This particular book traces the history of volcano study from rank superstition to the latest in science at the time of the author's death. Numerous passeges from others' writings are set forth as part of a very well conceived and edited text. Numerous color photographs, old etchings, and other photographic and artistic aids augment and explain the fine writing.

Volcano buffs, from the lay reader to the USGS expert, will appreciate and enjoy this book immensely. Be one of them.

It would also be of value for the numerous photographs illustrating the major ship classes, but this is were the problem lies. Some of the photos are incorrectly identified. The photo on p. 159 that is labeled as the USS Conestoga is actually the Tyler. On the following page the photo identified as the Lexington is in reality the Conestoga. Below it is a correctly labeled second photo of the Tyler. I'm not familiar enough with the other ship classes to say if there are additional mistakes, but on the basis of these rather blatant errors I would not want to trust or recommend the book as a pictorial reference.

Mr. Silverstone gives a general description of Civil War ironclads with a few pictures included in the book. The descriptions are the same layout for each ship describing the same characteristics, but if a basic general reference of almost all ironclads used during the civil war is what you are looking for, this is the book.

Griffiths does a good job reviewing the major modern theories of emotion and showing how the least defective of them do explain some of what folk psychology means by « emotion ». But his main thesis is that the latter category has to be rejected because it does not « carve nature at the joints » and actually covers a very heterogeneous collection of psychological phenomena. Griffiths proposes to replace it with several distinct categories like « affect programs », basic, stereotyped, transcultural and even transspecific responses ; more complex emotions that vary across cultures ; « socially sustained pretenses » based on some form of self-deception ; and « moods », a concept he parachutes in the last chapter.

The book contains a few interesting remarks on the nature / nurture dichotomy, explaining how even genetically encoded behaviour is not immune to environmental influences.

The more epistemological chapters, however, are typical of modern philosophy in their embarrassment with reality, their vacuous neologisms and their wonderfully droll verbal contorsions (« My concept of cat is about cats because its existence depends on cats by the particular kind of causal pathway appropriate to being about »). A particularly funny by-product of the absurdities blurted forward by modern philosophers is that commonsense gets to be « discovered » by even hipper philosophers who refer to it with such obscure jargon that you might not even recognize grandpa's down-to-earth wisdom. For instance, « Boyd 1991 » originated the principle of the « metaphysical innocence of theory construction », which tells us among other things that « the decision to classify certain events fifty years ago as child abuse has no effect on those events because no natural causal mechanism can reach them from the present. »

My favorite new concept is that of « causal homeostasis », which Griffiths introduces in an attempt to get rid of reality in his account of natural kinds. A category is said to have causal homeostasis if the correlations it identifies among its referents have « some underlying explanation that makes [the category] projectable », i.e. if the « theoretical significance » of these correlations is such that they can be extrapolated to « unobserved instances ». Apart from the jargon, this is not altogether silly. However, Griffiths uses it to give the concept of essence a « less metaphysical » (i.e. less reality-oriented) definition as « any theoretical structure that accounts for the projectability of a category »...

As a review of the psychological theories currently in vogue, this book can serve as a starting point for an exploration of these theories, if you really have to. But this is the most I can say for it.

One of the most interesting aspects is an excellent discussion of the power and limits of "adaptationism," where we may be able to explain emotions as evolved adaptive mechanisms, and where other explanations serve better.

This is a book that everyone with a slightly more than casual interest in evolutionary psychology or sociobiology can probably benefit from, whether they are proponents or critics. The reasoning behind evolutionary explanations and where they fall short is particularly good.

As might be expected, the author doesn't leave us with a specific theory of emotions so much as a renewed way of looking at the questions, and a better understanding of how to interpret data claimed to support a particular theory of emotions.

This book joins another one co-authored by Griffiths, "Sex and Death" also by Kim Sterelny, as two of the most useful books available for understanding the central issues for studying human psychology informed by biology.

