This book was recommended to me to read to my children. Personally, I think it will help anyone trying to cope with the loss of a loved one. I have given many copies to adults to help them with their feelings and sorrow. Don't be put off by the sub-title, "When a parent dies", it's for any loss whether parent, child, friend

This is a very important book. In it Dirac reviews his modified Hamiltonian formalism, including constraints, so that systems which do not have a proper hamiltonian can be canonically quantized anyway. For Dirac sustains that one only knows how to quantize a system when it has a Hamiltonian. So, if the system doesn't have one, what is a guy to do? He teaches how to generalize the canonical formalism and construct an effective Hamiltonian which is sufficient to do the job. These ideas gave origin to a flow of papers dealing with the matter, and to several good books. Still, Dirac's original lectures are the best introduction, in my opinion. Not to be confused with the famous "Principles of Quantum Mechanics" , the great expository classic. This book I am reviewing is more of a research document.

This is it, folks -- the point at which classical and modern liberalism began to diverge. Everybody in either camp is indebted, in one way or another, to the great Thomas Hill Green. And sooner or later, everybody in either camp will have to come to terms with him.

Now, in my own not entirely humble opinion, Green's criticisms of other liberal theorists are well-founded and he himself has gotten the philosophical foundations just about exactly right. Basically, his claim is that (my paraphrase) the source of our rights against one another, as well as the source of the state itself, is our possession of an ideal common end in which the well-being of each of us is coherently included.

He develops this account very painstakingly, and one of the joys of reading it is watching him make sense of Rousseau's tortured notion of the "general will." By the time Green is through rescuing this doctrine from Rousseau, it becomes something altogether respectable: that (my paraphrase again) there is an overarching ideal end at which our actions aim, and it is that end which we _would_ have if all of our present aims were thoroughly modified and informed by reflective reason.

I say "_would_ have" with some reservations, since for Green (as for Bosanquet and Blanshard, who followed him here) there is a clear sense in which we _really_ have this ideal end. But this point takes us afield into Green's metaphysics, which are better covered in his _Prolegomena to Ethics_.

As I said, this volume marks the watershed between classical and modern liberalism. Green is often associated with the "modern" side of the divide, but today's reader will be surprised to see just how "classical liberal" Green was (in, e.g., his opposition to paternalistic government and in a good many other respects). Why, heck, there are passages that could have been lifted from David Conway's _Classical Liberalism: The Unvanquished Ideal_.

It does seem, though, that in allowing a positive role for the governmental institutions of a geographically-demarcated State, he has started down the slippery slope to the modern welfare-warfare state. Like Hegel before him and like Bosanquet after him, Green usually means by "state," not the bureaucratic machinery of a territorial government, but the whole of society including _all_ of its "institutions of governance." But -- also like Hegel and Bosanquet -- he does not always keep these two things firmly distinguished, and at times he is clearly thinking specifically of the governmental institutions of a territorial nation-state rather than what some of us would call the "market."

He is also a bit unclear on the ground of "rights." W.D. Ross rightly takes him to task for this in _The Right and the Good_: Green writes on one page that we have _no_ rights until these are recognized by society, and then turns around and writes as though "society" is recognizing rights we _already_ have. To my mind Ross clearly has the better of the argument here, though the problem is not, I think, terribly hard to fix.

On the whole, then, it is probably no wonder that Green and his crowd set into motion -- whether inadvertently or otherwise -- a stream of "liberalism" that would eventually find a far, far larger role for the State than any that Green himself would have approved. But to my mind, these difficulties are removable excrescences, not the heart of his theory. (And it is also worth bearing in mind that Green provides moral grounds for _resisting_ the State: he acknowledges that no actual State is really ideal and, insofar as it falls short of the ideal, should be brought firmly into the service of our common end.)

The theory itself seems to me to be sound. In fact, despite the aforementioned disagreements and several others, I would nominate this volume as perhaps _the_ single greatest work on liberal political theory.

Again, at some point every "liberal" of any stripe will have to come to terms with Green's ideas (perhaps in highly mutated form). And if, with minor tweezing, Green's basic outlook is sound, it also -- suitably adjusted -- forms the proper basis for the classical-liberal commonwealth.

It therefore behooves classical liberals and libertarians to get the word directly from Green himself. Those other "liberals" aren't _entirely_ wrong.

