Gateway Books

This book, the Savage system by David Chidester highlighting colonialism and comparative religion in Southern Africa has proven the validity of Edward Said's thesis on Orientalism. In his Foucauldian work Orientalism. Said affirms that orientalism is an attempt to understand society group along with its culture in a way they look themselves. In another word, it is looking at society with your own perspectives. (Said, 1979) Unfortunately, as the orientalists were the references of the colonial power, it was one of the tools to hegemonize the power. The colonialists interpret the colonilized people in a way they want to prolong their colonialization. It was the power of knowledge. Once Said says in PBS TV: They (the Western sources) look the Arab, in a way I never understand it was my culture" David Chidister approaches similarly in his determination of comparative religions in Southern Africa in three periods; frontier, imperial, and Apartheid.

The frontier period, is the oldest period of comparative religion on southern Africa. In that, the earliest frontiers described African as people with no religion. no gods no worship, no temple. They similiarized African people with animal uncivilizedThe Imperial period is after the frontier era that is within the earlier days of colonial era. Not so much different from the previous period, the description of African people in this period is negative. African is just above the animal the have only the savage religion. They worship natural stuffs like three, animals, idols, stones, ect.

The apartheid comparative religion, although has been in a modern period, describes the African as just its previous period in which African were uncivilized, no religions and hold primitive religions in which Africans are described as worshipping the moon and the sun.

The three periods as Chidester highlights is in an accordance with his main thesis that comparative religions (religious study?) were very European centric. What was perceived as religion should fit with the European thought of religions. There should be one God, sanctuary, and prophet. Agreed with Foucault approach Chidester reveals this doles not successfully reveals what actually the reality belonged to African.

I think Chidester deserves appraise as he has successfully elaborated the European centric even in the comparative religions. Just as the same phenomena described for the colonized people in Malay and Indonesia or some Middle Eastern countries that Edward Said reveals. No other orientation in that creation except an attempt to marginalize the colonized people and to keep them colonized. It is undeniably true.

The depth of the research done by Mr Fulwiler is outstanding. There are many families in the Buchanan area that are in this book. I originaly purchased this book in a large sale held by the library in Buchanan Virginia back in 1993 and continue to read it occassionaly. Imagine my surprise when I saw my 'Family Tree' all though my mothers name is mis-spelled.

The Gateway Arch has many beautiful pictures. It tells why the arch was invented and whose idea it was to be an arch. This book shows every step of the arch being built and it is a very beautiful sight from the book. I highly recommend this book to others, because it is a very educational book. It gives a very excellent description of the arch.This is my first book about a real place with such beauty and I do believe it is the best educationl book.

A fascinating peek at a very foreign land by a seasoned reporter and illustrator who lived there for a total of eight years.Louise Sheldon grew to know and love Morocco and its people in a way that few journalists or diplomat's wives (and she is both)are permitted or qualified to do. The period between 1975 and 1996 was one of critical importance in the history of the Arab world, and King Hassan II's pro-Western stance encouraged all manner of contacts with Amaricans. This book is the fruit of that policy. she traveled from the circles of wealth and power to the far corners of the country and even into the Western Sahara to witness the fighting between Moroccan forces and the Algerian-backed Polisario. Her eyes saw the big picture and the small with equal clarity and sympathy, and her portraits of the little people, Arab and Berber, ring true. From the hazards of inter-cultural city marriages to the intricate rituals of a Berber wedding in the High Atlas she takes us with her on a voyage of discovery. We envy her, and so will those who share in her adventures by reading this fresh and entertaining account.

This is the type of Book that is hard to write a review about. It is good but is it what YOU need?? I don't know. If you can get it at a good price than it was worth it.

A Clown on the Streets of Jakarta is a collection of stories about Indonesians and about expatriates and tourists whose lives cross theirs.

It is not a great book or a professional resource but the kind of good read that enriches and satisfies us while taking us to humanity that is both different from our own and somehow deeply the same. It is worth more than a shelf of tour guides and a day of cultural lectures.

