I stumbled across this book while looking for Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. Sadly, this novel (or, I suppose, trilogy of novels) is entirely forgettable. The comparison invited by the title does this volume no favors, because Paul Auster's luminous meditations on time, identity, and meaning put Paul Hallasy's flat, uninspired prose to shame. Hallasy's novel is the story of a young man who comes to NYU, encounters the NYC boehmian life, comes to terms with his homosexuality, and confronts the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic. I have to admit that I skimmed the second and third sections of this book, having lost any ability to pay serious attention to the narrative, so there may be other major plot points or themes that I'm neglecting. The subject matter and time period have been thoroughly covered elsewhere, and with much more insight and skill. The book is published by iUniverse.com, and the error of the title may point to a problem with this "new face of publishing": at a traditional publisher, an experienced editor might have been able to steer Mr. Hallasy away from a title already used by a better author. This trilogy is overflowing with utterly specific cultural references- songs, place names, celebrities, brands, movies, etc., that fix the story in a particular time, place, and subculture. The allusions may be the greatest asset here- if the reader was there then, this could be a sure ticket to nostalgia. There's also some wit to be had, but not much. Oh, and I came across several spelling errors. The best advice I could offer would be to go read the other New York Trilogy, the good one, Auster's, and leave this one alone.

I shouldn't have to say anything about this book to show how nasty a history of a powerful nation is bound to be. Allow me to quote an obvious quote; Kether! "'For by St Paul', quoth he, 'I will not to dinner before I see thy head off.' It booted him not to ask 'Why'" (p. 2).

This book tries to make the case that America has strong policial parties. He should give his Ph.D. back.

Leonard Wheat's book on Tillich is a perverse endeavor that gives the "hermeneutic of suspicion" a bad name. It strikes me as very, very strange to begin an interpretation of a thinker's work with the assumption that he (Tillich) is systematically trying to deceive and mislead the casual reader, that his true goal was to subvert the Christian faith by masquerading as a Christian when all the time he was simply an atheist and secular humanist! Wheat attempts to decode Tillich's talk about God as the Ground of Being, the God above the God of theism, etc., boiling it all down to the arbitrary result that for Tillich "God" was simply humanity as such.

Wheat is misled by his insistence that Tillich, having been influenced by the Dialectics of Hegel, Marx, and Feuerbach, must have (secretly!) shared their conclusion, that there is no God but man. Another key misstep by Wheat is his insistence that, since Tillich rejected supernaturalism as well as metaphysics, then he cannot have been referring to anything metaphysical whenever he spoke of God or the Ultimate Concern. Wheat says Tillich's theological system is nonsensical, but it is so only when one approaches it as Wheat does with the reductionist chainsaw. If indeed Tillich meant what Wheat says he meant, it would be nonsense. But he didn't. Wheat, I think, failed to grasp that, when Tillich rejected metaphysics as a supposed knowledge of unseen realities allegedly behind the visible world, the only alternative remained materialism. Wheat knows Tillich denied that his "ontology" is the same thing as "metaphysics," two terms usually considered synonyms, but Wheat denies there is any difference. He does not seem to grasp that Tillich's ontology was based on the existential-phenomenological analysis of his Marburg colleague Heidegger. This meant, not an intuitive or speculative "knowledge" of unseen worlds of angels and epicycles, like Swedenborg's "Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell," but rather an analysis of the structures of being implicit in the visible world, revealed precisely by huamn life in the world. It is this element that makes Tillich sound so often like Schleiermacher, who inferred all theology from the experience of piety.

Heidegger denied that the Being-itself he talked about was to be identified with God. Another Marburg colleague, Rudolf Bultmann, differed. Adopting the Heideggerian framework, Bultmann reasoned that Being-itself did correspond to God (as Aquinas had said long before). Tillich thought so, too. Hence for him, Being-itself is a superhuman ontological reality in which all beings participate. More recently, Derrida has also seen the implicit theism of Heidegger's Being concept. Derrida calls Heidegger's approach not ontology but "onto-theology," because it hypostatizes an abstraction and in effect posits a God, at least a God-analogue. Derrida says Heidegger sought to banish metaphysics but wound up a metaphysician nonetheless, and this, it seems to me, is what Wheat ought to have said about Tillich: as a Heideggerian, Tillich thought that with his talk of Being he had somehow replaced and stultified traditional metaphysics, though we in retropect can see that he hadn't. Wheat is right in one sense: Tillich made an untenable distinction between his own "ontology" and traditional "metaphysics," but he is wrong in assuming that Tillich did not proceed to engage in metaphysics. Thus his claim that Tillich meant humanity and humanism when he was talking about God and Christianity seems utterly arbitrary. And his ugly allegations about Tillich being a deceiver, a fraud, a hypocrite, etc., do not deserve being taken seriously. It is not as if Wheat is reporting gossip from Hannah Tillich on observed shortcomings in her husband; Wheat gratuitously infers Tillich's supposed dishonesty because he cannot belive Tillich would say what he does and mean it!

Tillich may be criticized at several points, and has been. But this book seems arbitrary and wrong-headed. Any reader of Tillich seking help here is looking to get royally messed up!

book is to expensive for the information present. book is too basic

I found this book to be more of a so-called cultural study instead of the old-fashioned facts-and-chronologies accounts of history. The book is highly opinionated to the point where the events unfold along the lines of the author's opinion about the matter. I also found the book to be heavily slanted to the Left-wing way of thinking.

My son was required to read this book for his history studies at school, but I can't help but wonder if there is any good American history book that plainly tells the facts.

i would not recommend this book for anyone who is intereseted in identifying the trees in the field. Its organised according to species names and is very inconvininet to use. A classification basedon leaves, colors and fruits will be more useful.

Jeepers, I thought it was bad enough the first semester, but then I had to use it the second semester as well! The horror! Do not buy this book! We were forced to use it because UVA professors had written it! (UVA student here) DO NOT BUY IT!

It almost seems as if the authors of the book couldn't work their own problems. i have no idea how they choose which problems they do-- they only do the odd-numbered problems, and even not many of those! They don't explain each step, only referring you back to the textbook, which itself is useless and incomprehensible.

Don't bother.

My opinion is that this book is choppy, cryptic and hard to read. It has a strange format where the information is devided up into little blurbs, that made little if any sense. I would humbly recommend that the author take a writing course or two.