Turner Books

This is a VERY helpful travel book! In 357 pages it gives you access to the Online Travel Directory and has a large pull-out color map, yet it is small enough to fit in almost any handbag. Sites of interest covered in the book include Animal Kingdom, Epcot, Disney-MGM Studios, Water Parks, Golf, Tennis, Islands of Adventure, Daytona Beach, Kennedy Space Center and More! It gives pretty accurate ratings of rides, restaurants, hotels and such. This is especially helpful if you are taking the kids, you can use this to plan out the vacation, know what rides and food your kids will enjoy and even gives sample itineraries. The information is reliable and the details are wonderful! If you, or someone you know, are planning a trip to the Orlando area, this is a MUST!

Quality publisher of the exhibition at the Newberry Library, with smooth matte expensive thick paper and excellent reproductions of artifacts. Highly recommended.

This book captures many botanical wonders that are passionately explained by Suzanne Turner. The talented camera work and Ms. Turner's expertise combine to allow the reader to feel as though he or she were strolling through Louisiana's landmark gardens. The commitment and depth of this piece of art are nothing short of magnifique

Out of the frying pan--Into the fire...Not only is Caradoc Penluathe a failed mage, now he is also a fugitive accused of murder. Delsidor Whitfauconer was fataly stabbed in Ambrothen Cathedral, and all signs point to Caradoc, and a malevolent misuse of magepower.
Evelake Whitfauconer, son and heir to the murdered man, is in Caradoc's care. Evelake's mind has been removed and replaced by Borthen Berigeld, in a first move to take control of Garillon.
Caradoc, hunted and bereft of the mage-stone which is the source of his power and healing, must travel paths imbued with malignant hostility. With only his native talent and courage to keep him alive, Caradoc must bring young Evelake to sanity anf safety.
Only then can he tackle the infinitely worse confrontation with the feral evil of Borthen Berigeld!

From experts to beginners, Bill Turner provides the key to knowing how queer theory began and evolved. This historian and queer theorist maps the various themes and directions the major writers took while founding his book on the essential thoughts of Michel Foucault. This book helps keep my studies on track. I would help a novice gain a perceptive overview.

