book is an excellent coverage of the subject and yet they packed it into about 200 pages so it is 100% fluff free.

One concern and one wish. The coverage of tools is a bit spotty, the links to stego tools seem to change rapidly and some of the tools do not even have a link. If you can't find a tool you might try: http://www.stegoarchive.com/ that is what I use. I hope this goes to second edition and if so, my wish is that the author will beef up the detection chapter. Greg does such a great job of showing how stego can and has been used in the real world, I would love more information about how I can protect myself and apply detective controls in my organization's network.

This book is a wonderful rhythmic short story about a baby and his family. The rhythm of the words encourages the reader and listeners to get involved and to enjoy the musical nature of the story as told and in terms of content. It is one of our children's favorites and is frequent in our bedtime rotation. I highly recommend it to parents who arent afraid of getting a little creative with the stories they read and for children who are musically inclined.

This book is my classroom's favorite. The illustrations are very "jazzy" and fun to experience and the text is very fun to clap and move along with. Do I think "Jazz Baby" is a great book? "OH YEAH".

This book is supposed to be the funniest thing that Kant ever wrote, and I really wanted to swim through this book before I tried to figure out what I thought was so funny, but even treading water is a challenge when the current has such a fierce undertow, and the serious "First Part, Which is Dogmatic" demands some consideration, though it ends with the famous prudence which demands "that one make the pattern of one's projects appropriate to one's powers, and if one cannot reasonably attain the great, to restrict oneself to the mediocre." (p. 40). This collection of DREAMS OF A SPIRIT-SEER and other writings from the Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, edited by Gregory R. Johnson, which puts everything that directly related to KANT ON SWEDENBORG into this book, allows a serious consideration of Johnson's view that self-defense was the essence of Kant's approach. Religious controversies had career consequences in those days, and Kant had to show he was laughing "because Swedenborg was a controversial figure. Rumors of interest in Swedenborg would have seriously jeopardized Kant's prospects for academic advancement. This is sufficient motive for him to write a book exculpating himself of the suspicion that he took Swedenborg seriously." (p. xvi). Johnson was writing a doctoral dissertation on Kant the first time he read DREAMS OF A SPIRIT-SEER in 1994, and he cites it in the notes as his COMMENTARY, (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America, 2001). The acknowledgments are dated January 2003 (p. xxvi) and I feel lucky that I received this book as soon as I did.

I have been thinking about this book for a long time before I wrote this review, since this is the work for which Kant wondered if he had gone too far in jest. My first surprise was that Kant himself (like Hegel, he avoids mentioning names) is not entirely clear about whom he meant to be writing until page 49: "I come now to my purpose, namely, to the writings of my hero." He called his preface "A Prospectus That Promises Very Little for the Project" (p. 3) and the final paragraph of his introduction attempted to make his readers share the situation which he found himself in. "Furthermore, a large work was purchased, and, what is worse still, was read, and such effort should not be wasted. From this originated the present treatise, which, as one flatters oneself, should leave the reader in a state of complete satisfaction, in which the principal part will not be understood, the other not believed, and the remainder laughed at." (p. 4). In general, I approve of the steps Kant took to show a more enlightened view than the journals of his day. The major contrast in Johnson's Introduction is with Johann August Ernesti, who denounced Swedenborg in 1760 as a heretic in his "New Theological Library." For attempting to find meanings in the early books of the Bible which were not obvious, Swedenborg was accused of "pervert[ing] the Sacred Scriptures by the pretense of an inner sense, is in the highest degree worthy of punishment." (p. xxiv). When someone in Wurttemberg published a book on Swedenborg, "at Ernesti's urging, the Wurttemberg government declared the book heretical, confiscated all copies, and even ordered private citizens to surrender their copies on pain of arrest." (p. xxv). When a professor of Theology at Tubingen "urged a more open-minded attitude toward Swedenborg[,] Ernesti responded with yet another scathing review, asserting that Clemm's defense of Oetinger and Swedenborg was an offense that would have been worthy of the death penalty in earlier times." (p. xxv). Kant shows how modern people could be much more philosophical about these things, and though those people are all dead, there is a nice justice in the number of people who are still reading Kant and Swedenborg, even if they hardly know anyone else who does.

