Columbia Books

I received the book in only few days, in excellent conditions.

Thanks,

Janny

Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Science, Becker has pioneered the aplication of economic analysis to human behavior in such areas as dicrimination, married, family, etc. This book is a classic study of the consequences of investing in a person's knowledge and skills. According to his theory, investing in an individual's education and training is similar to business investments in equipment.

One of the principal book about Human Capital Theory.

This book is very technical in nature and not "a light read." However, it is an essential resource for anyone interested in labor economics and human capital. Dr. Becker is brilliant. Highly recommend!

If you have been abused or you work with people who are being abused (that accounts for 85% of the US) read this book. It's not obvious, even to victims, why they can't just walk away. Since typically the abuser is male and victim is a female I was impressed that this compassionate book on the subject was written by a male. A classic in the subject of abuse.

The author provides a foundational understanding of the psychodynamics and cyclic nature of abusive relationships. Celani explains how adult relations are unconscious repetitions of early childhood 'object relations'. He also compares his theories to those of other researchers and addresses practical methods for helping the victims. He is apparently passionate about the subject, making the book lively and approachable for lay persons as well as for psychotherapists.

If you have been abused or you work with people who are being abused (that accounts for 85% of the US) read this book. It's not obvious, even to victims, why they can't just walk away. Since typically the abuser is male and victim is a female I was impressed that this compassionate book on the subject was written by a male. A classic in the subject of abuse.

If you are new to the political job arena in Washington, Bill Endicott's book is a must-read. I had moved to DC in the fall of 2001 with very little knowledge about the political job market. With "An Insider's Guide to Political Jobs in Washington" as my guidebook, I was able to land the job I had sought.

The author does a great job describing the types of political jobs that are available - truly valuable to someone with little or no knowledge of the DC job structure. Following this, the reader learns how to actually get these jobs. The author's experience and knowledge really shine through, and there is no one better than Bill Endicott to explain the process of finding a job. In addition, the case studies present to the reader descriptions of how individuals from a wide range of backgrounds (and party affiliations) not only landed the coveted first job, but also how they had worked their way up the ranks.

Whether you are a student looking to land that first political job or a professional looking to make a career change into politics, read this book to gain an understanding of political jobs that is unavailable anywhere else. I can honestly admit that without "An Insider's Guide to Political Jobs in Washington," I would have never developed a successful plan and would have never landed a great job.

Bill Endicott's "An Insider's Guide to Political Jobs in Washington" is a roadmap for those who love politics, but don't quite know how to get started. I can think of nothing else on the market that reveals with full disclosure what working in Washington is like. When I graduated from university 5 years ago, I had countless questions that I couldn't find answers to at career fairs or through contact with alumni: What kinds of political positions are available? How do I decide whom to work for? How does one advance? Should I drop everything and work on a campaign?

These questions and others are precisely what Endicott's detailed description of the political process and his insightful case studies aim to help answer. His years in Washington offer a rich context that shines through in his colorful interviews and anecdotes. Endicott's exhaustive compilation of opportunities available in Washington will be an invaluable resource for aspiring politicos and may even inspire those who like to dabble in politics once in a while to consider public service. Students all over the country will be grateful for Endicott's thoroughness as they will no longer have to rely on word of mouth to get the skinny on what Beltway politics is really like.

At last there's a book that explains what political jobs are all about! Bill Endicott's An Insider's Guide to Political Jobs in Washington is a masterful presentation of information, advice and anecdotes. In combination this collection lays out real strategies for preparing for a political career, landing a first job and making a real impact in the job once you get it. The author draws on his own substantial experience in political parties, Congress, executive agencies and the White House to give readers the "insider's" perspective promised by the title. In addition to his own experience, the author introduces the reader to a number of political pros who have "made it" and taken a variety of different paths to their successful careers.