Mann provides everyday insights into Indonesian culture by taking us into the hearts and minds of the people themselves as they negotiate their lives on stages both large and small. The managing director and the village maid have equally compelling tales to tell, as do the lonely expat and the Australian tourist.

The stories are largely about people acting in and reacting to a breathlessly changing world. It tells of the hopes and aspirations that are fueled by opportunity in Indonesia's bustling capital city as well as the disappointments of fate. It is about ambition and resignation, feelings of progress and despair at disappearance of the familiar customs and landscapes.

There are stories of how men and women relate to each other and the power they exercise over each other. There is irony and pain and loss in the recipe yet reading them is as sweet to the heart as biji salak (sticky rice cake in brown sugar sauce) is to the tongue.

For those who have been to Indonesia or those who would like to go, here is an introduction to the people you will find there and both the simplicity and the complexity of their lives. Should you go there once or again, you too will have a story to write, or at least one to tell. I have one and I will tell you if you ask.

As always, Peter David writes an interesting and sometimes amusing story. Also as (almost) always, he ends with a cliffhanger non-ending, so if you share my distaste for such things, be aware of that before you start. (His background as a comic-book writer is sometimes all too apparent.) On the other hand, in the "Gateways" series, ALL of the stories end that way, so I suppose he isn't entirely to be blamed this time.

One oddity to note: he makes no attempt to place this story outside of his normal numbered New Frontier series, but there is no attempt to inform the reader where in the series this book falls, which makes it awkward for the reader of the series who suddenly finds the ongoing plot to jump between two consecutively numbered books; this book (and the sequel, "Gateways 7") falls between books 11 and 12 of the regular series.

For neophytes to computing, the authors give a gentle introduction to the main popular usages. Nothing too complex. But they show how easy it is to browse the web and to use email. These are still the first two killer apps of the Internet. The emphasis is on "gateway" in the title. Namely that if you have a computer hooked to the Internet, a vast amount of information and interactions become possible. From music to movies to social networking websites and more.

Eleven Gateways To Quantum Spirituality is Leonard Sweet's attempt to connect the United Methodist church with its past that strongly helped spark and shape the two major revivals movements in American history. With this book Sweet is hoping to capture some of that momentum that it has lost over the years by looking to the past. Leonard picks out 11 characteristics or genes that he believes the Church and more specifically the United Methodist Church needs to incorporate if it is to survive and be the kind of church that God called it to be. He incorporates such concepts as using good timing (the timing gene), taking advantage of new technology (the wired gene), and having good faithful music (the music gene). This book is not that much different and contains some same content and ideas as his other books AquaChurch and A Cup of Coffee at the Sweet Soul Cafe which are both better books. Although if you want to brush up on your Methodist history this is the book for you. Although I am strongly Lutheran I enjoyed the book anyway.

The use of the enneagram--that nine-faceted esoteric symbol--as a tool to map personality dynamics carries some interesting and surprisingly complicated cultural baggage. On the one hand, its extraordinary popularity shows the hunger many people have for some easily graspable method of self-understanding; indeed, not since the Sun Sign fad of the 1970s has there been such an iconic typology. On the other hand, the proliferation of popular books which, in their reliance on lists of adjectives and traits, seem to reduce--or encourage the reduction of--this characterology to superficial thumbnail sketches would appear to leave the seeker with very little essential sustenance indeed. After all, simply knowing that one is an ennea-type "Seven" or "Four" doesn't really carry any more depth of insight than knowing that one is an "Aries" or a "Virgo."

