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Using this book, I had Bookends and Scarborough Fair down in two days!
The only thing preventing me from giving this book a 5 : It had some songs I didn't know, and was missing two songs I really wanted : The Boxer, and Sounds of Silence.
This book has really accurate transcriptions, obviously done by someone who has a personal interest in Paul Simon's guitar playing; it shows in the song selection.
If you don't know how to play Kathy's Song, Overs, Peace Like a River, 59th St Bridge Song, Scarborough Fair, American Tune (and some others), this is a great, great book. You will learn so much from this book. The two part vocal harmonies are transcribed too, for the relevant songs.
I just wish the book could've been longer (keep an eye out for Brad Priddy's web page), but there was enough material in this book to keep me going for at least 9 months.
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Easy to use to look up maker's marks while out antiquing, or at auctions, or what-have-you.
I just wish there was a section of Russian Silversmiths Marks. But other than that... A+!
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THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY was written just before Marx might have been considered the founder of a settled doctrine, but it is full of signs that Marx saw how necessary it was that those who would rule should think like a government, or like a burning bush, and more honest than the law could ever be. Most of the observations in this book are based upon economic considerations. In pure economics, the almighty dollar would be the standard for determining matters of exchange, but this book is in search of a basis for political economics. In opposition to the political economics of Proudhon, which was based on the idea of equality, Marx wrote:
Hypotheses are only made in view of some end. The end proposed to itself in the first place by the social genius which speaks by the mouth of M. Proudhon, was the elimination of that which was evil in each economic category, in order to have only the good. For him good, the supreme good, the true practical end, is equality. And why does the social genius propose equality rather than inequality, fraternity, Catholicism, or any other principle? Because "humanity has realized successively so many particular hypotheses only in view of a superior hypothesis," which is precisely equality. In other words: because equality is the ideal of M. Proudhon. He imagines that the division of labor, credit, the workshop, that all the economic relations have been invented only for the benefit of equality, and nevertheless they have always finished by turning against her. From the fact that the history and the fiction of M. Proudhon contradict each other at every step, he concludes that there is a contradiction. If there is a contradiction it exists only between his fixed idea and the real movement.
Henceforth the good side of an economic relation is that which affirms equality, the bad side is that which denies it and affirms inequality. Every new category is a hypothesis of the social genius to eliminate the inequality engendered by the preceding hypothesis. To sum up, equality is the primitive intention, the mystic tendency, the providential end, that the social genius has before its eyes in turning round and round in the circle of economic contradictions. Providence is also the locomotive which conveys all the economic baggage of M. Proudhon better than his pure and heedless reason. (p. 129)
In the time of Marx, the struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat classes was political, but the almighty dollar has managed to produce a politics which is fundamentally only for those of standing, who have "conflicting, antagonistic interests, inasmuch as they find themselves opposed by each other. This opposition of interests flows from the economic conditions of their bourgeois life." (pp. 133-4). According to Marx, any attempt by a humanitarian school of economics was doomed to have a theory which was actually based "upon interminable distinctions between theory and practice, between principles and results, between the idea and the application, between the content and the form, between the essence and the reality, between right and fact, between the good and evil side." (p. 135) Marx proposes an ability to see beyond this, imagining the power of "the revolutionary subversive side which will overturn the old society." (p. 137). Even without communism, the papers are full of the efforts of the doomed to try this stunt, and of the government to stop them. General Sherman was as American as any economist.
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Also on the sea journey is Rudyard Kipling and his spouse and the wealthy Babson family. When Robert Babson disappears, his father screams murder and has proof to defend his charges. Wentworth and the two great writers begin to investigate the disappearance because they strongly feel that an injustice is about to occur.
THE PRINCE AND THE PROSECUTOR is a great mystery tale that brings to life Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling in one dazzling tale (what more can one ask?). The story line is intriguing and fun and the historical characters and the allusions to the original tale that this story is based on make for a great reading experience. Fans of historical fiction need to read all three "Twain mysteries" because they are intelligent and enjoyable books.
Harriet Klausner
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