Great for kids of any age. I really thought the story was boring, but the pictures were so funny! I think the illustrator aught to win a medal for his use of color and ideas.

Esther Cohen's book, The Crossroads of Justice, is intriguing. Her analysis of law and justice gives a fascinating look at the dynamics of community life as well as the relationship of the state to crime and criminal prosecution.

After reading I Rigoberta, Crossing Borders, and Stoll's account detailing the inconsistencies (lies??) of Rigoberta's life story, I wondered why it was so important to Stoll to undermine her credibility; after all, it seemed in doing so, he might hurt the Mayan people further... Even if she HAD made her account a composite of all poor Mayan women, these things did really happen. The Mayans needed her voice; they were most certainly oppressed. What has opened my eyes to Stoll's motives for discrediting her, however, is the near sainthood conferred upon her by the Left... ...the ease with which the Left, even when they knew her account to be false, continued to perpetuate the lie, even to our children. NO ONE has the right to rewrite history falsely. We DO need to be honest and not let the ends justify the means. We need to admit the truth regarding Rigoberta, get past it, and likewise admit the value of her existence in helping to open the eyes of the world the the Mayan plight. The TRUTH about Rigoberta, really about her PEOPLE, is compelling enough. Honesty will only accentuate it.

A LITTLE OUTDATED, BUT AS A PARENT WITH A NEWLY DIAGNOSED AUTISTIC CHILD, I NEEDED, FOR MY OWN BENEFIT, TO READ ANYTHING I COULD MY HANDS ON. THIS BOOK HAS THE BASICS COVERED FOR DEALING WITH AND LOVING YOUR AUTISTIC CHILD.

While I am willing to admit that some forgetfulness, slips of speech, and other actions have unconscious motives, (ex. I actually misplaced this book, apparently so I wouldn't have to read it), I don't see how all such acts can be classified as neurotic efforts at repression. Is Freud saying that a fully conscious person would never make a mistake?

Freud shatters all scientific crediblity by admitting near the end of the book that, of couse, we can't recognize or assertain the meaining behind every dream, mistake, or superstition, (like psychoanalysis). Freud writes,

"To substantiate the general validity of the theory, it is enough if one can penetrate only a certain distance into the hidden associations." pg. 161

This is kind of like substantiating the theory of relativity by saying it's enough to know that two plus two equals four.

Freud was an egotistical person, who spewed venom towards critics, and apostates to his theory, (look at what he has to say about Adler in a letter to Jung). Much of that ego plays forth here, when he speaks of psychoanalysis as a proven fact, rather than something to be seriously questioned and studied.

My misplacing of this book was less an unconscious act than a conscious one, I really found the reading dry at times and some of the examples pulled out of thin air, (if you keep free associating long enough, you can make anything in the universe connect to anything else, don't believe me? Play the Kevin Bacon game.)

I eventually did find my lost copy, and it was in the last place I would look for it....my reading table.

Once upon a time I read Freud seriously, in search of some understanding of human behavior. Now I only dip into a few of his books periodically because his thought process is so fascinating. His book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is more interesting and accessable than many of his writings, though his style does not make for an easy read. It is in this book that Freud takes up the issue of all the little things that go wrong which we have tended to think of as accidents and mistakes. To Freud, most, if not all incidents of things forgotten, lost, dropped etc are examples of hidden dynamics of the psyche playing out in the real world. His arguments can be very strained and he extrapolates very broadly from a few anecdotes and case histories. This isn't scientific thought, but it is very interesting nonetheless. If you took him at face value, you would have to conclude that we all need an analyst - which is exactly what he thought.

This book may be read as a necessary sequel to Freud's major opus The Interpretation of Dreams, cause the object of the two are the same, that is, to demonstrate trough a lot of very detailed personal and third person's examples, how the unconscious work, or even better, how it betrays itself trough its concealed (condensed and displaced) actions shown in our parapraxis of everyday. Parapraxis is a term which could be translated into faulty acts, which are, for instance, "slips of the tongue", "slips of the pen", misreadings, mislayings of objects, undeliberate forgetness of sentences, names and places, etc ...
The book is written in a very casual style and one is again admired how could such a genius as Freud convey his ideas in such an easy style.
Why no 4 stars? Because I think this book is not so fascinating as The Interpretation of Dreams, an opus which deserves 5 stars.

This title is cost-prohibitive and content-wise not what you'd expect from a tenured History Department Chair at Bethel College, North Newton, Kansas. Sprunger is as exhaustively boring to read and he is long-winded in the classroom. This piece should have been an academic paper at best.