Benjamin is one of the few 20th century philosophers who can convey profound thoughts in language that isn't at all opaque. His sentences are always perfectly clear - no pretentious literary or Marxist jargon (thank God). The only thing that makes it slow reading is that you always want to stop, put the book down, and think about what he's just said.

For example, a passage from his essay on Kafka:

'The definition of it which Kafka has given applies to the sons more than to anyone else: "Original sin, the old injustice committed by man, consists in the complaint that he has been the victim of an injustice, the victim of original sin." But who is accused of this inherited sin - the sin of having produced an heir - if not the father by the son? Accordingly the son would be the sinner. But one must not conclude from Kafka's definition that the accusation is sinful because it is false. Nowhere does Kafka say that it is made wrongfully. A never-ending process is at work here, and no cause can appear in a worse light than the one for which the father enlists the aid of these officials and court offices . . . '

This is not opacity for the sake of being opaque; he is trying to get at something incredibly complex, something that (unlike most literary criticism) actually helps you appreciate Kafka and understand him a little better. Benjamin doesn't peel away layers of an onion to arrive at a single shining insight; he presents a simple idea, expands on it a little, and lets you put on the layers of complexity yourself. Read these essays carefully, and it will be obvious why entire schools of thought have sprung up around single paragraphs, why people have devoted their lives to figuring out the ramifications of a single sentence . . .

Benjamin accomplishes something rare: in writing about art, he succeeds in telling us something about life in modern times. And his insights never seem forced; they flow naturally from what he is discussing. For example, his essay on Leskov, "This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation that is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places - the activies that are intimately associated with boredom - are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the comminity of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeated stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained."

A simple little paragraph on storytelling, but soon you start thinking about how the art of writing has changed since Benjamin's time, and what effect television and the movies have had on the way we live, on "boredom" and mental relaxation . . . anyway, I'm probably starting to get pretentious which Benjamin, thankfully, never does.

Above all this entire collection is filled with something increasingly rare nowadays, a genuine love of books. Forget all the Marxist stuff in other reviews, all Benjamin is really doing, finally, is talking about some books that he likes. That he succeeds in doing much more is a testament to his brilliance.

This is the only theoretical text that I have read, with pleasure, in recent memory. Given the conventional prolixity, obfuscation, and circumlocution of contemporary academic prose in the humanities, the fact that you can read Benjamin with pleasure marks him as outstanding.

Benjamin's project was itself outstanding. He aimed at a synthesis of Marxism, mysticism, German romanticism--in a sense, theology, materialist philosophy, and poetry. His critical approaches and thinking embodies the characteristics he praises in literary texts; Benjamin thinks poetically.

This eclectic collection of material, emphasizing Benjamin's later (and more Marxist) ideas, is not unlike a sampler of related but different confections. It's mistaken to think of Benjamin's various intellectual leanings as discrete ideologies or outright contradictions; instead, to borrow from Wittgenstein, consider his ideas to be different members of a family that resemble one another and are clearly related but live different lives in different contexts.

Benjamin's essay "Unpacking my Library," for example, looks on the surface like a confession of self-indulgence, but (in my opinion) deals in a clever and powerful way with the ways in which we inherit, buy, trade, classify, and value our heritage and cultures. This is truly fascinating material!

For Walter Benjamin, the defining characteristic of modernity was mass assembly and production of commodities, concomitant with this transformation of production is the destruction of tradition and the mode of experience which depends upon that tradition. While the destruction of tradition means the destruction of authenticity, of the originary, in that it also collapses the distance between art and the masses it makes possible the liberation which capitalism both obscures and opposes. Benjamin believes that with the destruction of tradition, libratory potentialities are nonetheless created. The process of the destruction of aura through mass reproduction brings about the "destruction of traditional modes of experience through shock," in response new forms of experience are created which attempt to cope with that shock.

Allegoresis and collection are the twin foci around which the elliptical writings of Walter Benjamin orbit. The former, as a mode of criticism, transforms the latter practice into a version of materialist historicism. Instead of constructing further barriers between his own practice and the practices of the historical moment he would transcend, Benjamin embraces the underside of his own theories in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." There he proclaims the disintegration of the aura and champions the revolutionary potential which is thus released. It will be of use therefore, to look at some of his other references to the aura. It's as though Benjamin takes more seriously than Marx the notion that capitalism contains its own subversion--the path to subversion is not to resist and revolt, but to accede and accelerate...

