Society Books

Quite an interesting read. Laurel presents her experiences into the technological world in an easy to understand, stream-of-consciousness way. She details her journey into starting a company that focuses on girl-based computer games, Purple Moon's success and eventual demise due to "outside-the-box" thinking.

Utopian Entrepreneur is both intectually and visually stimulating reading. The M.I.T. Press has paired up an author with a designer, in this case Brenda Laurel and Denise Gonzales Crisp, to create what they like to call a pamphlet. This is the first in the Mediawork Pamphlet series, which will focus on differenct aspects of our society and how technology is effecting them. Two more have been published since this one in 2001.

I don't work in the tech industry but a friend of mine referred this book to me. Laurel's message is significant to anyone interested in the betterment of planet earth. In a scant 100 pages she speaks volumes to those up against the wall that divides commercialism and art.

Like Nathan, I also know Brenda well, so my endorsement has a bias--but so does everything I say. This is one of the most enjoyable *business* books I've ever read. Not because it's short. Not because it's extremely well-written. But because it's honest, it's real and it's heartfelt. Brenda's not the type to populate her pages with catchy slogans and new paradigm models. Instead, she shares what it feels like to be an entrepreneur trying to do the right thing and make money at it. Her voice is humble, her perspective is fresh and funny, and her message is well worth considering.

First off, I'll cop to knowing Brenda Laurel, but I don't feel obligated to review this book because of it. I read the manuscript many months ago and was moved by Brenda's ablity to describe her personal experiences in a way for everyone to both enjoy and learn from. It's not a long book and it will definately leave you wanting more--not because there's not enough there but because what is there is so nice to read.

I think most of us in the tech industries--especially designers--often have conflicts about what kind of work we do vs. what kind we WISH we could do. Brenda's book is optimistic, funny, touching, and enraging at times because she describes her experiences navigating these conflicting forces. What happened to Purple Moon was a travesty and anyone who envisions building a company with any social goals in addition to making money should treat this as an important piece of research.

Note -- i tried to change this to 5 stars, because 2 years later, i still draw quite a bit from this book. the system doesn't seem to want me to change it though.

At its heart, Utopian Entrepreneur is a Purple Moon post-mortem -- what can be learned from the life and death of Rockett Movado, the spunky heroine of the Purple Moon games. Born from concerns about the technological gender gap, Purple Moon sought to build a suite of games based on solid research. Why didn't more girls play games? What are the differences in how girls and boys approach digital media? How might designers create interactive digital entertainment that would appeal to girls? Purple Moon spent months on these questions, interviewing and surveying thousands of girls. Educators, game designers, media theorists, gender scholars, or anyone looking for a good cocktail party quote will find some of these facts fascinating. Girls don't mind violence as much as a lack of good stories and characters; girls are more likely to blame themselves for computer failure than boys are. Good, useful stuff.





(...)this little gem is a bargain. As the initial book in MIT's new Mediawork pamplet series - "zines for grownups", Utopian Enterpreneur offers concise prose, compact design, and short segments that make it perfect reading for between meetings or waiting at the airport. The unique layout helps break up the text and enrich the reading experience. Pulling off such a personal book is not easy, and the graphic design definitely contributes to the book's success. At times though, the interplay among images, space, and type feels superfluous failing to add nuance or underscore the meaning of the text.



Checking it at just around 100 pages, Utopian Entrepreneur is so readable and engaging, that I only wished Laurel had more space to share more of her experiences at Purple Moon and lessons learned from the past twenty years in software design. Whether it's expanding this book, starting a new company, or helping invent a new digital industry, I, for one, am eager to see what she does next.

As I write this review on the quiet week between Christmas and New Year's Eve, the headlines and news reports are filled with the story of a software tester at an Internet consulting company who wrought an angry vengeance at his former employee by killing seven co-workers. This shocking tragedy has become numbingly familiar to Americans living in a society saturated with violence. This incident underscores the importance and relevance of Dr. Carll's book.

Dr. Carll incorporates valuable contributions from professionals in various fields including mental health, law, business and criminal justice. The book discusses the ways in which violence occurs in the workplace, home and community, and provides a lot of practical approaches for tackling the problem. For example, Dr. Carll offers quick, effective interventions for individuals who have encountered a traumatic violent incident in the workplace. This includes the use of "critical incident stress debriefings" which are confidential structured group meetings that allow individuals to ventilate their emotions and reactions to the traumatic incident they experienced.

In the chapter on Workplace and Community Violence: Intervention and Prevention, Dr. Carll shows how despite increased public awareness, employers continue to neglect the impact of domestic violence on the workplace. She therefore proposes a comprehensive workplace domestic violence program that is particularly sensitive to the needs and concerns of domestic violence victims.

This book is thoughtful, well organized and detailed while still being accessible and very readable. I highly recommend it not only to clinicians, but to anyone seriously interested in understanding and addressing the problem of violence in American society.

The invaluable and most comprehensive information in this book strongly impels anyone who reads it to become proactive toward attempting to curtail, if not eliminate, the violence that exists in society today. The author discusses the various forms of violence we are presently facing, including workplace and community violence, domestic and intimate relationship violence, media depiction and coverage of violence, and the secondary effects of crime and violence in the course of civic duty, targeting juror stress. What I find to be most unique in this book is the author's recommendations and practical solutions. They are not "pie in the sky," rather, realistic, sensible and attainable. Each one of us must contribute by first reading this book and passing it on to another, then making a visible, concrete effort to help alleviate the violence that does 'not' have to exist in our society today.

Dr. Carll provides a highly readable, and yet scientifically accurate strategy for systematically addressing the major public health hazard facing our nation today--violence. An internationally renowned expert, she possesses considerable "hands on" experience in effectively assisting victims of violence, in its many forms. Her highly practical reflections should be of considerable interest to concerned professionals and our citizenry alike. Her underlying message: As a nation, we need no longer be passive victims of acts of violence, interpersonal or environmental. We really do know how to make a difference.

The invaluable and most comprehensive information in this book strongly impels anyone who reads it to become proactive toward attempting to curtail, if not eliminate, the violence that exists in society today. The author discusses the various forms of violence we are presently facing, including workplace and community violence, domestic and intimate relationship violence, media depiction and coverage violence, including the impact on the family and community, and the secondary effects of crime and violence in the course of civic duty, targeting juror stress. What I find to be most unique in this book is the author's recommendations and practical solutions. They are not "pie in the sky," rather, realistic, sensible and attainable. Each one of us must contribute by first reading this book and passing it on to another, then making a visible, concrete effort to help alleviate the violence that does 'not' have to exist in our society today.

Unlike most other material written about violence, Elizabeth Carll gives a vivid description of the diverse forms of violence that exist in our society today, including family violence, violence in the workplace, random acts of violence in communities, and also media violence, and, in addition, offers practical recommendations aimed at eradicating existing violence and preventing reoccurrence. The techniques offered for professionals in mental health, the law and business are invaluable in that they are explicit as to means of prevention and, if needed, interventions that can be utilized including using more thorough pre-screening of employees, and conducting training seminars on recognizing and dealing with workplace violence. If crisis does occur, critical incident stress intervention (CISI), which encompasses immediate services as well as short and longer-term follow up as needed, is suggested. CISI is also expecially useful in the prevention of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (symptons such as re-experiencing a traumatic event through recurrent and intrusive memories/dreams, increased arousal manifested by sleep disturbances, temper outbursts, concentration difficulties, and exagggerated startle responses). In this book, the author creates an awareness of the extreme prevalence of family violence, especially violence against women, and the deleterious effects it has on children, including acceptance of violence as a normal response to frustrating situations, which may leave them at a high risk for eventually committing violent acts, themselves. Carll also devotes a chapter to covering media violence, including the media minimizing violence against women, displaying explicit sexual violence, and using violence as a form of entertainment. The long-term effects include desensitization to violence and suffering, learning aggressive behavior and becoming fearful of being victimized, many times resulting in increased distrust of others. The profile presented for identifying the potentially violent personality, highlighting characteristics such as having a history of aggressive behavior/continually blaming others for problems, an unwillingness to take responsibility for one's own actions, and social isolation leave all individuals without excuse for becoming more vigilant in our everyday lives in recognizing the warning signs and possibly warding off danger. Elizabeth Carll gives a comprehensive account of the various forms of violence that exist in our society today, and also strategic methods to identify, minimize, and eventually eliminate them, therefore, fostering renewed hope in an otherwise hopeless society.