I thought I knew everything imaginable about Led Zeppelin and its bandmembers. Boy, was I wrong! There is great biographical information of each member, and hundreds of pictures that I had never seen before. Quotes from the bandmembers tell the story of Led Zeppelin from 1968 to today, as well as their pre- and post-Zeppelin lives. Kendall's comments are perfect, and he doesn't take away from the power of the photos that grace each page. To any self-proclaimed "Zep fan", this book is a must have!! To those who wish to get to know Led Zeppelin better, this book is a great way to begin. To those of you out there who are as obsessed with Jimmy Page as I am, there are some great pictures of him, and he looks absolutely adorable in every one! His smile makes my heart melt everytime I see it :-)

This was a very enlightning book about the Lees history. Some very fascinating stories about the lees and their roots

This book is a great introduction to the Left Book Club. Its introduction sets out how the Club worked: "members were committed to buying a designated title from his (Gollancz) list every month, for a minimum of six months. The books were often specialy commissioned for the LBC, but were sold to the general public at two or three times the club price of 2s 6d. They were distributed via bookshops and some newsagents. To encourage as many new readers as possible, the monthly choices were supposed to require 'not the slightest knowledge of politics, economics or history for perfect understanding.' Gollancz wanted to create an active political readership,an intellectual popular front."
He got the idea from the Book Society which operated a similar scheme as a conventional business.  (X)

The anthology ranges across political reportage, autobiography, plays, science (eugenics), history and fiction. Everyone will have their favourites. I particularly liked Spanish Testament by Koestler which tells of his imprisonment by Franco forces and Our Street by Jan Petersen which is "an account of left-wing resistance to Nazism in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin". I was also intrigued by extracts from the Left Song Book and would like to have seen more of their Five Famous Rounds with New Words. The extract from Prices Rise (sung to the tune of Three Blind Mice) certainly whetted my appetite :

Prices rise, prices rise
See how they mount,
see how they mount
They've raised the price of your daily bread
And given you cruisers and guns instead
For they know it won't trouble you when your dead
That prices rise  (p.174)

The LBC was a powerful political force; one which always had strong links with the Communist Party. Paul Laity doesn't shy away from this issue. He makes it clear that "One aspect of the selection process was never made explicit - the unwillingness on the part of Gollancz, Strachey and Laski to criticise the Soviet Union and its leadership, or to publish anything which would seriously annoy the Communist Party." (XV) Strachey in particular was keen on Stalin, commenting on the show trials he said there was "no conceivable alternative after the accused had told their stories but to shoot them". (XVII)
Laity concludes that "It's pretty clear now that it came close to being a 'front' organisation."  (XV)

Perhaps it was inevitable that the enthusiasm and idealism of the LBC were accompanied by naivety. With the rise of Fascism in Europe young people had a clear enemy, and looked to Communism as a counter ideology and power. Orwell and other writers, however, were not comfortable with what came to be known as Stalinism.
Paul Laity has done an excellent job of putting the debates and works in a political and historical context.

Members of the LBC believed they could change the world... I hope that people read it now and take some of that with them.

if you've read books by michael raliegh or michael connelly...Check out the PI Series by Mark Renzler, hes the best!

I really like this book, the background of Genesis. I've borrowed it out so many times it looks all rough, it's very popular.

Does anybody really know what mana is? This book confused me about a couple of things but again another well put together bokk.

This book is so original and carefully thought out that it is more like reading philosophy than a book on constitutional theory, except that Kahn is a much better and more lucid writer than most philosophers. (Kahn has an odd habit of writing elusively short sentences, and then piling them on top of one another.) The book is really an intellectual history, showing how each generation of judges in US history has come to grips in different and characteristic ways with the problem of applying the Constitution to new problems. The theme of the book is the illegitimacy of judicial review, and more precisely of the idea that true self-government can be made consistent with constitutional governance, in the US or anywhere else. It is a perfect book for curious, intellectually ambitious lawyers and esp law students to become acquainted with the big questions and big theories in constitutional law (at the end of the book, Kahn critiques all the major theorists). You won't think in the same way about the law after you've finished this book, and it is the one of a handful of law books that does not read like a few law review essays strung together. The book received one or two rave reviews but so far as I know is not read outside the law world (say by intellectual historians).