Particularly instructive is the discussion of working in the White House. Regular "West Wing" viewers may get the impression that the chief of staff, the press secretary and the office of communications is pretty much all there is. The book introduces the reader to almost 50 different offices and a variety of different jobs that serve the immediate needs of the President and his senior staff. While one might get the impression from television and movies that jobs working for the President are out of reach, Endicott dispels that myth.

One might expect a practical "how to" book of such detailed quality to suffer from air of cynicism about the entire process. The absence of that outlook is one of the most refreshing and enjoyable aspects of the book. Bill Endicott believes in the process and he offers a passionate defense of both politics and service. Beyond offering the reader roadmaps to successful political careers, Endicott defends service within the political process. In Endicott's Washington, anyone with a strong desire to serve can use their skills to make a meaningful contribution to their country. That is an optimistic proposition, but it is supported by strong empirical evidence throughout the book.

For those inclined to ask John F. Kennedy's eternal question, "what you can do for your country?", Endicott's book reveals where and how to find the answer.

i got these for a trip to costa rica - i had taken spanish in high school, but hadn't really learned a whole lot. these cds start with the basics/the alphabet, etc. I listened while I brushed my teeth, drove around, worked out, etc and learned quite a bit. They integrate common vocab into the lessons and you really do pick up a lot of the language. i didn't use the cd-roms, but now that i'm going to spain, i think i'll need a little more practice!

Instant Immersion Spanish Audio Deluxe (Instant Immersion) [UNABRIDGED] (Instant Immersion)

I ordered this package because I had previously ordered the instant immersion software and wanted something to complement it while not at the computer. This package is especially nice because in addition to the audio disks, it provides a disc with all the dialog in Printable PDF files so you can follow along with the audio cds if you like or just go back to the printouts for review. Great Product!!!

After taking two years of Spanish in college about ten years ago, I needed a good review prior to a trip to Peru. This 8 audio CD set is ideal for re-learning the language. It is an excellent review. I believe it could also be a good learning tool for someone who wants to commit the time to listen diligently and practice with the audio CD's and learn the language for the first time. I especially like the extra CD-rom that allows all the lessons to be printed in order to see the words and phrases that are spoken. The package includes a second CD-rom which permits the user to practice proper pronunciation on the computer.

I had purchased the Instant Immersion software package (3 audio and 5 CD-rom)and very much liked the audio CD's, but found that I could not commit the time to sit at the computer to review the lessons. This 8-audio deluxe version allows me to learn while I'm driving. I appreciate the style of teaching which is very similar to a classroom setting. Each lesson builds on and reviews the previous teaching. There is adequate time to practice pronunciation and learn new vocabulary and sentence structure. It is not rote memorization which is on some other CD's which I would not recommend.

A problem with political parties that have an agenda to promote is that if they are successful then the party begins to flounder about aimlessly with no goal but to complain about the world situation. The Democratic party, and particularly the left wing of the party had a series of items on its agenda: There was civil rights, woman's rights, the war in Viet Nam, the Great Society view of welfare, gun control.

Civil rights led to the legislation that greatly expanded the rights of blacks to vote, ended 'official' school segregation and basically changed the structure in the south.

Woman's rights were basically accomplished by court action in cases such as Roe v. Wade.

The Viet Nam war is over. And while the left seriously opposes the war in Iraq, people are not being drafted and there is little agitation on campuses around the country.

The programs for supporting the poor have fallen into disrepute as we have spawned generations of 'welfare queens' that have lived on the system but not used it as a way to break the poverty chains.

Gun control has become an issue of the left wing of the party, but when Al Gore lost his home state of Tennessee and the polls said gun control was the primary reason, the mainstream of the party realized that strong gun control would keep them out of office. When Kerry and Edwards returned to Washington from the campaign trail to vote on a bill that annoyed gun owners they protected the liberal base of their party, but they wrote off the south and west and lost.