Come on now, the title of the earlier review tells it all, except that Donald Theall isn't the one involved in the academic infighting.

It is also factually incorrect, since the entire sweep of McLuhan's work is more than amply covered in Theall's excellent biography.

As McLuhan's first PhD student Theall (along with McLuhan's first "partner" Ted Carpenter) presents a careful and nuanced perspective on the life and influences of McLuhan -- a rarity in a world where McLuhan has been used for everything short of selling pipe tobacco.

Let those who were outside McLuhan's life fight over him, Theall (and Carpenter) are clearly insiders and they give us the sharpest insight yet into the life of this towering intellect.

Biographies and accounts of the famous possess a certain fascination. Sometimes even flashes of illumination. But most are based on second-hand knowledge of authors attracted to the famous after attainment of fame. This is often too late because fame has a way of creating a type of trickster mythology obscuring its subject.

A rare few biographies are written by those who had close friendships with the famous before the hazy mythology of fame enveloped their subject. Here are the famous before they were "hijacked" and packaged by icon-making PR handlers, before their entrance onto world stages or tabloid pages. Reading these accounts is somewhat like watching scratchy old home movies that peek into the shadowy early years before later lives were illuminated by the bright flashes of the paparazzi cameras. These stories are often the most interesting, the most enlightening, the most instructive, and too, the most paradoxical and ambiguous.

These thoughts come to mind in reading the brilliant and fascinating book The Virtual Marshall McLuhan by Donald Theall professor emeritus, former president of Trent University and author of The Medium Is the Rear View Mirror. In the thick mythological haze which particularly surrounds the McLuhan legend, it is indeed a rare and insightful friendship.

With this in mind, Theall's book is still a funny hybrid genre not easy to place in traditional categories. Andrew Potter, a reporter for the Canadian National Post says it well in his March 24, 2001 review of the book "Rescuing McLuhan." Potter writes Theall's book "is not a biography of McLuhan, nor is it an application or elaboration of his views. It is perhaps best understood as an exercise in retrieval, an attempt to rescue McLuhan from McLuhanism and McLuhanites, from those who would portray him as the patron saint of the new corporate technotopia as well as from those...who would read him as an early voice in the wilderness, warning of civilization's demise."

* * *

In the summer of 1950, Donald Theall arrived at the University of Toronto as a graduate student. The director of Graduate Studies of the English Department attempted to warn Theall against doing a doctoral degree with an avant-garde, unorthodox professor at the University named Marshall McLuhan.

But Theall was not persuaded and decided to stay in Toronto to study under the iconoclastic professor rather than return to Yale. Theall writes "I felt that between the historically oriented University of Toronto Department of English and the avant-garde McLuhan I was obtaining a badly needed awareness of the study of literature in its historical context as well as within a new, broadly interdisciplinary context."

McLuhan embedded his teaching in literary history but also in the history of grammar, logic, rhetoric, and early theories of education. It was a history of inter-relationships between literature, the arts, and the everyday culture. Certainly a rare combination at the time and one that threatened the rather insular perspective of the English Department at the University of Toronto. When he arrived, McLuhan was the only lay member of the English Department, which primarily consisted of a handful of priests and three nuns.

The Marshall McLuhan that Donald Theall and his new bride Joan met in 1950 was a "charming, good looking, witty, fun-loving, highly intelligent devotee to the world of letters and traditional arts." More significant for what has come to be, notes Theall, McLuhan was a technophobe who often despised technology. In 1950 he did not own an automobile or a vacuum cleaner. And he did not type but used pen and ink and stored his notes in small boxes that had originally contained Laura Secord chocolates.

Toronto in the 50s personified McLuhan's technophobia. It was a boring, forgotten city of three-quarters of a million people. Theall calls it an "overgrown village" adding it was a "somewhat idyllic...still semi-colonial, marginally contemporary city...a sedate, stuffy city where on Sundays the major department store drew curtains across its windows, stores did not sell cigarettes, and people could not have wine or other alcoholic beverages with a restaurant meal ... There was no television; the only radio network, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)...was government owned."

Another close friend and collaborator of McLuhan in Toronto of the 50s was Edmund "Ted" Carpenter. In his short enlightening McLuhan memoir "That Not-So-Silent Sea" in the Appendix of Theall's book, Edmund Carpenter remembers Toronto as a "depressing" place, "not a joyous place at all." It had a meanness which was visible everywhere - in its architecture, its food. McLuhan once described it to Carpenter as the "cringing, flunkey spirit of Canadian culture" and "its servant quarter snobbishness." Leopold Infeld, one of Carpenter's friends, suggested it was "perhaps the finest city in which to die, especially on Sunday afternoon when the transition between life and death would be continuous, painless and scarcely noticeable."

* * *

Theall's book is a master memoir of a time and a person that no other McLuhan biographer can come close to. It is not an easy book and those interested in reading a McLuhan for Dummies are advised to steer clear of this book. But this book is the real thing... Judge for yourself about Donald Theall's book. For myself, it is a masterpiece from the apprentice of the master.

A Review
The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, Donald F. Theall
McGill-Queens University Press, 305 pp.
(with a historical appendix by Edmund Carpenter)

Everything about Marshall McLuhan is paradoxical. He knew this about himself and made much of it as an attention-getting strategy even to the point of appearing to be a trickster, an artist of sorts. Like a Dadaist or Surrealist, who were antagonistic toward middle class society in the avant garde Bohemian tradition of épater-le-bourgeois common to anyone wanting to gain broad attention, McLuhan `twitched the burghers' of establishment values far and wide almost globally. McLuhan noticed first and best how electric process was changing society and individuals.
I know of no one who understands McLuhan's electric and eclectic vision better than Donald Theall. As McLuhan's first and most important Ph.D. student and close associate from 1950-54, Theall was let in on the complex developments that produced the Explorations Group, the Ford Foundation study that led to Understanding Media, and the establishment of Toronto's Centre for Culture and Technology in the early sixties. Theall was privy to the developing relations between Harold Innis, Tom Easterbrook, Edmund Carpenter, Dorothy Lee and the rest of this historically significant association.
A true understanding of the coherence of McLuhan's vision is extremely rare. Theall brilliantly explains McLuhan's , unseemly, popularity with his understanding of the early virtualizing role of the intellectual in the electronic age:

Speaking about some remarks of the classical eighteenth-century father of capitalist economics, Adam Smith, ... McLuhan argues: "in this passage Smith does seem to sense that the new role of the intellectual is to tap the collective consciousness of `the vast multitudes that labour.' That is to say, the intellectual is no longer to direct individual perception and judgment but to explore and to communicate the massive unconscious of collective man. The intellectual is merely cast in the role of a primitive seer, vates or hero incongruously peddling his discoveries in a commercial market. (Theall. 208)