Walter Benjamin has progressed over the years from an obscure lesser member of the Frankfurt School to a widely read leading member of that obscure school. Aided by such as Hannah Arendt, who introduced him to a wider audience in her writings (and also to me), readers have come to appreciate Benjamin for the beauty of his writing as well as his sharp insight.

This volume, along with its companion, is an excellent introduction to the style and thought of this man who, while out of step with his times, possessed the insight to give those times an original critique.

Possessed of a lively style and free from the Marxist bagge that weighs down his Frankfurt School colleagues such as Adorno and Horkheimer (I think Benjamin owes much more to Heidegger than Marx), Benjamin will hook any reader who takes the time to spend an hour or two with this book. From here it's an easy step to purchase other Benjamin writings, a step I can almost guarantee.

While his work is as important as Barthes, Foucault, or Derrida, or any other critic of the 20th Century, Benjamin's work has a mystical quality, a kind of enchantment, that resonates much more than any other critic I have read. It is always human and sensitive, even despite his determinedly impersonal tone.

When I think of Benjamin, I think of Emerson's famous line about Hawthorne - that he was a greater man than any of his works betray. The integrity and character of Walter Benjamin shines through his works, and is an inspiration to anyone who takes literature seriously.

This first volume of Bejamin's complete works is very attractive and welcome. Some of my favorite essays are present, such as his essays on children's literature, and the nature of language. I eagerly await the other two volumes.

Walter Benjamin and G. Scholem are two of the most important thinkers of this century. And in this book we can listen to their voices and thoughts. In my opinion the most interesting part of the book are the letters related to Franz Kafka. In fact, I think the way they understand and illustrate Kafka is still unsurpassed, and just for that is really worth to read this book.

The most complete English-language edition of Benjamin's letters reveals the German author dealing with characteristic and unrelenting vigour and insight in a wide range of issues from Jewishness and Zionism to European literature, book-collecting and, of course, letter-writing. Yet, with the beginning of each of the 332 letters included in the volume, the reader is brought a little closer to Benjamin's tragic suicide, as he attempts to escape the consequences of the second world war

An excellent book, finally Banjamin on photography and cinema is available in english. Reading his essay on Chaplin is extremely illuminating concerning the question of the passage from silent film to sound film. His concept of critique, as well as his concept of "making history" lies in this text.

This artistic team of Bloom/Hill were my professors while I attended the University of Houston pursuing my degree in fine arts photography. I know the area very well that was documented in this book and this book was a forerunner to the path that other artists have taken since it's publication in the field of ecology art.

I've read a lot of books about Franklin, but this one is in a class of its own. It's a psycho-biography (kinda) that traces Franklin's religious development from his early childhood through the rest of his life. Nope, he's not the deist we learned about in school. Instead, he's what Walters calls a "perspectivist." If that sounds boring or dry, think again. The book reads like a novel. I definitely recommend this one. It puts a new spin on old Benjamin. My only objection is that sometimes you have to wonder how much of this is Walters, and how much Franklin. So it loses one star.

Kerry S. Walters has written one of the best studies of 18th century religion yet produced. Benjamin Franklin is a difficult subject, in part because as Walters puts it, Franklin "wrote both too much and too little about his religious thought." (p. 4) Different historians read the same documents and come up with radically different interpretations of their meaning. Walters, however, has produced a nuanced study, sensitive to the wider religous context in which Franklin lived his life, and profoundly learned too in the cultural and intellectual developments of the Atlantic enlightenment. By meticuously locating Franklin within this larger context, he has written a work which sheds insight both into Franklin himself, as well as the larger society in which he lived. To do this in 151 pages of lucid and economical prose is quite a worthy achievement.

Walters argues that Franklin's religious views developed in tension between two ultimately irreconciliable religious traditions. On the one hand was the Calvinism of his native Boston, the faith of his father, with its sophisticated Augustinian piety. On the other hand was the "New Learning" which captivated so many polite and cultivated men and women on both sides of the Atlantic, the faith of men like Isaac Newton or John Locke, with its concomitant liberal Christian emphasis on the capacity of human reason to arrive at religous truth. As a young man, Franklin wavered, adhering first to the one and then the other.