It seems that the Democratic party has become the party of complaining about the actions of the Republicans without having an agenda of their own. When President Bush announced his vision of changing social security by allowing a portion to be invested at the direction of the payer the Democratic party began a campaign to denounce Bush's plan. But did anyone ever hear what the Democrats proposed to solve the problems of an aging population?

In this book Mr. Gitlin calls on the left to once again engage the public life with vision, patriotism, and a willingness to look at the world as it really is rather than spending all their time criticizing and resisting Bush. After all, this is Bush's last term, he is leaving office with rather low approval ratings. Is the next election to be another Republican victory because the Democrats are unable to present a vision that the populace wants?

For many Americans, the shock and horror of 9/11 dissipated within months, driven into the subconscious, replaced by the old trench thinking and its accompanying political combat. Some even enlisted the atrocity as a bogus rational for waging a senseless, immoral war in Iraq. Todd Gitlin, a former 1960s radical and president of Students for Democratic Society, today an esteemed professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, put the horror to better use.

Living just north of the World Trade Center, inhaling the acrid air containing the remains of the fallen buildings -- New Yorkers would eventually realize that the foul air also contained human remains -- Gitlin set about to rethink his political ideas and reassess how to revitalize the left. That is what tragedies should do: overwhelming grief should lead to serious rethinking. Instead of simply escaping the pain or worse exploiting the horror, Gitlin challenged the orthodoxies. What being patriotic means? What patriotism means for liberals? Is U.S. military intervention always bad? What is good about America? The result is his engaging, and courageous The Intellectuals and the Flag.

"This might," the 1960s icon writes in the introduction, "be a healthy time for an intellectual renaissance. The nation is deeply troubled, and for all cant about optimism and faith, much of the nation knows it is troubled."

An intellectual renaissance on the left is not going to be easy, Gitlin makes clear. The political left is essentially bankrupt; Marxism and postmodernism are exhausted. A right-wing coalition of plutocrats and fundamentalist Christians has controlled the politics of the nation for three decades.

In a previous book, Letters to a Young Activist (2003), Gitlin laid out what practical efforts liberals needed to undertake to regain political superiority. The Intellectuals and the Flag places an intellectual foundation under those practical efforts. The objective of the book, the author writes, is "to contribute to a new start for intellectual life on the left."

In this timely and lucidly written book, the professor begins with a survey of three intellectuals who in the 1950s were his personal models: David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, and Irving Howe. Then he examines the negative effects of postmodern thinking, the anti-political of Cultural Studies, and the values of media, citizenship, and higher education. The final section, the title essay, "The Flag and the Flag," is where Gitlin explores what most readers are most interested in: how did we get into this political mess?

"The tragedy of the left is that, having achieved an unprecedented victory in helping stop an appalling war, it then proceeded to commit suicide."

The left played a major role in ending the Vietnam War, but it also paid a heavy price. Immersed in the horror of Vietnam, day after day, year after year, too many of us developed an unbalanced, lopsided view of our country. We acquired an overly negative evaluation of America.

"But the hatred of a bad war, in what was evidently a pattern of bad wars -- though none so bad as Vietnam -- turned us inside out. It inflamed our hearts. You can hate your country in such a way that the hatred becomes fundamental."

In the wake of the Vietnam War, political leftists tended to immerse themselves in either radical individualism -- often devoid of politics -- or cosmopolitanism with a global perspective. This, it seems to me, left an opening on the national level that the right-wing, beginning during the era of Ronald Reagan, exploited successfully.

To return to political prominence, Gitlin stresses the left must end its knee-jerk slamming of America. It must stop being a mirror opposite of the right-wing that views America as always righteous. We need a patriotic left that "stands between Cheney and Chomsky," he quotes Michael Tomasky. We need to love our country, but love it for what we value. We need a liberal patriotism, not the right's patriotism of closed-minded obedience, not their patriotism of only symbolism, but patriotism that is open-minded and action oriented. And that means we need to be open to what in the past we automatically rejected.