A French patriot, writing amid the upheavals of 1848, alerted his countrymen, fellow Europeans, and posterity to an emerging social science that harmonizes order (the conservative impulse) and progress (the liberal impulse). Auguste Comte (1798-1857) called this science "Positivism," positing its ability to break the trend of negativism brought about by the decline of Catholic feudalism and culminating in the French Revolution. Like all brilliant entrepreneurs, Comte saw the revolution as an opportunity within a tragedy.
Erik von Kuenelt-Leddihn, in his book "Leftism Revisited," accurately summarized that Comte sought to create a secular version of the Roman Catholic Church. Comte's reverence for Catholicism is all through "A General View of Positivism" although in trying to sell his philosophy to Frenchmen he made the church sound better than it actually was. Puzzling is his attribution of the idea of separating the temporal power (government) from the spiritual power (philosophic) to the Roman Church. I don't recall the Vatican ever giving up political power voluntarily. Perhaps Comte is crediting the Bible's "Give on to Caesar what is Caesar's and give on to G-d what is G-d's" to Catholicism when it should be attributed to Christianity in general.
Interestingly, as foreshadowed by Comte, the Roman Church has evolved into a more positivist institution, eschewing direct involvement in elections and practical politics and sticking to its morals advisory knitting. Result: Pope Benedict XVI has an 80 percent approval rating with Americans, a level President George W. Bush (who regularly confounds the roles of morals and politics) can only dream of.
Readers will not be able to miss the non-theological, non-metaphysical nature of Comte's "Religion of Humanity." This characteristic is what links it to its variants in other fields - logical empiricism in the field of language and logic as practiced by the Vienna and Berlin circles of the 1920s and 1930s, the physical-science instrumentalism of Ernst Mach and Henri Poincare, and William Clifford's non-Euclidean geometry.
Unlike most other empiricists and inductive thinkers, Comte saw his system eventually embracing all of humanity. Thanks to flexibility under republican principles and a history with Catholicism, France would take the lead in adopting Positivism, with the philosophy gradually adding the remainder of Western Europe then the rest of the world in a period of not less than 200 years. Comte's forecast seems to be on pace. The European Union, peacefully clustered around French-speaking Brussels, is the most public manifestation of Positivism today. (Note its stable currency and the great desire of Eastern Europeans to join while metaphysical America's dollar declines and its NATO policy antagonizes Russia toward Cold War II). Were he alive today, Comte could comfortably say "EU c'est moi."
"A General View of Positivism" makes passing mention of the United States but anyone who picks up a newspaper can easily see that today's America is not ready for Positivism. This is due mainly to the natures of Positivism and U.S. society. Positivism is anti-individualist, anti-militarist, and contrary to the postulates of modern American feminism. Comte venerates women, going so far as to call his Great Being (the new god, i.e. humanity) "She," reflecting the view that women put social feeling over self-love more naturally than any other group (a key tenant of Positivism). Yet Comte's reading of history and discernment of the laws of sociology and nature lead him to determine women's most effective and harmonious role as working in the home, educating and civilizing children (especially males), and influencing public opinion through the salon. Men and women competing in the economy poisons relations between the sexes at their very source, Comte points out. Sad but true yet try selling that to America's NOW gang and teachers unions.
The profoundly conservative and pro-life sentiments of Comte's Positivism are too elevated for the shallow jingoists that make up much of the contemporary American right wing. Consider the American infatuation with novelty, newness, and unrestrained democracy then consider this - "We see this unfortunate narrowness of view too often in the best socialists, who leaving the present without roots in the past, would carry us headlong toward a future of which they have no conception. In all social phenomena, and especially those of modern times, the participation of our predecessors is greater than that of our contemporaries." (p. 403, Robert Speller & Sons edition, published 1957).
Now consider whether prattling about ever-elastic "rights" can come close to valuing the unborn and other humans the way this statement does - "The principle upon which Positivism insists so strongly, the union of the present with the past, and even with the future, is not limited to the life of society. It is a doctrine which unites all individuals and all generations...We may live with those who are not yet born; a thing impossible only till a true theory of history had arisen, of scope sufficient to embrace at one glance the whole course of human destiny." (p. 290-291).
Jewish intellectual Dennis Prager once said he couldn't give a good secular reason for marriage but Comte, further burnishing his conservative credentials, provides one, writing that binding union with one of the opposite sex is crucial for the moral development of the partners. Moreover, polygamy and divorce erode civilization, Comte writes, leading one to speculate if this isn't a leading cause of stagnation in the Islamic world. "The striking superiority of social life in the West is probably due to it (monogamy) more than any other cause." (p. 263).
Positivism would likely be most opposed in America by those who should be best able to discern its assets - conservatives. You'd expect opposition from mass-market neoconservatives like Rush Limbaugh, who tried to discredit John Kerry during the 2004 election by calling him "the French candidate." Others held that the Kerry/Edwards motto ("For a Stronger America") should actually have been "For a Stranger America." Such vapidity doesn't merit a reply.
But reactions of thoughtful conservatives do. In "The Conservative Mind," Russell Kirk warned about positivists and rationalists undermining the "religious nature" of society yet didn't offer one quote from Comte or include Comte in the book's bibliography. Kirk's summation of Comte's philosophy seems tainted by biases favoring theological conservatism and British conservatism. Surely, Kirk was right to recoil at the injection of one aspect of Comte's philosophy (the preeminence of public opinion, which has lead to the Oprah-ization of U.S. politics and government-by-polling data) into a society not ready for Positivism. Yet Kirk's central views about obedience and virtue agree with Comte's.
The best hope for Positivism in the U.S. is for it to be adopted under the brand name of its closest American cousin - Pragmatism, as developed by William James and Charles Peirce. As history further advances the U.S. toward the need for Positivism, with metaphysical and theological notions and government-by-interest group sowing destruction in every direction, the question will arise "Does relativist Positivism, by its communitarian nature, lead to statist absolutism?" (The converse being absolutist religion giving us relativist statism). Comte addressed this by writing that totalitarianism is possible if people confuse Positivism's intellectual nature with its social aspect. Just as revealing is Positivist physicist Philipp Frank's remark about the "tragic feature of enlightenment." To wit, advancing science destroys old conceptions while creating the conditions for misuse of the new ways. Like its religious and philosophical ancestors, the fountainhead that is Positivism can pour forth waters that are bitter and sweet.
Comte's most effective sales pitch is when he uses the features of theology to show that most religious practice is actually self-service. Jewish, Christian, and Islamic conceptions hold that G-d is perfect and needs nothing from humanity. Mirroring the approach of Baruch Spinoza, who equated G-d with the world, Comte reminds us that humanity is in need and we are all part of the Great Being thus we're duty-bound to make the Great Being (our home) a success. In other words, we are the world.

