Think you've read it all, just because you've exhausted yourself reading Mallory's Morte D'Arthur? Get set for a fantastic new round of "forgotten" stories as retold/arranged by the author. Authentic feel, easy to read, everything you hoped for when you said to yourself, "there must be more to the Legends than this!"

The book is an awesome biography of the Mystical life of Louise Claude de St. Martin. The author fully described the sequence of events of the life of this Unknown Philosopher. Excellent reference for the students in Martinism or traditional Martinist Order as well as a path in the search of Truth by modeling from the examples of the book.

I've read "Untimely Meditations" in a few different translations, and Arrowsmith's is excellent (I have no German, not yet). But the special reasons to buy Arrowsmith's "Unmodern Observations" are (1)the translator was himself a man of enormous complexity and diverse gifts; and (2)at the end of the 1st Meditation ("David Strauss, Writer and Confessor"), Nietzsche appended a section analyzing the STYLE of Strauss' work, pointing out the mixed metaphors, cliches, bungled rhetorical flourishes, et cetera, with a more or less brutal intensity. Translating this appendix, which amounts to an essay on German literary style, is very daunting for obvious reasons, and most translators simply leave it out. Arrowsmith masterfully renders the whole thing, and when I read it in the library at Brandeis ten years ago I felt I was learning more about how to write than I had from any other book.

pILLARI TAKES UP THE SCAPEGOATING THEME PRESENT IN WESTERN MYTHOLOGY,LITERATURE AND THE bIBLE. tHIS FOCUS HAS RECEIVED MUCH ATTENTION IN THE LAST THREE DECADES WITH THE IMPETUS OF rENE gIRARD WHOSE THEORY OF MIMESIS IS CLOSELY TIED TO SCAPEGOATING. pILLARI EXAMINES THIS THEME IN THE CONTEXT OF FAMILY DYNAMICS AND SHE OFTEN TOUCHES UPON THE MAJOR IDEAS OF gIRARD. pAUL rICOEUR,A fRENCH PHILOSOPHER TAKES THIS THEME TO A "HIGHER" LEVEL IN HIS "SYMBOLISM OF EVIL" AND "FALLIBLE mAN". tHIS DYNAMIC OF SCAPEGOATING AFFORDS INSIGHT NOT ONLY FOR FAMILY DIFFICULTIES BUT FOR CULTURALLY BASED AND INTERCULTURAL TENSIONS.

Before the pure delightful world of natural foods turned into expensive junk food using refined flours, ORGANIC sugar and chocolate, people were creative and truly health minded.
Uprisings is an example of this time when brilliant and delicious recipes were truly healthy. This book is a collection of most popular recipes from whole foods bakeries around the country (and world even) who created delightfully delicious treats to be baked in our kitchens using TRUE natural and whole ingredients.

Truly valuable and hand lettered and decorated in the tradition of the Moosewood Cookbook, this book is a treasure.

I had "Urban Economics" for one of my urban planning courses at graduate school. It was a pleasure to study the principles and processes of city building, growth and dynamics, through this book. Every chapter in the book can be a title for a separate volume. So this is a very comprehensive overall general view of economics as a determinant of urban development and form.

I particularly liked the chapters on Urban Poverty and Housing. The chapter on poverty explains issues like income transfers, food stamps and their effect on consumer behavior, problems of inner cities and development policies needed to change that.

Housing has a great chapter devoted to the peculiarities of housing as a commodity and the effect of race and discrimination on housing patterns. The most interesting part concerns the "filtering" of housing from the upper income to lower income populations.

Also explained is the auto oriented transportation vs mass transit and their specific roles in shaping cities.

Highly recommended. Easy to read and understand.

Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Jorges Luis Borges and Raymond Carver at their best. Four timeless tales from the abstract minds of four of our greatest sci-fi authors. A thrill a minute..!

Excellent book of tables, not a text book. Written in the practical style of Roark, or Peterson's book of stress concentration factors. Allows quick estimates of many shapes and support methods during preliminary design. Combine this book with Hartog's to economicaly cover most structural problems.

I have a little bit of a problem with the words 'Modern Classics' usually, but in this case it is appropriate. All five titles are worthy of the prefix.