This is an example of the deep understanding that only Theall can bring to McLuhan's work. After McLuhan has described himself, to Ezra Pound, as "an intellectual thug,"

and gives his reason for being satirical and disinterested in society: "Everyman of goodwill is the enemy of society." (McLuhan, 1962, 269) This seems a deeply conservative view of one's fellow citizens - original sin as politics.
Theall sees McLuhan as a new kind of artist, who produces what Theall calls the "essai concrete," a poetic prose that captures the multiplexed meanings of the electric worldview. McLuhan , like Joyce is constantly punning - a strategy for multiplying meanings.. He was never definite or linear like a list of either/or oppositions (even though he was maddeningly dichotomous in some of his statements), so much as dedicated to a both/and approach to events - medium and message together.
Theall, is one of the few who know the deep scholarly background to McLuhan's critique of contemporary culture and he is incisive in his understanding of McLuhan's profound ambivalence in the face of traditional intellectual categories. McLuhan seems neither moralizing conservative nor countercultural guru. Being partly both, he transcended both in his electric odyssey, and toys with post-modernism by becoming beyond himself a virtual icon.
Theall, and very few others, perceives the darker side of McLuhan, his arcane knowledge which derives from his Cambridge Ph.D. studies in the hermetic tradition of the early grammarians - characters from Cicero to Blake through Cornelius Agrippa and Joachim de Floris. The Hermetic implications of the dissertation on Nashe show an earlier interest in such ideas.
In short, I know of no one better able to comment credibly on the multi-faceted genius of McLuhan: the artist, the satirist, the exploring pioneer of the electric world in all its complex diversity and amazing revelations.
Anyone who worked closely with Marshall McLuhan took their intellectual lumps. He was capable of great kindness and generosity but stood adamantly]
against any meddling with his work unless powerful new perceptions were presented to
him. Without mentioning Yeats and his famous reluctance to explain his poems because
("it tends to limit their suggestibility") McLuhan's position is deftly handled by Theall

who worked very closely with the master. "My canvasses are surrealist, and to call them theories is to miss my satirical intent altogether. As you will find in my literary essays, I can write the ordinary kind of prose any time I choose to do so." (Theall, 67)
The quite deliberate difficulties in McLuhan's writing are rooted in his taste for paradox and rhetorical play. The artful ambiguities that arise from this approach Theall is better than anyone to convey. He produces a brilliant insight: "The power of ambiguity to imply more than can be said and the power of juxtaposing items without comment to intensify observation are two strategies McLuhan had learned from Pound, Eliot and F.R. Leavis. (Theall., 68)
Some of Theall's best observations deal with McLuhan's proclivity for an allusive and aphoristic prose style that goes way back and is rooted in classical literature.
His knowledge of the obscurity of surrealism, modernist symbolisme, and high modernist post-symbolism ... reinforced and radicalized lessons he had learned earlier from Francis Bacon's observations about the advantages of a deliberately obscure, parabolic style - what Bacon called crypsis... . (Theall., 68)

The Virtual McLuhan has both scope and depth of understanding from perhaps the one scholar whose knowledge of McLuhan's genius is based on his own and his intimate almost filial relationship with the great men. The chapter "Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Modernism" is a first in bringing the darker McLuhan into fine focus. Fitted out in the robes of precursor it is possible to see McLuhan as Theall presents him as anticipating cyberspace, postmodernism and the Internet. His prescience is well marked and displayed by Donald Theall in this excellent, sine qua non, treatment of McLuhan the man and the multiplex and dynamic ideas which remain alive and are extended beyond the original in Theall's hands.

A Review
The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, Donald F. Theall
McGill-Queens University Press, 305 pp.
(with a historical appendix by Edmund Carpenter)

Everything about Marshall McLuhan is paradoxical. He knew this about himself and made much of it as an attention-getting strategy even to the point of appearing to be a trickster, an artist of sorts. Like a Dadaist or Surrealist, who were antagonistic toward middle class society in the avant garde Bohemian tradition of épater-le-bourgeois, McLuhan `twitched the burghers' of establishment values far and wide almost globally. McLuhan noticed first and best how electric process was changing society and individuals.
I know of no one who understands McLuhan's electric and eclectic vision better than Donald Theall. As McLuhan's first and most important Ph.D. student and close associate from 1950-54, Theall was let in on the complex developments that produced the Explorations Group, the Ford Foundation study that led to Understanding Media, and the establishment of the Centre for Culture and Technology at St.Michael's college in the early sixties. Theall was privy to the developing relations between Harold Innis, Tom Easterbrook, Edmund Carpenter, Dorothy Lee and the rest of this historically significant association.
Many commentators flirt with the ambiguities of McLuhan's vision but a true understanding of the coherence of this vision is extremely rare. Theall brilliantly links McLuhan's , at the time rather unseemly, popularity with his understanding of the very early virtualizing role of the intellectual in the electronic age:

Speaking about some remarks of the classical eighteenth-century father of capitalist economics, Adam Smith, ... McLuhan argues: "in this passage Smith does seem to sense that the new role of the intellectual is to tap the collective consciousness of `the vast multitudes that labour.' That is to say, the intellectual is no longer to direct individual perception and judgment but to explore and to communicate the massive unconscious of collective man. The intellectual is merely cast in the role of a primitive seer, vates or hero incongruously peddling his discoveries in a commercial market. (Theall. 208)

This is an example of the deep understanding that only Theall can bring to McLuhan's work. After McLuhan has described himself, to Ezra Pound, as "an intellectual thug," the prophetic huckster gives his reason for being satiric and disinterested in society: "Everyman of goodwill is the enemy of society." (McLuhan, 1962, 269) This is a deeply conservative view of one's fellow citizens - original sin as politics.
Theall sees McLuhan as a new kind of artist, a sort of poet who produces what Theall calls the "essai concrete," a poetic prose that captures the multiplexed meanings of the electric worldview. McLuhan follows Joyce in his unrelenting punning ambiguities - a strategy for multiplying meanings. There is never anything linear, logical or definite in the "probes" that Dr. McLuhan injects into situations. But it is never a matter of listing either/or oppositions (even though he was maddeningly dichotomous in some of his statements), so much as learning how to follow a both/and approach to events that most interests McLuhan in his Joycean and satiric posture.
Theall, being one of the few people knowledgeable of the deep background of scholarship behind McLuhan's contemporary façade, is incisive in his understanding of McLuhan's profound ambivalence in the face of traditional intellectual categories. McLuhan is neither fish nor fowl, neither moralizing conservative nor countercultural guru. Being partly both, he transcended both in his electric odyssey, and planted the first oar in the side of post-modernism by becoming himself another virtual self.
What is almost always missed except by a very few and Theall foremost, is the perception of the darker side of McLuhan, his arcane knowledge which derives from his Cambridge Ph.D. studies in the hermetic tradition of the early grammarians - characters from Cicero to Blake through Cornelius Agrippa and Joachim de Floris. The Hermetic implications of the dissertation on Nashe show an earlier interest in such ideas.
In short, I know of no one better able to comment credibly on the multi-faceted genius of McLuhan: the artist, the satirist, the exploring pioneer of the electric world in all its complex diversity and amazing revelations.
Anyone who worked closely with Marshall McLuhan took their intellectual lumps. He was capable of great kindness and generosity but stood adamantly against any meddling with his work unless powerful new perceptions were presented to
him. Without mentioning Yeats and his famous reluctance to explain his poems because ("it tends to limit their suggestibility") McLuhan's position is deftly handled by Theall who worked very closely with the master. "My canvasses are surrealist, and to call them theories is to miss my satirical intent altogether. As you will find in my literary essays, I can write the ordinary kind of prose any time I choose to do so." (Theall, 67)
The quite deliberate difficulties in McLuhan's writing are rooted in his taste for paradox and rhetorical play. The artful ambiguities that arise from this approach Theall is better than anyone to convey. He produces a brilliant insight: "The power of ambiguity to imply more than can be said and the power of juxtaposing items without comment to intensify observation are two strategies McLuhan had learned from Pound, Eliot and F.R. Leavis. (Theall., 68)
Some of Theall's best observations deal with McLuhan's proclivity for an allusive and aphoristic prose style that goes way back and is rooted in classical literature. His knowledge of the obscurity of surrealism, modernist symbolisme, and high modernist post-symbolism ... reinforced and radicalized lessons he had learned earlier from Francis Bacon's observations about the advantages of a deliberately obscure, parabolic style - what Bacon called crypsis... . (Theall., 68)

The Virtual McLuhan has both scope and depth of understanding from perhaps the one scholar whose knowledge of McLuhan's genius is based on his own and his intimate almost filial relationship with the great men. The chapter "Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Modernism" is a first in bringing the darker McLuhan into fine focus. Fitted out in the robes of precursor it is possible to see McLuhan as Theall presents him as anticipating cyberspace, postmodernism and the Internet. His prescience is well marked and displayed by Donald Theall in this excellent, sine qua non, treatment of McLuhan the man and the multiplex and dynamic ideas which remain alive and are extended beyond the original in Theall's hands.