"Post-Vietnam liberals have an opening now, freed of our sixties flag anxiety and our automatic rejection of the use of force. To live out a democratic pride, not a slavish surrogate, we badly need liberal patriotism, robust and uncowed."

Now is the time for liberals to reconnect with their nation, to celebrate its ideals while continuing to criticize its shortcomings, a liberal patriotism that says we will make sacrifices for our country because we love what is good about America.

"It is time for the patriotism of mutual aid, not just symbolic displays, not catechisms or self-congratulations. It is time to diminish the gap between the nation we love and the justice we also love. It is time for the real America to stand up."

And so Todd Gitlin, a major antiwar voice during the Vietnam War, an insightful and broadminded writer during Bush's Iraq War, calls upon the American left to embrace their country to make it the reality that we want America to be. If you are tired of a left politics assigned to the political margin, if you are tired of the status quo that paved the wave for George Bush and the Iraq War, buy this book. And then get to work.

This thoughtful work made me ponder the use of the American flag, as well as how various Americans regard patriotism.

It occurs to me that at least on social issues, patriotism is naturally the domain of the liberals. After all, we liberals are the ones who focus on the common good. It is the conservatives who are more willing to be exclusive or even intolerant, shutting out part of our own society. It is the conservatives who are more willing to assign profits to themselves even at some cost to the greater good. It is the conservatives who boast about our Right to get tax breaks. We liberals are the ones who want to collect more taxes in order to improve our society.

Yes, we liberals are the ones who ought to be waving that flag around. We're the patriots. And sometimes, when we focus on social issues, we do just that, to the annoyance of those who disagree with us.

When it comes to foreign policy, it appears to work the other way around. Now, we liberals are the ones who can threaten to hurt our country in order to work for what we claim is the common good of the world. And it is conservatives who are suddenly willing to spend tax money ... on defense. And it is they who wave that flag, not us.

Overall, however, we liberals are the ones who are more leery of our own flag. Why is that? Are we ashamed of our country? As Todd Gitlin explains, sometimes we are. We've seen America behave badly at times. And we aren't so sure we want America's misdeeds to be in our name.

But Gitlin goes further than this. He discusses the two main problems liberals often have with patriotism. The first is individualism. We Americans love freedom. We liberals often view ourselves as loving freedom even more than others. We love freedom so much that we hesitate to give up some of that freedom to support (and follow the orders of) any government, even our own.

Of course, if we are unwilling to defend those freedoms, we'll lose them. If we are willing to defend our freedoms, we may need to join an army (or at least be patriotic in some manner) which restricts those freedoms. However, if we truly love freedom, we need to put up with these restrictions or we'll be unable to find a way to defend our country when it is attacked.

In any case, we liberals are scared to see unthinking support of all American policies. We don't want genuine deliberation spoiled by unreflective flag-waving. And that makes us hesitate to wave that flag.

The second problem is cosmopolitanism. Flag-waving just plain looks provincial to us. It makes us look unpopular to the community we really feel we belong in, namely international society. And it makes us appear intolerant and uncooperative.

Still, there is a serious problem that we liberals face. Gitlin sums it up by explaining that many on the left simply settle for condemning what we're doing, rather than coming up with plans for improvement. And that leaves many of us without a positive program to espouse.

Sure, we want to present an alternative to those appear to us to be "faith-based, inclined to be impervious toward evidence, and tilted toward moral absolutism." But as the author shows, quite a few of us on the left appear to be just as faith-based, impervious to evidence, and tilted toward moral absolutism as the extremists on the far right. What we really need is an alternative to both of these extremes. And those who always condemn America but refuse to condemn fanatical terrorists are not providing us with that alternative.

Ideally, we want to come up with an intelligent and positive program that will improve society. And we want to remove some counterproductive ideas from our platforms. Of course, if we fail to do that, we'll probably alarm so many voters that we won't be given the opportunity to accomplish anything, whether it is of value or not.