This work represents the culmination of 25 years of learning from Aboriginal elders and stands out as one of the only written works that represents Aboriginal theology as an ontology wholly deserving its own place among the worlds religions. Professor Turner turns on its head the usual practice of analysing aboriginal religion, theology and social life from a dominant external perspective, using instead the Aboriginal perspective to analyse the dominant religious and social movements of our time. Not only does this bring aboriginal culture into our timeline but it exposes the brilliance of their theology and the height of their accomplishment. This book is 50 years ahead of its time. While many authors return home for their analysis Professor Turner has returned again and again to the Elders and has truly represented the people. This is an authentic volume of work not to be missed by those wishing for more than the musings of self involved academics or new age prophets.

Cable was a Southern writer, born in New Orleans and a Confederate soldier, best known today (if known at all) for his local color stories about the Creoles of Louisiana and the novel THE GRANDISSIMES, about two feuding Creole families around the time of the Louisiana Purchase. Cable was also a reformer, especially for prison reforms and equal treatment of blacks in the South; this latter view, made public in books such as THE SILENT SOUTH (1885), caused much outrage in the South. He believed that the separation of the races and especially the desire in the South to keep blacks "beneath" whites in all things was damaging to both races. Cable was also a very religious man and was very active in the church. Despite his popularity as an author and lecturer (he toured successfully with Mark Twain), Cable was often in debt, living on advances for his writing. Turner relates Cable's trials and tribulations, and his successes, very well in this biography. He writes well, never allowing his research to get in the way of his commanding style. Later in his career Cable wished to write stories that "make you feel today that you are enterained, and find tomorrow that you are profited." Turner's biography does just that. Highly recommended.

In "Germany from Partition to Reunification" Henry Ashby Turner, Jr. presents a very well-written straightforward political history of modern Germany. In the first edition of his book, known as "The Two Germanies since 1945," Turner was praised for his knowledge of the German Democratic Republic, an area in which many American authors had been weak. Not long after the first edition was published in 1987, there was suddenly much more German History to take stock of with the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of 1989. Turner does not let the reader down in his gripping, lean narration of the last suspense-filled months of the East German regime. Turner sprinkles pithy photographs throughout this book and writes in a concise, reader-friendly style. One criticism of the earlier edition was that it focused too narrowly on political history and gave short shrift to social and cultural elements. Turner did well to keep this book as a simple political history with marginal reference to social and cultural history. To include those elements in this work would have been an unweildy task that surely would have ballooned the size of the book and reduced the effectiveness that its conciseness and brevity afford it now. One weakness in the book, however, is the chart showing political institutions of the Federal Republic. While most of it makes sense, it is unclear what the exact relationship is between the State Parliaments and the Federal Assembly. The Federal Assembly is listed separately from the Bundestag. It should be explained more carefully on the chart what the relationships are between these particular bodies. In summary, however, the book is an excellent read.

I am a high school business teacher and I received this book along with the various teacher editions. However, because our order was for only 3 student books, I was not given the student version of the chapter working papers. This made making lesson plans tedious because I needed to format sheets to match, so needless to say, I was NEVER so happy to see that Amazon had the student version! The book arrived in a timely fashion and my students and I are diligently working on accounting (although I think I was much happier to see the book than they were!)

THANKS AMAZON!