Biographies and accounts of the famous possess a certain fascination. Sometimes even flashes of illumination. But most are based on second-hand knowledge of authors attracted to the famous after attainment of fame. This is often too late because fame has a way of creating a type of trickster mythology obscuring its subject.

A rare few biographies are written by those who had close friendships with the famous before the hazy mythology of fame enveloped their subject. Here are the famous before they were "hijacked" and packaged by icon-making PR handlers, before their entrance onto world stages or tabloid pages. Reading these accounts is somewhat like watching scratchy old home movies that peek into the shadowy early years before later lives were illuminated by the bright flashes of the paparazzi cameras. These stories are often the most interesting, the most enlightening, the most instructive, and too, the most paradoxical and ambiguous.

These thoughts come to mind in reading the brilliant and fascinating book The Virtual Marshall McLuhan by Donald Theall professor emeritus, former president of Trent University and author of The Medium Is the Rear View Mirror. In the thick mythological haze which particularly surrounds the McLuhan legend, it is indeed a rare and insightful friendship.

With this in mind, Theall's book is still a funny hybrid genre not easy to place in traditional categories. Andrew Potter, a reporter for the Canadian National Post says it well in his March 24, 2001 review of the book "Rescuing McLuhan." Potter writes Theall's book "is not a biography of McLuhan, nor is it an application or elaboration of his views. It is perhaps best understood as an exercise in retrieval, an attempt to rescue McLuhan from McLuhanism and McLuhanites, from those who would portray him as the patron saint of the new corporate technotopia as well as from those...who would read him as an early voice in the wilderness, warning of civilization's demise."

* * *

In the summer of 1950, Donald Theall arrived at the University of Toronto as a graduate student. The director of Graduate Studies of the English Department attempted to warn Theall against doing a doctoral degree with an avant-garde, unorthodox professor at the University named Marshall McLuhan.

But Theall was not persuaded and decided to stay in Toronto to study under the iconoclastic professor rather than return to Yale. Theall writes "I felt that between the historically oriented University of Toronto Department of English and the avant-garde McLuhan I was obtaining a badly needed awareness of the study of literature in its historical context as well as within a new, broadly interdisciplinary context."

McLuhan embedded his teaching in literary history but also in the history of grammar, logic, rhetoric, and early theories of education. It was a history of inter-relationships between literature, the arts, and the everyday culture. Certainly a rare combination at the time and one that threatened the rather insular perspective of the English Department at the University of Toronto. When he arrived, McLuhan was the only lay member of the English Department, which primarily consisted of a handful of priests and three nuns.

The Marshall McLuhan that Donald Theall and his new bride Joan met in 1950 was a "charming, good looking, witty, fun-loving, highly intelligent devotee to the world of letters and traditional arts." More significant for what has come to be, notes Theall, McLuhan was a technophobe who often despised technology. In 1950 he did not own an automobile or a vacuum cleaner. And he did not type but used pen and ink and stored his notes in small boxes that had originally contained Laura Secord chocolates.

Toronto in the 50s personified McLuhan's technophobia. It was a boring, forgotten city of three-quarters of a million people. Theall calls it an "overgrown village" adding it was a "somewhat idyllic...still semi-colonial, marginally contemporary city...a sedate, stuffy city where on Sundays the major department store drew curtains across its windows, stores did not sell cigarettes, and people could not have wine or other alcoholic beverages with a restaurant meal ... There was no television; the only radio network, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)...was government owned."

Another close friend and collaborator of McLuhan in Toronto of the 50s was Edmund "Ted" Carpenter. In his short enlightening McLuhan memoir "That Not-So-Silent Sea" in the Appendix of Theall's book, Edmund Carpenter remembers Toronto as a "depressing" place, "not a joyous place at all." It had a meanness which was visible everywhere - in its architecture, its food. McLuhan once described it to Carpenter as the "cringing, flunkey spirit of Canadian culture" and "its servant quarter snobbishness." Leopold Infeld, one of Carpenter's friends, suggested it was "perhaps the finest city in which to die, especially on Sunday afternoon when the transition between life and death would be continuous, painless and scarcely noticeable."

* * *

Theall's book is a master memoir of a time and a person that no other McLuhan biographer can come close to. It is not an easy book and those interested in reading a McLuhan for Dummies are advised to steer clear of this book. But this book is the real thing. I wrote a 6,000 word review of the book which was scheduled for publication in a publication that went out of business. I would be happy to send this review to anyone if they simply write me at jfraim@symbolism.org. Judge for yourself about Donald Theall's book. For myself, it is a masterpiece from the apprentice of the master.

First, before anything else, he links us to a character, a man named Bert Smallways, who we will follow and this allows us to see what is happening from the view of a normal man within the book. The first few chapters in fact deal only with Bert, pushing much of the major events into the background, suggested by news headlines that nobody seems to notice.
But when wars come it comes with a bam. The Earth's weapons seem to be bomb carrying airships and gun carrying airplanes.
The airships seem to be the major weapon, becoming the terrors of the sky, huge monster craft that carry death to the cities of Earth.
Why airships? The book was published in 1907. While airplanes were just being invented and designs played with, blimps and dirigibles were already flying about in good numbers. By the time World War One cames about, German airships are bombing London. Airplanes started off during the Great War totally unarmed, used for scouting out enemy movements and checking out the landscape. So, for him to suggest that airships would become the wave of the future in combat is not a great leap of logic.
One scene has German airplanes and airships destroying an American fleet of warships, a chilling vision of things to come.
As each nation designs and builds it own aircraft things get out of hand. While the air fleets can bomb the cities, they can't TAKE them (not being able to carry any troops) and they can't DEFEND them (as they carry many bombs, but few weapons to fight other aircraft), so soon the world is nothing but burnt out buildings and thousands of airships attacking anything on the ground that even LOOKS dangerous.
Will Bert survive? Will he get back to England? Will mankind ever learn to live together?

"The War of the Worlds" wasn't the only masterpiece that H.G. Wells wrote with the words "The War" in the title. "The War in the Air," which came out 10 years later, in 1908, is surely a lesser-known title by this great author, but most certainly, in my humble opinion, a masterpiece nonetheless. In this prophetic book, Wells not only predicts World War I--which wouldn't start for another six years--but also prophesies how the advent of navigable balloons and heavier-than-air flying craft would make that war inevitable. Mind you, this book was written in 1907, only four years after the Wright Brothers' historic flights at Kitty Hawk, and two years BEFORE their airplane design was sold to the U.S. Army for military purposes. In "The War in the Air," Wells also foresees air battles, as well as engagements between naval and aerial armadas. His gift of peering into the future is at times uncanny.
We see this worldwide war through the eyes of Bert Smallways, a not terribly bright Cockney Everyman who is accidentally whisked away in a balloon and lands in Germany right on the eve of that country's departure for war. Bert is brought on board one of the German airships, and so personally witnesses a titanic battle in the North Atlantic; the Battle of New York (in which the length of Broadway is destroyed and many buildings near downtown City Hall Park are levelled, looooong before 9/11); and the huge fight between the German and Asiatic forces over Niagara Falls. And these are just the start of Smallways' adventures. Wells throws quite a bit into this wonderful tale, and the detail, pace and characterizations are all marvelous. But this isn't just an entertaining piece of futuristic fiction; it's a highly moral one as well. The author, in several beautifully written passages, tells us of the terrible waste of war, and the horrors that it always entails. In this aspect, it would seem to be a more important work of fiction than even "The War of the Worlds." While that earlier work might be more seminal, this latter tale certainly raises more pressing issues. And those issues are just as worrisome today as they were nearly a century ago. In his preface to the 1941 edition of this book, Wells wrote: "I told you so. You damned fools..." As well he might! And it would seem that we STILL haven't learned the lessons that Wells tried to teach us so many years ago.
Perhaps, at this point, I should mention that readers of this novel will be faced with many geographical, historical and vocabulary/slang terms that they may not be familiar with. If those readers are like me, they will take the time to research all those obscure terms; it will make for a richer reading experience, as always.
I said before that this novel is a masterpiece, and yet, at the same time, it is not perfect. Wells does make some small booboos in prediction, for example. Zeppelins were not more important than airplanes in war; civilization did not collapse after World War I. He tells us that the distance from Union Square to City Hall Park is under a mile, whereas any New Yorker could tell you that it's more like two. Wells mentions that the Biddle Stairs (which were built in 1827, led from Goat Island to the base of Niagara Falls, and were demolished in 1927) were made of wood, while in fact they were made of metal and encased in a wooden shaft. But these are quibbles, and in no way detract from the quality of the work. Indeed, this is a novel that should be mandatory reading for all politicians, not to mention all thinking adults.