I recommend this book.

A great presentation of what I expected to be an unexciting topic. Examines the workings of the political system in a highly readable way. I was not only well-informed after I read the book, but entertained as well!

This is excellent material if you are conducting any kind of serious research on NAFTA and its negotiations' development and outcome. It provides with a huge theoretical framework, every step of the process. If your line of work is game theory, this book will really help you (or at least it worked wonders for me). This is mandatory reference material for anyone interested in studying NAFTA.

Mayer rivals Grisham. He enfolds the strategy of NAFTA like a good murder-mystery. More proof that reality is more entertaining than fiction. It's a thriller, a nail-biter. I couldn't put it down!

Saturday February 1, 2003 was a sad day for the U.S.: The shuttle Columbia disintegrated in space, killing flight commander Rick D. Husband; pilot William C. McCool; payload commander Michael P. Anderson; mission specialists David M. Brown, Kalpana Chawla and Laurel Clark; and Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon.

It was especially difficult for Israel and the Jewish people, who had placed so much pride and hope into the voyage of Ramon, the son of a refugee from Germany and a veteran of Israel's War of Independence and a mother who had survived Auschwitz. In 1981, he had flown with seven other Israeli F-16 pilots who destroyed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor near Baghdad. "If I can prevent another Holocaust, I'm ready to sacrifice my life for this," Ramon had selflessly told his comrades.

All Israel and the Jewish people considered Ramon's mission a source of honor, a testament to positive spirit, despite a troubled time that had claimed 768 Israelis in terrorist attacks since September 2000.

Ramon was cool-headed, modest, "a humble hero," who although he was not an observant Jew, took with him Jewish symbols into space--a small Torah smuggled out of Bergen-Belsen by a Holocaust survivor, a mezuzah wrapped in barbed wire, and the drawing of a moonscape by a victim of Theresienstadt. For Israel and the Jewish people, he had said, it was "a very symbolic mission."

And so it was. For Ramon reminded the Jewish people, said a Jerusalem Post editorial after his death, "we can make the desert bloom and build modern cities on sand dunes. And we can reach for the stars."

This book is a fitting tribute to a Jewish hero.

--Alyssa A. Lappen

I just wanted to thank you that you wrote this book

I want everyone to know that this book was a labor of love. I want to help make people aware of the life and the legacy of Ilan Ramon, a hero and inspiring figure for all of us.

Books on Japan that are worth reading must fulfill three criteria. They must be based on a direct access to primary sources, which presupposes a high degree of familiarity with the Japanese language and social history. They have to build upon the scholarly literature, including analysis and commentary presented by Japanese scholars. And they have to offer a theoretical perspective that is relevant to the subject under consideration.

The Logic of Japanese Politics meets these three criteria with a wide margin. Professor Curtis seems to know every major political figure firsthand and has developed with many of them a personal relationship since their rookie years as junior Diet members. As a distinguished political scientist, he brings intellectual breadth as well as historical depth to his topic, and has himself published extensively in Japanese. He is careful not to placate preconceived notions on the Japanese political system, and develops useful comparisons with politics in Europe (whereas most observers, including Japanese political actors, tend to overuse the comparison with US politics).

The 1990s was an important turning point for Japanese politics. From 1989 to 1998, Japan had nine prime ministers; there had been only eleven over the previous thirty-four years. From 1955 to 1993, only one party, the LDP, was in power at the national level. Then during one year beginning in August 1993, every party in the Diet except for the Communists participated in one coalition government or another. Among parties opposed to the LDP, affiliations were in such a flux that a number of Diet members stopped indicating their party membership on their name cards. Although the PLD's absence from power lasted for less than a year, before they returned to government in an alliance with their former arch-rival the Japan Socialist Party, the period marked a dramatic rupture in Japanese politics, with the end of the so-called '55 system and the quest for a new political landscape that took some time consolidating.