Midwives is undoubtedly one of the finest pieces of fiction in modern years. Bohjalian mixes suspense with drama to create a masterpiece. Its starts out with a tragic death during labour, which may or may not have been the midwife's fault. As you follow the story through the midwife's daughter's eyes, you discover the truth in what is an interesting finale.

A wonder of translation, The Reader is a fascinating novel of morality and social injustices in postwar Germany, It focuses on the Holocaust through the eyes of 15 year old Micheal, whose older lover Hanna, as it turns out is guilty of unspeakable crimes. Emotional and stirring, The Reader is a must have.

Snow Falling On Cedars is a brilliant mystery set in San Piedro. A Japanese American man is on trial for the murder of a white man. Still reeling from racial distrust, the town is baying for blood, but one man must recover from his own distrust and jilted feelings rooted in his past to discover the truth. Beautifully written and vividly imagined, Snow Falling On Cedars is one of my favourite novels.

Believe the hype, Memoirs Of A Geisha is here to stay. This novel is incredibly popular and rightly so. It uncovers Japan's hidden Geisha trade and stuns us all with its revelations. Through the eyes of Japan's 'most famous Geisha' as we are led to believe, we see it all from the youth up, the training, the social manuevering, the infighting as our very own Geisha struggles with her own morality in her search for happiness.

Cold Mountain is in truth a beautiful love story. Winner of the US national book Award this book is strong, maybe not so as the rest, but entertaining and beautiful in its own right.

And finally, A Lesson Before Dying. Always controversial, this story focuses on a man set for execution. Jefferson is the black man on death row, and as he faces social and racial tensions, his grandmother wishes that someone might teach him to die like a man, and that is where our narrator steps in. Beautiful and poignant, Not to be missed.

So there we have it. Beautiful writing didn't die with Austen, the Brontes and Dickens. 20th century authors may just have what it takes to be classics hundreds of years from now. Read and Enjoy.

Blindness, the inability or refusal to see why we commit violence and to see the effects of violence on ourselves and others that continue for generations, is a kind of spiritless, hopeless and, in the end, impotent power.

That is one of the points of this marvelous book, a collection of articles written by anthropologists who have been through or who have been with those who have been through violence. Not only does violence kill, main and destroy, it changes those who live after. Violence sears identities, amputates parts of self, twisting how the survivors see themselves and others. We are some of those others.

From China to South Africa to Sri Lanka to the former Yugoslavia to India to Pakistan to Nigeria to what we call Western civilization, these essays carry us around the world to meet people to have done their human best to deal with inhumane circumstances. Sorting identities of the circumsized as opposed to the non-circumsized, trying to be a man when men have no fathers and whose primary role is to serve as targets for the enemy, the erasure of identity through steralization and the importance of memory are questions faced by the most ordinary of people. One of the most riviting and thought-provoking essays is titled, "On Not Becoming a "Terrorist"". In a culture of terrorism, can a person refuse to become one - and survive? It was a Mayan social commentator, Sam Colop, coming to terms with the decades of mass murder, who described the conqueror type. "It is not merely that his power makes him blind," he wrote, "nor that his power is accompanied by blindness, nor even that his power required blindness; it is, instead, quite simply that is blindness, his willed amorality, is his power, or a large part of it." And is it then the victims who should likewise seize power?

Arthur Kleinman brings it all home to "the violence in middle-class life under the regieme of disordered capitalism." "Rather than view violence, then, simply as a set of discrete events, which quite obviously it can also be, the perspective I am advancing seeks to unearth those entrenched processes of ordering the social world and making (or realizing) culture that themselves are forms of violence: violence that is multiple, mundane, and perhaps all the more fundamental because it is hidden or secret violence out of which images of people are shaped, experiences of groups are coerced, and agency itself is engendered." Or, to use a "mundane" example, can you recall in either a movie or TV show a single non-family dispute that was resolved without violence or aggression? Can we any longer imagine a way of solving social and political problems without violence, the threat of violence, creating new weapons, passing "tougher" laws, building new prisons or insisting (making) "the other person" make the sacrifice?

A great book.