H.G. Wells-what a genius. He foresaw the future better than any supposed "psychic." This novel, little known but available again, is the proof.

In the early 20th century, the invention of aerial vehicles precipitates the outbreak of a worldwide war that had brewed for hundreds of years. The aircrafts' ability to wreck unlimited destruction lays waste to civilization, reducing it to pre-Industrial revolution levels. That is the basis of this incredible piece of political and scientific prophesy. Wells unleashes his full understanding of human "progress" and the fraility of political systems, and with every page hits truths about war and technology even more applicable today than during World War I, the combat that Wells envisioned here. He even saw 9/11 and the Iraq War, pegging Western European complaceny so accurately that I felt my jaw drop to the floor on a few occasions.

Honestly, this H. G. guy was one in a billion. He was utterly, incalculably brilliant. He was also a helluva writer, expressing ideas with flashes of humor, irony, and passion. Wells uses a countryside Englishman as witness to the fall of civilization, and manages to effortlessly switch between the epic canvas of war and the cameo portrait of a normal man seeing everything he ever understood about the world fray apart before his eyes.

In a terrific last stroke, Wells writes the final chapter that sums up the possibility that "progess" may be an illusion. This novel deserves to be considered amongst Wells finest, and this new edition with Duncan's insightful introduction, may be the firest step in getting it the wide audience it deserves.

Written in 1908, Wells predicted warfare as we know it now. He foresaw pushbutton wars, "cold-blooded slaughters ... in which men who were neither excited nor ... in any danger, poured death and destruction on homes and crowds..." Paradoxically, Wells also predicted it to be "a universal guerilla war, a war involving civilians and homes and all the apparatus of social life." He predicted weapons "ineffectual for any large expedition or conclusive attack, [but] horribly convenient for guerilla warfare, rapidly and cheaply made, easily used, easily hidden." Specifics of the story needed to be credible to Wells's 1908 reader, but major points could have been drawn from today's headlines.

Wells's war encircled the globe, years before WWI showed how widespread a war could become. Rather than narrate global destruction, though, Wells told his story through the viewpoint of Bert Smallways, an everyman of modest means, achievement, and intellect. In fact, Bert's only real skill was a knack for being in the wrong place when world-shattering events came to pass. Starting from his bicycle shop in England, Bert's involuntary travels made him witness to the destruction of whole blocks and rows of blocks in New York City, then to the rise of Eastern armies that over-ran the Western world. Then, somehow, he made it back to his sleepy village to settle into a post-war agrarian life without technology - easy enough, since the village had slept through the technology of the time anyway.

Despite the zeppelins used as warcraft, Wells's forecasts hit the bullseye of many targets. He predicted the worldwide caches of hidden weaponry, not too far from what we saw in the Cold War. He also predicted the bafflement of the common civilian, who really just wanted to settle down with a spouse, a house, and food on the table. Headlines aside, that's still the case today.

-- wiredweird

Bert Smallways is a rather backward sort, trying (but not too hard) to make a living in England, and watching the advance of technology. But, technology is moving on in directions that he might never have guessed. With the advent of the airship, a secret arms race has broken out among the world's powers, and a new type of war is about to break out.

When Bert is accidentally scooped up by a German fleet, on its way to launch a surprise attack on the United states, he finds himself with a front row seat to the greatest war that has ever been - the war in the air! This new war is to be a different sort of war than all the wars that came before it, unprecedented in its ferocity and destructiveness. When everything can be smashed, what will be left? A good deal less than you might hope.

This now largely forgotten work was written by H.G. Wells (1866-1946) in 1907, and is a masterpiece of forward thinking. While Wells missed the true course of the development of military aviation, his grasp of what a major war, involving fleets of aircraft, would mean was spot on. In fact, this book is quite spooky in its prediction of the destruction of cities and modern infrastructure, and in its portrayal of fleets of warships destroyed from the air! As a prediction of the future, this book is nothing short of amazing.

Well, if the book is so good, why is it now forgotten? In fact, while Wells' portrayal of aerial warfare is right on target, the book, as a novel, is not as good as it should be. The story starts out quite slowly, wasting too much time on the development of the character of Bert Smallways. And, there are many places throughout the narrative where the book could have benefited from some pruning and tightening of the narrative.

So, if you are a fan of H.G. Wells, or are interested in how correct a man of 1907 could have been about modern warfare, then this is the book for you. However, if you are looking for a good science-fiction story, you might be disappointed. Overall, I found this to be an interesting story, one that I am glad that I read. It's almost frightening how close to reality Mr. Wells was. I just wish that he had had a better editor.

I was completely amazed at this book. Robert Wolff beautifully illustrates the reality that has only been presented as fiction in books like "Mutant Message Down Under" by Marlo Morgan, and idealized for the future in Daniel Quinn's "Ishmael" series. It gives one hope to know that not all humans live out of harmony with their surroundings, and indeed, each other. I was impressed by his candid portrayals of the various adventures he has had, and the honesty with which he presents his misconceptions, mistakes, and cultural blunders. It makes me hope that one day, books from great minds such as his will be included in high-school required reading curriculums, so that maybe a new great thinker will learn from the past, and give us hope for the future.

If you are interested in learning more about primitive societies prior to civilization, thinking outside the box of western or eastern culture, observing civilization from a unique perspective, this book is for you. As an empathetic anthropologist, Robert Wolff was open-minded enough to really observe and listen to the people he was employed to "help" rather than impose his societies' values on them. He tells their story, and in so doing creates a window to a life style and a society that, otherwise, would have vanished without notice. I once posessed 15 copies of this book, all of which have likewise vanished to friends' libraries.

If you are interested in learning more about primitive societies prior to civilization, thinking outside the box of western or eastern culture, observing civilization from a unique perspective, this book is for you. As an empathetic anthropologist, Robert Wolff was open-minded enough to really observe and listen to the people he was employed to "help" rather than impose his societies' values on them. He tells their story, and in so doing creates a window to a life style and a society that, otherwise, would have vanished without notice. I once posessed 15 copies of this book, all of which have since vanished to friends' libraries.

If this book was a drug the FDA would make it Class 3. It is that powerful and will have that strong an effect on your life.

While it is described as account of a Malaysia tribe, it is, more importantly, a window into another way of thinking about WHAT IT IS TO BE HUMAN. That is also the name the book was originally given by it's author. Robert Wolff opens our eyes to see and think about possibilities for being human that our western world's schools and media do not teach, do not suggest.

Every person I know who has read this books says it changes the way they walk through the world, the way they see, the way they know.

It discusses ideas that impinge upon parapsychology, shamanism, Carlos Castaneda's works, intuition, healing...

The book is a precious gift that will make you feel joy and sadness-- joy from knowing the possibilities of being human, and the beauty of the Sng'oi, sadness, because the Sng'oi were reported to be "absorbed" by the Malaysian culture several years ago. They are gone.

Read the book and see if you can find a way to begin seeing as they did, and find a part of them in your heart.

The book has been re-issued under the title Original Wisdom, so it is readily available without a wait.

This book is an autobiographical account of psychologist Robert Wolff's time among indigenous/aboriginal people, mostly in Malaysia. It's rich, exciting, fascinating, insightful, thoughtful, and an incredible exposure for those of us in the "modern" world to what life was like for our ancestors of the past 100,000 years and what life is today for those still-extant tribal people. This book, and Peter Farb's "Man's Rise to Civilization" are *the* two classics in this field.