Each chapter focuses on a particular phase of this transition: the ouster of the LDP from government and its replacement by a seven-party coalition led by the charismatic prime minister Morihiro Hosokawa; the unraveling of this coalition that nonetheless achieved to pass an important electoral reform; the LDP's return to power in a coalition led first by the Socialist Party's chairman Tomiichi Murayama, then by former MITI minister Ryutaro Hashimoto; the disappointing results of the 1998 upper-house election and the appointment of Keizo Obuchi over Junichiro Koizumi as party chairman and head of government.

The result of these changes and reorganization was immobilism and confusion precisely at a time when Japan needed policy change and strategic direction in order to deal with an ailing economy. Despite the rhetoric on the need for political reform, administrative restructuring and deregulation, Curtis shows that the Japanese public felt ambivalent toward undoing the system that brought Japan its postwar success, and that the authorities delivered relatively little in terms of real departures from the past. He also castigates the Japanese's infatuation with the idea that the two-party system of Westminster democracy would magically cure Japanese politics from all its ills, arguing instead that the "rice-roots" quality of Japanese democracy is its strength rather than its weakness.

Distinctly Japanese political institutions are introduced throughout the text. The zokugiin is a Diet member who concentrates on a single issue, developing expertise and influence through his contacts with the bureaucracy and special interest representatives. The habatsu is a faction within the LDP bound together by ties of personal allegiance more than doctrinal content. The most powerful faction usually leaves the position of party president (and thus prime minister) to someone from another faction, while exercising power from the shadow through control of the post of party secretary-general and through controlling the composition of the prime minister's cabinet. The all-important secretary-general has final say on candidate nominations and is in charge of the party's funds, two sources of power that enable him both to do favors and to punish party members.

The kokutai or kokkai taisaku iinkai is a party's Diet-strategy committee that doubles the formal House Management Committee (giin unei iinkai, or giun) and that offers the channel for backroom deals between parties or for informal contacts with the bureaucracy. The innai kaiha is a parliamentary caucus that can be distinct from the political party (or parties) it supports. It came to play a critical role after the collapse of LDP one-party dominance in 1993 as politicians seeked to restructure the party system.

Detailed knowledge of the functioning of these institutions and others is important in order to understand how politicians operate within particular institutional constraints. Politics in Japan makes sense in Japanese terms, and clear reasoning can make sense of Japanese politics.

I have lived in Japan for a few years in the 1990s and have always assumed that (at least for now) the politicians there don't really matter. And compared to American politics, Japanese politics seemed dry with one party rule until 1993. But Curtis shows how exciting it all is under the surface. I read this book very slowly, wanting to absorb every detail; however, Curtis writes well and will keep you moving through the events of the 1990s.

So if you are a student of Japan and are trying to piece together some of the highlights you already know, read this book. Curtis has done us a great service.

As the title of the book suggests, there is a logic to Japanese politics, just as there is a logic, a coherence, to other social phenomena and behavior. This will no doubt disturb those students of the Asian "mind" who are prone to boil down Japanese "national character" to some sort of ahistorical essence. As Professor Curtis says, he hopes he "will leave the reader with a sense of the culture of Japanese politics. It is not a book that argues that culture explains Japanese politics." This is revisionism operating in a healthy sense. There are a couple of specific points I would like to make. In dissecting electoral reform, he does not mention recent play given to direct election of the prime minister, an idea first raised by Nakasone in the 1960s. Of course, the conservatives are betting this would benefit the election of a strong right-wing leader in the mold of Shintaro Ishihara, the present governor of Tokyo. Secondly, in speculating on the direction Japanese politics may take, he mentions only briefly what he terms the New Right and the implications for U.S.-Japan relations. The drift to the right in Japanese politics is unmistakable, which in its worst form would lead to remilitarization and indeed pose a problem for Far East security. Already, the national anthem and national flag, replete with their war-time associations, have been officially recognized. This past February both the upper and lower houses of the Diet formed committees to study revising the Constitution. The New Right, or neo-nationalists, if you will, see this as an opening for revising Article 9, the anti-war article. Just one small error to point out in a name: read Taku Yamasaki vice Yamazaki. All in all, this is a tremdously valuable study.