The prime point in the Introduction by Johnson resides deep in personal philosophy, that professional philosophers might understand as, "that Kant's mature critical philosophy is best seen as a synthesis of Rousseauian and Swedenborgian elements (the influence of Leibniz and Hume being primarily upon Kant's elaboration of difficult technical questions once his basic vision was already in place). . . . although Kant's vision of the cosmos is more Swedenborgian than Rousseauian, it is Rousseau who provides the essentially pragmatic arguments that allow Kant to embrace the content of Swedenborg's visions but discard his enthusiasm." (p. xx).

The notes are helpful. Only a translator is likely to notice, "Here Kant embraces the idea of general as opposed to particular providence." (p. 161, n. 26). This is what makes Kant a philosopher, "the notion that God governs the universe by framing general laws. Particular providence is the notion that he governs the universe on a case-by-case basis." Swedenborg is so religious that he argues "general providence is meaningless without particular providence." There is more on this in Johnson's (as yet, unpublished) COMMENTARY. Kant [Part I, Second Chapter, Paragraph 3] was talking about connections in the immaterial world, the former connections, before getting trapped where "nothing hinders even the immaterial beings that affect one another through the mediation of matter from also standing in a special and constant association and as immaterial beings always exercising reciprocal influences on one another, so that their relationship mediated by matter is only contingent and rests upon particular divine provision, whereas the former is natural and indissoluble." (p. 16)

I would like to check another translation to see if this is even close to what anyone else would think. In 1992, David Walford and Ralf Meerbote had their translation published in Kant, THEORETICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1755-1770. "Walford's translation is highly accurate and very readable. Indeed, it would be hard to justify a new translation of DREAMS at all were the Walford translation available in an inexpensive paperback edition." (p. xxiii). It soon might be, if that is what you would rather have.

This work is often described as Kant's most "mysterious". The mystery lies in the fact that here in this treatise the Great Professor of Metaphysics unreservedly admits in the existance of "immaterial natures in the world", i.e. spirits and a spirit world. There is nothing mysterious about this statement, it is just that modern readers refuse to accept it. I've never understood why this should be so hard for some, since Kant's System of critical idealism is perfectly consistent with this view. Kant claimed that we could never know the true nature of the world around us, the true causes of sensations. He always held that there is a real world that we can never accurately know. This real world corresponds with a "spirit world", or if you prefer, a platonic world of Ideals lieing outside of our human perception of time and space. Kant unmistakably states that "We should ... regard the human soul as being conjoined in its present life with two worlds at the same time...." Nothing could be more unambiguous, especially considering his references to the writings of Swedenborg.

I think that this book has been largely ignored because it is just too divergent from the rational empiracism of the modern scientific mind. The scienitfic materialist conveniently ignores the fundamental questions of material "reality" that Kant couldn't ignore. Furthermore, when the Prussian government banned this work it set into motion the series of events that culminated in the profound physical and spiritual disasters of the 20th cetury- and beyond.

It may yet be proven that the ideas in this forgotten book are far more "real" than the modern materialist concensus of reality....

This book is a valuable addition to any Civil War library. Chronologically ordered, it recounts the deaths of Union officers and men from wounds received at Gettysburg.

The title is mildly misleading. Many of the soldiers referenced died of wounds in the month after the battle. This in no way minimizes their sacrifice, but these are not exclusively eyewitnesses accounts of soldiers immediately KIA.

One of the more intriguing aspects of the book is the presentation of letters to next of kin by commanding officers and fellow soldiers. Those letters reflect the ethos of the Civil War soldier, as well as the diction and eloquence of a more gracious age. Contrast the poignant sense of loss and appreciation reflected in those letters with the sterile form letter-notification of the 20th Century.

A companion piece from the Confederate side would be a valuable accompaniment to this scholarly work.

There are many books written on the American Civil War. They address the leaders, the battles, the statistics, the politics and the individual struggles. Until now, however, the personal accounts of those who witnesses the last moments of many a brave soldier has gone unpublished. Here, in these pages, are the tales and tragedies of many poor Americans who's personal efforts might have gone forgoten if not for the lasting impressions they left upon those who cared for them. Stories from nurses, best friends, commanders, all attest to the bravery and devotion these men possessed. Here are the stories of men who's lives where smashed by the minie ball, doused by the cannon's belch and torn by the lack of adequete medical knowledge. Here is a book that will vividly inform it's readers of the true finality of war.