Manly P. Hall gives all students and initiates the essential knowledge of proceeding on the path of the Ancient Wisdom (and the Mystery Schools). Further recommended reading are the books- "ZELATOR"; "KYBALLION"; "The Initiation of the World"; and all the books of Rudolph Steiner and Alice Bailey. Those wishing to advance can also join the Rosicrucians (AMORC).

In the age when the number of false prophets grows like mushrooms after rain, this book will help an aspirant avoid the many pitfalls that are thrown under his feet. Painfully honest and to the point, this book gives best advice to those who aspire to become students, disciples, or some day adepts of the BL - no, ambition will not get you there. Those who have sight will see the wisdom, which they need to have to qualify for the entrance into the Eternal. The ABC of occult studies; a book which will be my permanent companion. My most sincere gratitude goes to Mr. Hall for living such priceless jewel for future generations.

This is the shortest introduction to the depths of esoteric knowledge you will ever find. If you are on the Path, you will feel like it was written just for you. If you aren't, don't even bother.

The pursuit of knowledge, the practice of service to one's fellows, hardship and suffering and ultimately, a true comprehension and temperance of our lower natures, all combine to lead us to a better understanding of our existence. In this curious and important essay, Hall describes the shared destinies of all of us; and that is our pursuit of truth and our conscious or unconscious hunger for a meaningful relationship with the Divine. He warns and laments about our modern tendencies to material gain and instant gratification in all things worldly. Over time, he suggests, the methods used in attaining material gratification has translated into our spiritual endeavours. One cannot deny the plethora of `expert' advise out there, presenting in many guises, to attain Wisdom in "ten easy steps". Become an all-powerful, influential guru and mammoth success, getting rich in the process. For a substantial fee, ladies and gentleman, we can show you the secrets of the ancients and throw in a no-fail diet to boot. This, of course, is not the road to Wisdom. The true road, Hall suggests, is a long and arduous one, fraught with suffering and difficult lessons, where one's hope lies in one's sincere labour, courage, true aspiration and egoless silence.

This short essay is recommended to anyone interested in sound and universal advice in their pursuit of a greater understanding of themselves and existence.

In this short work by Manly Hall, he digresses into the little known subject of how the ancient masters of the mystery schools go about teaching their students. Much has changed in the way of secret societies since the days of Plato and Pythagoras, however, the principles are generally the same. Silence is still of utmost importance. In the times of Pythagoras, silence was not only a virtue, but something your life depended upon. Today, you will not get crucified or burned at the stake for revealing secrets from a society, however, your integrity and Will are disseminated. Silence today stands as a virtue more than anything, but one that most people neglect. This short book also looks into the practices of the Student, Disciple and Initiate, as the basic three grades of the practitioner once they have entered a mystery school. Even today all of these attitudes that Hall speaks about have complete practicality in today's culture. It is less about environment and more about the demeanor of the practitioner. If one does not take in all of the ideas represented in this book, surely one or two of them will cling to the readers mind as not only possible, but inspirational. For those that have been practicing the secret arts for a period of time, this book may serve as a good reminder of why they are doing what they do to begin with.

This book surpassed my expectations! It could be seen as a documentary but transcends being pigeonholed in that way. It is, among other things, a breathtaking work of Art. The images have a crisp presence; at the same time there is a dreamlike undercurrent. The reproduction quality of the images is superb; they can hardly be distinguished from original silver prints! I also like the humble attitude of the Artist towards the people he portrays. Indeed, a masterpiece!

This book brought back vivid and fond memories of the time I lived in Papua New Guinea in 1960 -1962. The use of black and white photography was especially effective in capturing the essense of simplicity that represents the people. If you truly wish to see human spirit at it's best, visit New Guinea. If you can't - buy this book!

This remarkable book first caught my attention at the Australian Museum in Sydney one hot summer day. I was preparing my own expedition to Papua New Guinea in order to write a book on the rarely visited island provinces. I would be doing my own photography. As I leafed through these breathtaking portraits I experienced that shiver at the base of the neck that invariably indicates one is in the presence of great art. Only later came the gut-wrenching realisation that I would never be able to achieve such consummate skill myself (even with my old Nikon F2 and all the best old lenses).
Rainier has a passionate eye for composition, atmosphere and the eloquent possibilities of black and white texture. As you read the detailed and often poetic text accompanying the photographs, you will also find that Chris overcame incredible disasters in conquering this inhospitable environment to bring us these images. In the massive heat and humidity of Papua New Guinea, photographic equipment performs all sorts of horrible tricks at vital moments. Everything seems wet and clammy all the time. His canoe overturned and he lost all his valuable equipment and somehow replaced it to continue his expedition. To even get yourself into the remote areas where some were taken is an achievement in itself and then to emerge from the jungle with high art.......what can one say?
These photographs cross that difficult invisible line that separates art and photography.....very few have the genuis.....Brassai, Cartier Bresson, Eugene Atget and Salgado.....yes, these are Chris Rainier's peers. The images have the immortal immobility of an ancient and inaccessible past recaptured. The quality and sheer size of the prints is superb. All this lead me to convince my publishers to put one of his pictures on the jacket of my own Papua New Guinea book and one of my own more decorative photographs on the back.......a suitable place for this photographic Salieri. Sales are better than expected.
Buy his book as a tribute to a great photographic artist and in the process truly enrich your own cultural horizons.

A stunning exhibiton of humankind. A masterpiece that's worth, without any doubt, spending $40.

Carlos Costa

I was first exposed to Rainer's work in Smithsonian Magazine (Oct. 97). I strongly urge anyone who has a desire to evolve toward embracing and celebrating the essential oneness of all humanity--from urban jungles to remote small-scale societies--to buy this book. As a documentary filmmaker researching shamanic rituals around the planet, I would hire him in a heartbeat to capture the beauty of the world's cultures with his otherworldly gifts of lighting, detail and penetrating the souls of the subject and the viewer. Mr. Rainer, do you shoot 16mm film? If you (or any of your representitives) read this, please contact me at pjoshua@makani.k12.hi.us. Many thanks.

The conservative, european-american movement's declaration of the end of white supremacy in this country requires the kind of challenge offered by "Whitewashing Race". This book offers every fair-minded reader an opportunity to judge the realities that still persist as a consequence of 250 years of chattel slavery, 100 years of complete segregation, lynchings and restrictions on work and educational opportunities. The efforts needed to create a truly non-racialized culture in America are far from over.

It presents information in such a way that you are at the very least, forced to consider what they've presented. As a self-identified "African-American" who considers himself a conservative, I think this book does a great job of presenting the foundation of how the problem of race still exists and presents pragmatic ideas - however controversial - that are far better, in my view, than maintaining the status quo.

If those who on principle oppose these ideas (specifically, the conservatives this book spends a lot of time lambasting) would come out with substantive data to disprove what this book says, the race debate would become a lot clearer and would bring us closer to realizing a better America for all.

For anyone interested in how the politics of race are presented in today's world (affirmative action, prison sentencing, etc.), this book is a definite must-read. The authors analyze the conservative's overly-simplistic view of race as being based simply on whether a person exhibits overt prejudice while ignoring the larger implications of accumulated wealth and advantages enjoyed by whites from years of legal discrimination.

The authors poke holes in much of the misinformation coming from the conservative side of the aisle, and reveal just how sinister and permeating racial bias still is in America. Grab this book, a good cup of coffee, a high-lighter, and become updated on the dynamics of race in 2003 America.

I read this book hoping to find some ideas about the status of race in post civil rights America. Although I found the book helpful and infomative, I do remain highly concerned that the issues the book addresses seem static. The authors do offer a lot of statistics and concise ideas to help understand the problems concerning race in America.

The attack on the racial realists and conservitive views on race really caught my attention. I find the arguements in this book far more convincing. I struggled to articulate how the conditions of American culture create a negative experience for blacks, but this book articulates the message clearly. I find myself reading and hearing arguments about race with a new understanding.