As a mature adult, however, Franklin came to accept the ambiguity of his earlier commitments. "Recognizing that a Newtonian-inspired deism was spiritually impoverished, but unable either rationally or emotionally to return to the orthodoxy of his boyhood, he was at loose ends for a few years," Walters argues. But in 1728 Franklin found a way to reconcile the contradiction. "The solution he arrived at--his doctrine of theistic perspectivism--enabled him to escape from the mechanistically sterile cosmos into which he had drifted without falling back into a Calvinist worldview whose central tenets he found unacceptable." (p. 12)

As Walters explains, Franklin's perspectivism stemmed from a belief in an inaccessible God, which humans symbolically represent to themselves in order to establish an emotional and intellectual relationshop with the divine. This means that while God *is*, there are various human representations of God as well. "These anthropomorphized conceptions of the divine," Walters writes, "serve as the foci for personal adoration as well as sectarian theologizing." (p. 10) The result, then, is a commitment to religious toleration because human representions of the divine are culturally and historically bounded. Human religous traditions, to the extent that they share the same purposes, contain some worth.

In arguing for this understanding of religion--an understanding which arises from the tension between the two religious traditions within which Franklin was working--Walters can explain Franklin's religous statements with a cogency missing from earlier accounts. While Walter's statement of Franklin's perspectivism may sound superficially anachronistic, that is a misreading of this work. This is a terrific exercise in intellectual and relgious history, and Walter's demonstrates convincingly the historical origins in Franklin's thought of the theology he discusses.

I really like this book, even though I'm not sure I agree with its spin on Franklin's religion. Walters argues that Ben is a "perspectivist"--basically, a proponent of religious fictions that he knows have no objective basis, but which he thinks are necessary for psychological health and social stability. The case is well presented and nicely written. (Would that all historians wrote as well!) But I can't help thinking that Franklin comes out more of a twentieth-century existentialist than he is--complete with religious angst and identity crisis. What the heck, though. This is one good book. My guess is that it's going to make a lot of people mad--especially those good American Christians who want to think that all the "Founding Fathers" of the USA were also Christians. As Walters demonstrates, it just ain't so.

When Walter Benjamin, a German Jew, died in Spain during World War II, Europe was deprived of "the most subtle mind of [his] generation." Benjamin, a philosopher, historian, and literary critic, was a colleague of some of Europe's most influential thinkers during the period between the two world wars. Deeply involved in the intellectual aspects of history, Benjamin, however, became a prisoner of the world of ideas, a man who neither understood nor recognized the immediate political realities of the Nazi threat, preferring to sit "in glory above the fray, on an alabaster cloud." Refusing to leave Paris until almost all avenues of escape were closed, Benjamin's indecisiveness about escape and his insistence on toting his 1000-page manuscript on the history of Parisian arcades may have cost him his life.

Parini's imagery here is often stunning, and his prose so smooth it is almost melodic in its flow. Using several points of view, he allows Benjamin's friends and acquaintances to recall episodes in Benjamin life, creating emotional power from their reminiscences after Benjamin's death in Spain. First-person accounts by Lisa Fittko, a real person who helped Benjamin and others escape through the Pyrenees into Spain, are particularly powerful, giving immediacy and drama to Benjamin's attempted escape on foot. Quotations from Benjamin's own philosophical writing give a sense of reality to a man who otherwise refused to become engaged in the realities of his time.

Unfortunately, Benjamin himself is phlegmatic, and Parini is often forced to "tell about" his life, rather than recreating it for the reader. Because he is distanced, both by his own personality and Parini's narrative style, Benjamin never really comes to life as do his friends, such as Fittko, Jewish mystic Gershom Scholem, and Russian Marxist Asja Lacis, who, in addressing us directly, create scenes which are full of vitality. Still, this novel about Benjamin as "the European Mind writ large" is endlessly fascinating, a thoughtful eulogy for all that has been lost to posterity.

This book is among the top three I read last year. It tells the story of Walter Benjamin, the German/Jewish thinker, who happened to be in the middle of Europe during the dark times of the Third Reich's apogee.

Mr. Benjamin makes a very interesting character, with his obssession for true and pure knowledge and his inability to deal with people or the terrible times he was facing.

The author, Mr. Parini, has a very pleasant style, constantly changing the point-of-view in the narrative, in a way that we can understand every character in a much more deep sense.

Walter Benjamin was nobody to me before I had read this book, and I must say I have bought two books with his writings since then. The same goes to Mr. Parini, since I bought his other book "The Last Station", which deals with the last days of Russian writer Leo Tolstoi.

This book is definitely worth reading. It is very touching since and it is hard not to feel any simpathy for a character with such a complicated personality. Also, it is based in true facts, this people really existed and the book is very well written.