I actually changed how I detect problems based on information outlined in this book.

The strengths of the book are clear: all the information you'll need to handle NT is there, from installation to networking (all the many and various protocols, etc), to disc management, discussion on the merits and demerits of the many options that NT offers, messing with the Registry, tweaking the system, security ....its all there, in a lucid enjoyable style. The one teeny criticism of the manual that I have in fact has nothing to do with the manual itself. The edition I have was printed in 1996, and is just barely beginning to show its age. However with NT 5 due out soon there is probably l! ittle more to add to NT 4.

All in all, a super book that is worth its weight in gold.

2 German political culture of the 19th century is inherently and ineluctably antisemitic. I'd accept "largely" antisemitic; but Rose wants to make an essentialist case, that you couldn't be a 19th century German radical without being antisemitic, and he fails to support that. Instead we get rhetoric, some of it as heated as Wagner's own.

3 Wagner was always antisemitic, even before 1850, when antisemitic references started to appear in his letters and articles. There it's safe to say that the evidence disproves Rose's case; see, for example, Jacob Katz's "Wagner: The Dark Side of Genius", a book which condemns Wagner's antisemitism on the basis of better research and less tenditiousness. Not only does Rose not actually make his case here, but he couldn't.

4 There is coded antisemitism in Wagner's operas. Here Rose abandons all pretence to academic standards and writes some very silly things. For example he argues that "Die Walku:re" is antisemitic because it depicts incest and adultery sympathetically; but adultery is against the Ten Commandments, and the Ten Commandments is a Jewish document. Wagner's, and "Die Walku:re"'s rejection of the 10 Commandments is therefore antisemitic. Where this leaves Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, and every other opera librettist, poet and dramatist in human history is not clear. By reasoning like this they must all be antisemites. In "Der Fliegende Hollander", Rose argues, Senta's entire village is an antisemitic depiction, because they value money over other values; therefore they must be meant as Jewish. When someone starts looking for antisemitic depictions, and comes up with the idea of a Jewish fishing village in the middle of the Norwegian fiords... when arguments like that are seriously put forward, we know two things. First, that the writer has lost the plot. Second, that the people who should have read the book before publication and got rid of embarrassing silliness like that, weren't doing their job.

I don't know much about the history of 19th century antisemitism in Europe; but Rose's material on Wagner is so hopelessly unreliable and ill-thought-out that it calls into question the reliability of his other material.

There's another comment on this book, apparently written by a believing Marxist, that claims that Wagner made a mistake in making his gods and Nibelungs, in the "Ring", morally equivalent. No, that wasn't a mistake; that was Wagner's _point_. Both the Nibelungs and the gods are involved in a struggle between the values of love and the desire for power. Both the gods and Nibelungs choose power, not love. Wagner was on the side of love, and that is why he makes both sides fall.

Even though Wagner was a flawed human being (but a human being, not a monster; he had a kind and considerate side as well as a selfish and manipulative side), the "Ring" is one of the greatest works of art ever created. And its message is pacifist, pro-love and anti-power, and (ironically, given Wagner's own racism) anti-racist, in showing the moral equivalence of all the different struggling peoples in the "Ring".

The writer of the other comment is right to say that Wagner was a shallow and inconsistent political thinker. But that means that not all of his ideas are bad. His antisemitism shames Wagner's memory as much as the antisemitism of Marx, Bakunin, Proudhon, Schubert, JS Bach, Schumann, Chopin, Mussorgsky, Dostoevsky, TS Eliot and so on and so on, shames theirs. But Wagner's defence of love over power, in the "Ring", strikes me as politically, as well as artistically, not without merit.

Rose makes a mistake in reading antisemitism into works that don't contain it, and another mistake in not recognising that Wagner's works have some moral merit which should not be thrown away.

Laon

My biggest problem was believing that I could do it, but I think the title of the book really hits the nail on the head...if others can be successful, why not me?

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A definite read!