Should one send political scientists to do a historian's job? That is the question one has to ask about this book compiled by a consortium of political scientists, in response to the "racial realism" of today's right-centrist consensus. This consensus, argued by such authors as Jim Sleeper, Tamara Jacoby, John McWhorter, The New Republic and the renowned historians of American immigration Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom, argue that racism is not really a problem in American life. To the extent that African-Americans are disadvantaged it is because of their own failings or, somewhat more tactfully, the failings of the black politicians and the guilty liberals they (overwhelmingly) support.

This book argues that this fundamentally optimistic view is wrong. They are right to say so and their book is very detailed and comprehensive (the Thernstroms in particular are repeatedly criticized). Still the book is not perfect. The book makes an error in numbering its footnotes in chapter five. It also incorrectly says that until recently there were no African-Americans elected from North Carolina since Reconstruction (one in fact was elected in 1898). The style is not very engaging, it consists mostly of summaries of papers in economics, political science, sociology and the other social sciences. The result is a certain dryness and abstract quality that could use more historical analysis (the treatment of unions is somewhat superficial). The discussion of racism is not the most thoughtful available (and little is said about Latinos). Nevertheless one should not ignore its points. "Racial realists" argue that racism is not a problem because only a handful of people would support racist attitudes in opinion polls. There are several problems with this argument. Aside from the fact that people do not necessarily volunteer their support of unpopular ideas, it turns the concept of racism and racist harm into a question of pure malice. If there is none (or if it somehow "rational") there is no racism. One might ask why showing discrimination should require showing malice, when other torts merely require showing negligence? Also it is a non-sequitur to argue that if whites are not malicious, blacks and/or liberals must have screwed up. Moreover, rephrasing the question can lead to rather different results: in a 1980 poll only 5% supported segregation, but only 40% supported a law stating that a homeowner could not refuse to sell because of race. The authors go on about how in the post-war period African-Americans were discriminated in social security legislation, GI bill benefits and housing segregation. We also relearn about the insufficiently notorious effects of urban renewal and automation.

What is best about the book are the statistics it provides showing consistent racial gaps, even when corrected for class, age, income or any other variable. For example 53% of mortgages in black Chicago middle-class neighbourhoods are from sub-prime lenders, whereas only 12% of mortgages in white neighbourhoods are. African-Americans are 25% less likely to get mammograpy screening, notwithstanding age or income, while a 1985 Massachusetts study showed that whites underwent significantly more corony surgery than blacks. 61% of basketball players were black in 1996-97, but 81.5 % of coaches were white; 52% of football players are black but in 2001 nearly 97% of head coaching positions were white. During the 1990s in Los Angeles, Latinos make up 41% of the population, but only 6% of the jurors. It is often said that spiralling illegitimacy is the key reason for persistent black poverty today, but the President's Council of Economic Advisers has noted that the poverty gap would have fallen by only a fifth had there been no changes in black family structure since 1967. Likewise the Thernstroms et al have argued that high black youth unemployment is the result of their demand for excessive wages. Yet studies have shown that their length of employment is not correlated with wage demands. The gap between black and white test scores has infuriated potential university students. But the correlation between scores and success is somewhat weaker for women and Asians. Another questionable use of data by "racial realists" is their concentration of Berkeley in the 1980s. There the white graduation rate within 6 years was 88% but only 59% for blacks. But in 28 other colleges the white average was 86% and the black average 75%. Might this not say more about the problems of particular universities than an inherent cultural failing of African-Americans?

We also learn about a third wave of criminology scholarship and we learn how only 26% of the gap between blacks and whites drug offences in Pennsylvania is the result of the higher arrest rate among blacks. Even after making every allowance Georgia blacks are five times more likely to get life sentences for drug offences than whites. We see at every stage of the arrest process, from scholars such as Madeline Wordes, George Bridges, and Michael Leiber, a clear bias against African-Americans. Although the prospect that somewhere, somehow affirmative action might hurt white men has haunted the conservative imagination, only 4% of 1990-94 sex/age discrimination suits were launched by white men, (yet they file three-quarters of age discrimination suits). Oddly enough, racial realists have blamed blacks for inadequate black representation. Supposedly they won't vote for whites. Yet in the past few decades only 0.5% of white majority districts elections have chosen a black representative. And whites have shown great reluctance or active hostility in voting for blacks in prominent elections in Chicago, Philadelphia and California. The authors conclude with sensible suggestions for reforms in education, stronger civil rights protection and an improved welfare state.

Having been a fan of Ms. Moore's other police procedurals, I snatched up her latest offering hoping for more of the same zany characters, colorful mysteries, and laugh-out-loud humor. I was not disappointed. Not only is Orchid a fast-paced read, Ms. Moore has topped her own previous efforts. I'm looking forward to more from this fantastic author.

After Detective Cezanne Martin solves THE LADY GODIVA MURDER and becomes the new acting-captain of the Fort Worth police homicide unit, she learns she's been put in charge of the newly-formed Cold Case Squad. When she inherits an 8 year old unsolved cold case, she finds herself in a media fishbowl. Not only is the brass trying to run her off, she learns the former investigating officer died while trying to solve the case. When she finds herself immersed in an alternative lifestyle group made up of wealthy, influential people who go to great lengths not to have their identities exposed, she comes face-to-face with the Executioner, leader of THE WILD ORCHID SOCIETY. This is an action-packed, nail-biting, suspense-filled read that will hold your attention way beyond the last page. Authentic situations, exciting dialogue and skillful plotting keep this novel fast-paced. I hope the last line is indicative of another sequel to come in the Cezanne Martin series. Absolutely fascinating to the end.

Having solved the LADY GODIVA MURDER does not liberate Cezanne Martin from being an anathema because of her affair with a married peer. Instead Cezanne is further punished by her relative Deputy Chief Daniel Rosen who announces at a press conference that she is the temporary head of homicide. Rosen informs the media that Cezanne will head up the newly formed Cold Case Squad and promises to solve the eight year old Great Dane Murder in two weeks. Rosen will keep the pressure on Cezanne because he expects her to resign after making the Fort Worth police a laughing stock.

Cezanne refuses to quit though she has just obtained her law degree. Instead she transfers in ostracized cop Klevenhagen because his personnel file is bigger than hers. As she watches a teen with the gift of sight, Cezanne obtains help from the FBI that leads her to digging undercover the Dungeons of Decadence, but soon learns that the Executioner stalks D&D participants seeking sacrifices of the top secret WILD ORCHID SOCIETY. If she is to solve her cold case, Cezanne will need to infiltrate this deadly group and unmask the Executioner. Besides her career in jeopardy, her life could be forfeit too.

The latest Martin police procedural is a fantastic tale that hooks the audience the moment that the reader realizes along with the heroine that she is being set up to fail. The story line moves forward on several fronts that not only never slows down the pace, but also cleverly merges together into a terrific investigative tale. Sub-genre fans will want Moore detective tales from a Five Star author.

Harriet Klausner

Don't let the cover frighten you, well maybe just a little. Ms Moore has given us a protagonist in Cezanne Martin that proves to be human. "Zan" has the depth of character to keep her wits about her through all the challenges anyone could be asked to face. This includes the confidence and determination to venture where her authority as police Captain and even the ability to defend herself or call for back up are taken away from her. We glimpse a part of her humanity that the stern exterior covers well. With her combined strengths and weaknesses, Cezanne perseveres through a high tension and well developed mystery. I didn't figure out, "who done it" until the very last. And that doesn't happen often. Get it. You'll thank me later.

Cezanne Martin returns as the Acting-Captain of Fort Worth Police's homicide unit, and this time, the brass has set her up with a cold case investigation designed to make her fail. The previous investigator died while investigating the Great Dane Murder (not about dogs) and Cezanne finds a connection with an underground organization known as The Wild Orchid Society (not about flowers). Infiltrating the bizarre, alternative lifestyle group could cost more than her job and reputation, if discovered; unmasking The Executioner, ringleader of The Wild Orchid Society, could put her on ice.

The storyline will grab you from the beginning, not to mention it'll keep you in a headlock until you're through.

This is a brilliant, concise gem of a book that brings certain sights of Kyoto to life unlike any travel guide. When I visited many of the places described here, I'd no idea that any of this remarkable history had occurred.