I stumbled upon this book when I was visiting Mt. Vernon for the first time a few years ago. It looked so interesting I had to purchase it. Even though this is a cookbook, it's very unique with a lot of additional material that explains cooking and the recipes from the time period that the book was written. I'm more of a history buff than a cook, but I really, really enjoyed it.

This is the historical food researcher's answer to Oprah's "AHH HAA" moments in your life! Sit back and let MS. Hess fill you full of delight as you find out exactly where and how gingerbread got its beginnings and why do we call turkey, well, turkey. The amount of historic research and information is a true goldmine for one serious in their food history or for the novice who would just love to know where all our food preferences comes from. I am a teacher of historic foodways and tell each and every one of my students to start here first! You won't be disapointed.

This book is a jewel. Being a 16th-17th century reenactor, I would not have thought that Martha Washington's cookbook would have become such a favorite of mine. The annotations by Karen Hess make it invaluable to anyone interested in historical cookery from the Elizabethan age onwards, and it is a darned good read, informative and fun even if you aren't. This is the book I will give someone who thinks they might possibly be vaguely interested in historical cookery and would like to learn more. It is very well-researched and there is something to learn on every page. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

This book blew me away. Fearless poetry.....that's all I can say. These poems are utterly proud, audacious, textured, & profound. If you are a lover of poetry, you will not be disappointed.

Some of the poetry in this volume are works that western readers would never have the privelege of reading and would have been otherwise deprived of the beauty of this work. A sensitive translation that involved each poet. Discover the voices of arab poets in this volume.

According to Jayyusi view, the cultural bias favoring the group over the individual remains constant, with the poet seen as "a worker producing for the group" with the poetic "product" limited by what the group can accept and utilize. Jayyusi believes poetry is thus driven by a social functionalism expressed in two main directions "one ideological of religious origin and the other musical, in the form of singing and tarab."

In other words, poetry must serve a cause, and ideology in the first case, while in the second, and in fact the more keenly felt and popularly enjoyed function, the purpose is sheer pleasure and jubilation. Ideally, the two functions concur--this is the goal of such a poetry.

Jayyusi emphasizes that "tarab," i.e. singing, remains fundamental, indeed intrinsic to Arabic poetry past and present. Poetic verse is always subject to this standard. "Don't we notice that the Holy Koran today, for example, is a matter of audition or tarab for most Muslims more than a matter of reading, and comprehension and contemplation," Adonis writes.

Jayyusi points out that the two elements, "song" and "function (the serving of a cause)" are so fundamental that any poetic expression not embracing them is culturally relegated to the status of "philosophy," something deemed complex and remote from the people. Thus, unrhymed, non-musical poetry, poetry based on "contemplation and examination of inner worlds" lies so outside Arabic poetic taste as to be utterly marginalized, removed from any but a tiny, refined audience.

Jayyusi sees a conflict between this cultural reality and his own conviction that poetry must challenge boundaries and establish new aesthetics. This poetic effort means embracing rather than spurning the difficulty and ambiguity of meaning. "The problem in this context, lies in the refusal of Arabic poetic taste to place poetry at par with the great cognitive and discovery intuitions."

As Jayyusi points out, poetry continues to be judged by the causes and concerns it champions, and by the author's affiliations and ideologies. "Original readings concern themselves not with the essence of poetry but with its 'soil' and the 'climate' in which it is produced."

This phenomenon, according to Adonis, will only be reinforced by society's increasing domination by the non-literate media, TV in particular. Thus, modern communications technology only serves the religious and social traditions already so profoundly established. This leads Adonis to an equally profound pessimism regarding the present and future chances of Arabic poetry to escape its traditional limitations.