The most exciting parts of his escape read like a thriller. By the time you end this book, I doubt if you won't feel any shame for a regime that sacrificed so many bright minds for nothing. I sure did.

This is a book that I turned to with some scepticism. I admire Jay Parini enormously as a poet, novelist and essayist but this new project: to "novelize" Benjamin's last years seemed excessively ambitiousess. How do you add flesh and bones to this melancholic man of letters, this Marxist rabbi or magic lanternist as some have described? What can be added to Benjamin's own work, his letters and the reflections written by friends and comrades? Well Benjamin's Crossing is both a marvellous, magical and intensely moving novel. Parini gives Benjamin a sexual and emotional life which sensously combines with Benjamin's mental life. By the end of the novel I was so immersed in the figure of Benjamin, so moved by him, that I wanted Parini to re-write history, which of course he could not. If there are any ambitious filmmakers out there this would make a compelling and yet daunting movie.

Blanchard and Fabrycky start with an excellent discussion of systems engineering (SE) history and proceed to cover program/project SE in a logical and orderly fashion. The material is well written, lacking the usual jargon and catch-words. The book could benefit from additional technical implementation details of effectiveness analysis, design concept development, and integration technique coverage. Among the alternates available, this is the preferred broad coverage of SE and well worth reading carefully.

I'm currently teaching graduate students and used this as a text book last semester. I suppose students have enjoyed this book very much. I appreciate the author and ...'s excellent work as well.

One of the early original works to attempt to define Systems Engineering, it still represents one of the best overall introductions to the multiple faceted discipline of Systems Engineering and Analysis. It successfully covers the broad range of topics associated with this field. It is also a good introduction as it shows how Systems Engineering evolves over the various phases of system development from concept definition to final testing.

I'm no expert on McMurtry, but he got my interest with that juxtaposition in the title: Like a lot of people, I know about Walter Benjamin from having read him a bit in college, and like any native Texan, I know something about Dairy Queen, too. On one level the link is simple. McMurtry says the book has its origins in the day back in 1980 when he was sitting at a Dairy Queen in West Texas reading Benjamin's "Storyteller" essay. This becomes the jumping off point for McMurtry's observations about story telling, the West, book-scouting, writing, reading, cowboys, movies, nostalgia, and the other side of 60. Benjamin is a bit of a fleeting presence, though at one point McMurtry does observe that Benjamin's greatness was diffused, a lot small bursts of light rather than a single supernova-sized work. This book is similar, I think. It's a book of ruminations, which sounds faintly pejorative, but I don't think the book greater in its parts than in its sum. In fact I'm not sure I could say what the sum is, since McMurtry passingly asserts that this is no memoir. I guess I'm inclined to disagree with him on that. If this isn't a self portrait per se, it's at least a sketch of the kind of life and intelligence one needs to be authoritative and at ease (not merely acquainted, like me) with the cosmopolitan and the down-home, Benjamin and Dairy Queen.

For those that aren't familiar with Larry McMurtry's body of work, this book will seem to be a stand-alone effort. But, in reality, it is truly a sequel to his first book of essays - "In A Narrow Grave: Essays On Texas" (1968). If one hasn't read "Narrow Grave", it should probably be read first (or re-read if one hasn't recently). As far as storytellers go (the tie-in to "Walter Benjamin At The DQ"), McMurtry is certainly the last gifted storyteller concerning the Texas from the 1880's through this century. This new book is, I suspect, just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the experiences of his dozens of now-deceased family members that he could set down either as straight history or as material for a definitive character (perhaps the "biography" of Sam the Lion prior to "The Last Picture Show"). Regardless, the things learned about McMurtry's own life are both endearing and entertaining. After reading the books, one should visit both Archer County and Archer City to try and soak up some of the elements that are a part of Larry McMurtry (and, of course, having a lime Dr Pepper at the DQ shouldn't be missed; neither should a visit to the bookstores where he has rounded up his herds of books - it's quite an experience).

The New York Times called this a peculiar book but they must not read much Larry McMurtry. This was a wonderful series of essays explaining much of the writing that he has done during his lifetime. I copied many of the sentences Larry wrote about reading because they were my experiences also. I too grew up on a farm and my reading habit is directly connected to that life. My love of reading is my life, and many of my favorite books are ones by Larry McMurtry. He can describe people better than most other authors. I have a better understanding of how he does that now that I've read this book. The honesty that Larry uses in describing his own life is startling. I'm going to look up Walter Benjamin now, I'm intrigued with the storyteller quotation.