I think this book is an essential addition to any serious Japan library, and as it is a slim text - I think it'd be a welcome and portable companion on a reader's visit to Kyoto.

Keene's study of Ashikaga Yoshimasa, who many historians call the worst shogun in Japanese history, is remarkable for its central theme: that this man was actually one of the greatest Japanese persons ever.

Keene does a decent job of recounting the historical context of Yoshimasa's life: it was an era of unending war and brutality when famine and sickness ravaged the peasantry and rich aristocrats vied for power in the most brutal fashion - beheadings, suicide and betrayal were commonplace. These same aristocrats also lead lives of dissipation - spending their lives drinking and "sporting" while the masses suffered and Kyoto was razed time after time.

But where Keene shows his brilliance is in his interpretation of the life of this failed shogun who embraced religion and the arts as an escape for the 'impure world' and in the process invented many Japanese cultural forms.

When Yoshimasa fumbles the choosing of his successor and a civil war is unleashed, he decides then and there to leave his shogun's life behind and build a mountain retreat - the so called 'silver pavilion' - where he spent his days contemplating the arts.

It is clear that an aesthete such as Yoshimasa was incapable of leading the Japanese nation in war. But Keene shows in this book that Yoshimasa's peculiar taste in art - simple unadorned wood, sliding screen doors, rustic tea utensils, and gardens filled with rare trees and stones, poetry, Chinese calligraphy, flower arrangements, No theatre and so on - served as the template for future Japanese cultural expression.

Yoshimasa's silver pavilion was thus an incubator for 'the soul of Japan,' and a location where visitors can still see the building almost exactly as it looked a half millennium ago. Now I want to visit Kyoto again with newly aware eyes.

This book's only shortcoming is its lack of explanation as to how the culture born at the silver pavilion spread throughout Japan. Yet that might require a lengthy tome, and one of the nice aspects of this history is that it can be read leisurely in a couple of days. It also features some nice color photos. Highly recommended.

This book was given to me by a friend. Frankly, I wouldn't have bought it based on the back flap. Yet, Donald Keene wrote a great book explaining the importance of possibly the worst Shogun in Japanese history, Ashikaga Yoshimasa. He was a terrible military strategist and his government (especially during the Onin war) was one of the weakest in Japan's history. On the other hand, Yoshimasa was of vital importance to the Arts; calligraphy, Waka and other poetry, the cha-no-yu ceremony and painting all were sponsored by Yoshimasa. He also left the beautiful Ginkakuji, the Temple of the Silver Pavilion, for posterity. Yoshimasa's impact on Japanese culture and the arts is undeniable, even in modern day Japan.

Donald Keene, who probably has done more to make Japanese literature understandable to Americans now turns his attention to the state of Japan during the days of Yoshimasa, one of the Ashikaga shoguns. Like other families to rule Japan in the name of the emperor, the founder of the family generally tended to be a fairly dynamic figure, followed by persons of varying competance before sinking into dynastic decadance.

This book presents a portrait of one of the least competant persons to ever become shogun, but managed to have a positive influence just the same. Keene argues rather convincingly that Yoshimasa, though a weak ruler, was an influental patron of the arts. It is Yoshimasa's aesthetic which eventually prevailed in the Japanese imagination and that is the lasting contribution of both him and the Silver Pavilion.

I thought the book was consistent with the overall general high level of scholarship that characterizes Keene's works in general. However, while I am willing to give this work my highest possible recommendation, I am not sure if I can totally support all of the claims made for Yoshimasa. My main concern is that even though I am ready to concede that he does have an aesthetic legacy, I am not sure (and for that matter no one ever really can be) that he can claim to have originated all of the artistic innovations (though patronage) that Keene claims. My reason for doubt is that many buildings that date back to Yoshimasa's period were themselves destroyed during the Onin war (a war brought about by Yoshimasa's politic ineptness). Lacking anything really to compare the Silver Pavilion to, makes it difficult to determine just exactly how great an influence this building actually had at the time. The fact that it survives at all probably ensures that it has had and continues to have an impact on other generations. I am just not sure on what influence it might have had at the time that it was built.

The title of the book is "the soul of Japan" which means the Silver Pavilion built by Ashikaga Yoshimasa the 8th shogun of the Muromachi period.

Chapter 1 Ashikaga Yoshinori the 7th shogun, a tyrant killed by one of daimoys
Chapter 2 Childhood of Yoshimasa, his wife Shigeko and his "favorite mistress" Imamairi
Chapter 3 Weakness of the shogunate, preparation of Onin war
Chapter 4 Onin war, the relationship between Japan and Ming dynasty of China
Chapter 5 Japanese Renaissance, Eastern Mountain culture
Chapter 6 Yoshimasa as a patron of Cha-no-yu, his interest in Chinese painting
Chapter 7 Poetry at that time: renga and waka
Chapter 8 The Silver Pavilion, the garden and the architects Zenami and Soami
Chapter 9 Cha-no yu
Chapter 10 Religions of Yoshimasa, art of the no theater

The division of the chapters and the description of their content are very rough because the author usually puts many different topics in one chapter. This informal writing style seems like that the author has no clear plan and he just writes down something when he remembers something. Reading the book from cover to cover may not be the best way to appreciate it. The character I most like is the index of the book. It is complete and interesting. Just choose a word from the index, and read something about the word in the book. For example you can just read the paragraphs about the eccentric Zen monk Ikkyu and his poems. After you finish all the words in the index, you are able to construct a whole story in your mind. It is the post-modern style of V. Nabokov's novel "Pale Fire".

Judging from the book, the author is just a good story-teller not a good historian. Actually he is good at Japanese literature. This book just contains much facts and details which I don't think important. The author does not see the essence of Japanese culture and does not explain why Japanese culture is special. It is not easy to understand the essence of Japanese culture for most Western scholars. Usually they just emphasize bizarre events, strange imaginations or explain things from the Western piont of view. In my opinion, the soul of Japan is the Bushido and Zen. These two topics are not treated deeply in this book. If you are interted in Japanese culture I will recomment to you the other books:
Bushido: the soul of Japan by Inazo Nitobe
Zen culture by Thomas Hoover
Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn

By the way, I like this little book. It is beautiful with its poetic language. It is a pleasant experience reading the book on the train passing through Appalachia Mountain in the summer.

Donald Keene's latest contribution to the field of Japan studies is a masterpiece on the development of Japanese aesthetics and kokoro (heart, soul, mind), much of which evolved during the Higashiyama Period at the Silver Pavilion (Ginkaku-ji) under the leadership of Ashikaga Yoshimasa. Shogun at the time of Onin War (1467-1477), which destroyed nearly all of Kyoto, Yoshimasa was a hapless leader who devoted himself instead to the pursuit of beauty. In this Period, Noh and ink painting flourished, the tea ceremony "originated in a small room at Ginakaku-ji where Yoshimasa offered tea to his friends," and with it the Japanese art of flower arrangement was born. Keene acknowledges the judgment of most historians-that Yoshimasa was weak, extravagant, incompetent in affairs of state, and unable to end a meaningless war and its incumbent famine and suffering-yet posits that he has yet to be recognized for his contribution to Japanese arts and taste. In the midst of wholesale destruction, Yoshimasa precipitated a Japanese renaissance.
Though respecting his grandfather Yoshimitsu, the builder of the Golden Pavilion (kinkakuji), he had no interest in emulating either his life or works. Yoshimasa's Silver Pavilion stands in stark contrast to his grandfather's Golden Pavilion, the later coated in gold leaf, the former the epitome of Kyoto cool wabi sabi understatement. "The simplicity and reliance on suggestion of the buildings and gardens at Higashiyama may indicate that a man who had earlier exhausted the pleasures of extravagance had at last achieved a kind of enlightenment," writes Keene.
This concise work is a complex web of murder, chaos, and endless war that destroys everything in its wake. And, simultaneously-amazingly, ironically, unbelievably-the Period gave birth to some of Japan's best-known art forms. As an insight into medieval Kyoto, there is no better place to begin.