The first virtue of this, Claudio Naranjo's seminal work on the ennea-types, is that he understands each type as a consellation of variable traits that have as their common axis a singular, perhaps archetypal trait and which, *as an essential flaw in perception,* transfers its skewed spin to the entire structure. Actually, in this he is not entirely alone among ennea-type authors. What makes Naranjo's book unique is that it isn't focused on the psychological level. The essential flaws aren't just neuroses or quirks of character but "ontic obscurations," fundamental (and deeply entrenched) misperceptions about the nature of one's being. The depth of this phenomenon is futher conveyed through Naranjo's aligning of the nine "fixations" with the seven deadly sins-adding fear and vanity. As Naranjo puts it:

"The central idea underlying this book....is that we are looking for the key....to our ultimate fulfillment in the wrong place, and that this cognitive error is at the source of our dissatisfactions.... Throughout these pages I have called this key "being"....We may say that we are, but we don't have the experience of being; we don't *know* that we are. On the contrary, the closer the scrutiny to which we subject our experience, the more we discover, at its core, a sense of lack, an emptiness, insubstantiality, a lack of selfness or being."

And from this perceived lack of being, Naranjo states, developes the entire structure which the book explores and elaborates on a type by type basis-never straying far from the fundamental connection of each type to "being loss."

Another reason to recommend this book is the sheer concision, clarity and depth of the analyses. Naranjo has a way of homing in on the essential, and evoking the "flavor" of the character under discussion, partly through his own style, and partly by the judicious use of the apt metaphor, allegory (drawing frequently from the body of teaching tales involving the Sufi "Holy Fool" Mullah Nasruddin) and allusions to literature.

Of course, some may find his style to be alternately terse and clinical. In addition, nothing here is sugar-coated, as the earlier quote should help to convey. This is not a New Age exegesis of the higher aspects of our ennea-types; rather, this book explores the fixations at the root of our sufferings-and it isn't pretty. But it would be a mistake to confuse this approach with the excessive preoccupation with pathology prevalent in psychiatric circles: This work hits hard, but it needs to in order to penetrate our defenses, or rather, in order to prompt us to penetrate our own defenses.

One additional theme bears exploring here: The relationship of the ennea-typologies (yes, there is more than one discrete variety) to the venerable Gurdjieff lineage. In fact, this is one more example of the aforementioned cultural "baggage," though of a far more subterranean nature. For the "enneagram of personality" is nothing if not the bête noire of the more conservative factions of the Gurdjieff movement, and although the typical ennea-reaction of these good folks to the mention of the typology is a polite but chilly smile (followed by equally chilly turned shoulder), one can so easily picture them cringing every time Gurdjieff's name is mentioned in the dozens of ennea-type books. Why is this, you may ask?

It is true that Gurdjieff did indeed introduce the *symbol* of the enneagram (speaking of it as a glyph through which great knowledge can be conveyed-an idea to which his sacred dances attest admirably), and furthermore that he spoke of both human "types" and of "personality." But he never countenanced a marraige of "personality" or "types" with the enneagram, and this fact alone seems to be the first obstacle to the acceptance of even the theory of ennea-types within the mainstream Gurdjieff Work. Another related obstacle is perhaps the sheer commercialism-the popular mass appeal-of the enneagram as a typology, which perhaps evokes in some tradition-minded people the sense of the relevance of the esoteric principle which holds that the quality or power of a teaching diminishes inversely the more it grows in quantity. Simply put, in their minds the typology is twice-damned: first, insofar as bears no connection to Gurdjieff, while millions of unwitting people are led by inference to believe it does; and second, insofar as it's a suspicious application, of unknown provenance, which seems to degrade an esoteric tool of great potential.

There are, quite possibly, even more ramifications of this rejection of a powerful tool for most practical ends, but this is not the place to explore it further. Suffice it to say that, 12 years after its release, Ennea-Type Structures still stands as the preeminent book on the "enneagram of personality." It is the ideal ennea-type book for those abovementioned "traditional" folk who are wary of the legitimacy of the application of character study to the enneagram, or for anyone who has simply been put off by the apparent superficiality of so many of the enneagram books filling the marketplace. Ennea-Type Structures stands in relation to most other enneatype books as, say, Reinhold Ebertin's The Combination Of Stellar Influences stands in relation to the "daily horoscope" in the newspaper.