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Also recommended: 35 Golden Keys to Who You are & Why You are Here; Art of Spiritual Dreaming
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This is why foreigners have saved and planned to come to America.
It's SUCCESS: AMERICAN STYLE.
This is why we have FREE ENTERPRISE here.
It's SUCCESS: AMERICAN STYLE.
This is why Americans are far wealthier than people in any other country. It's SUCCESS: AMERICAN STYLE.
And this book tells me and all of us a lot about Mr. Wade Cook,
SUCESS: AMERICAN STYLE and a very proud American no doubt.
Notice there are no negative reviews here. I guess that tells us a lot about the bashers. I seriously doubt if Wades ever present bashers will ever read this book. Too bad--It's their loss!
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Understanding modernism as the Enlightenment ideals of progress, optimism, rationality and the search for absolute truth and the true self, Ward sees postmodernism as the contemporary antithesis embracing exhaustion, pessimism, irrationality and disillusionment with absolutes. On the surface this comparison may appear to put postmodernism in a negative light, when it has much to commend it.
For example, in architecture (chapter two) the modern perspective was utilitarian. Form had to be functional. The result was inhuman sameness. Postmodern architecture emphasizes form, not function, and borrows/blends architectural themes from various places and times to create an eclectic hodgepodge more representative of human diversity and experience. This democratization of architecture is mimicked in literature and the arts (chapter three) where critics are dethroned as arbiters of taste and culture in favor of mass appeal and acceptance.
Chapter four titled "The Trouble With Reality" is simply marvelous, and sets the tone for the remainder of the book. Postmodernism changes the very essence of reality. Just as quantum physics explains that my desk if more "space" than matter, postmodern thought sees reality in form, not substance. The conviction that "image" must rest upon something "real" is contrary to postmodernism, since image is reality. Television is the primary medium; Jean Baudrillard a primary figure.
Chapter five builds on four with poststructural conceptions of language and meanings. Positing that language is self-referential and, accordingly, never reflective of essential reality, postmodernism replaces the author's intent with the readers' insight; meaning with interpretation; facts with relationships.
In chapters six and seven Ward explains the postmodern reworking of personal identity. Rather than the unveiling of innate essence, the postmodern self is fundamentally social. Constructed, not created, the postmodern self "becomes" through social interactivity. Postmodernism rejects a whole, unified or coherent psyche in preference for a "fleeting, unstable, incomplete and open-ended mess of desires which cannot be fulfilled."
In chapter eight Ward summarizes postmodernism as against depth and essence, totality and universality; but for the superficial and provisional, fragmentation and difference. He concludes with applications of postmodern thought in both science and politics.
Ward does an exceptional job of selecting representative postmodern voices, letting them speak for themselves, and then also giving voice to their critics. This style of writing is a little choppy, but is well worth the added insight it provides.
Now if I can just find a similar book on chaos theory and quantum physics!
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Not since the advent of the long playing record and the publication of Leonard Feather's "Encyclopedia of Jazz" has anyone made such an enormous, substantive, light shedding contribution to Jazz (outside a recording studio.) This book is a must for everyone... and in fact, its divided into two parts... one which *is* for everyone, and goes into how musicians come up, hone their skills, learn to interact, develop and whatnot, and then the second half, which is more for musicians and features close to 400 pages of musical examples - - a text book in musical studies itself.
As a musician myself, I have long suspected that Jazz isn't just a bunch of patterns and scales. It is a culture, an attitude, an approach, and way of thinking... this book not only confirms it, but it substantively will take you into the mind of its foremost vetarans and practitioners. With its balance between information that's anecdotal as well as analytical, and Berliner's excellent writing style (despite the size of the book, he just draws you in the pages flow by one by one) - - this is must reading...
Almost a half a century ago Leonard Feather told us about the masters, now Berliner draws us into their minds. It is my hope that Jazz students (and fans) alike will begin taking up this book as they begin their journeys, and as a result, it invigorates and revitalizes the music as its never been before !
Requires the ability to read music if you want to follow all of the examples, though there is much you can follow otherwise.
One nice feature of the book is the clarity of its organization. The main text is about 500pp long, written in clear, untechnical prose, with only a few illustrating diagrams or musical examples. The majority of the musicial examples are instead placed in a succeeding 250pp section: the high point of this is a series of four _full_ transcriptions of classic jazz recordings. By "full" I don't mean from end-to-end (indeed usually they're only a few choruses): rather, I mean that they are transcriptions of the entire band's activity, not just the soloist's line. The recordings transcribed are: Miles Davis's versions of "Bye Bye Blackbird", "I Thought About You" & "Blues by Five"; & Coltrane's version of "Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise".
As those names suggest, this book's aesthetic range is fairly narrow: basically bop & hard bop, whether filtered through the classicist bop aesthetic of Barry Harris, the pianist-pedagogue who is one of the book's touchstones; or through the neo-conservative aesthetic of Wynton Marsalis. (The book's other real touchstone, though not actually interviewed, is Betty Carter--a large percentage of the musicians interviewed were at one point Carter's sidemen.) The avantgarde, for instance, only gets a few peeks, notably in the figure of Ronald Shannon Jackson...though again, he's more often cited for his work with Betty Carter than with Cecil Taylor or Ornette Coleman! There is one engaging heart-on-sleeve affection here that upsets this neoclassism, though: Berliner is a big fan of Booker Little, & the text & musical examples frequently turn to his work. Nice to see Little get such sustained attention.
The book is written, as I've said, quite clearly: the downside is that it's a little bland & studiedly impersonal. The interviews are also evidently cleaned up a bit: no humming & hawing or grammatical errors, very little slang, no swear words. While jazz musicians are a very articulate bunch, I somehow doubt the original interviews were quite this smooth.
That's really the only criticism I have of the book. It does of course have its limits--one can imagine a very different book might have resulted if musicians like Charlie Haden, Paul Bley, Paul Motian, Bill Frisell or Sam Rivers were interviewed--but is nonetheless about as accurate an account of the informal, often very much heuristic educational process that leads an aspiring musician from his first efforts towards a mastery of the idiom.
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The people who lived through it get to see what the rest of the world saw. A look of what they went through which can help them validate the emotions they are feeling.
The folks that witnessed it from a distance get a closer look of what our fellow americans went through.
All of it is a healing process that we need and looking at it through pictures or written stories of our friends will help us understand our human bond living in this beautiful country.
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everyone and tells them the story - he is a little art history teacher now. needless to say, his mother and i ordered several copies apiece to give as christmas presents. They arrived quickly.
i can't wait for the next one.