Jean Douchet's book is a splendid chronicle of the French New Wave phenomenon. Generously illustrated and incisively written. Well-balanced. Illuminating profiles on New Wave icons like Godard, Anna Karina, Truffaut, Jacques Rivette.

It's a pleasure to see this book back in print. Although Ciment's analysis is a little heavy on the semiotic side, he does an interesting job of illuminating the various thematic threads in Kubrick's work. Profusely illustrated, the book juxtaposes various stills to show the recurrance of visual motifs in each and every one of Kubrick's films (though he manages to miss my absolute favorite -- the imaculate bathroom). There are roughly two essays in the book, one dealing with Kubrick the modernist and the other on Kubrick's use of the fantastic. However, the real gems of this tome are the various interviews, three conducted with the man himself (four if you count a Q&A conducted by mail) following the releases of Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon and The Shining. Somehow the author got Stan to open up in a way, that I've never seen him do in any other interview (the exception being the one for Playboy in '68). This edition also contains some fine interviews, some recently added, with Ken Adam, Jack Nicholson, Malcolm McDowell, Diane Johnson and Marisa Berenson. There is an added chapter on Eyes Wide Shut (which in part explains why it took him so long to do the film) and a memorial essay which gives a fine and tender goodbye to a great director and good friend.

I am glad Mr. Ciment waited until Kubrick's oeuvre was completed before updating what is, indeed, the very last word on this very unique artist's films. Everything is here from the first edition which was out-of-print for quite awhile plus the films that were made after. With Stanley Kubrick's death we now have the very best study of the themes, techniques and recurring visions of a very singular artist. Anyone who wants to understand the evolution of Stanley Kubrick can disregard all the other flawed books out there and put this one on the shelf as a keeper. With detailed analysis and tons of pictures, any serious fan of his films will appreciate this as only the subtitle says it is - the definitive edition.

I have this book. 5,6 years ago, I bought this at second hand book store. So book I have is second handed one, and Japanese special edition. As other reviewers say, it's very very great pity that this book is out of print now. I think some publisher had better make new edition title, added to a visualy wondeful film-Eyes Wide Shut!! If you have found it at bookstore and you are a Kubrician, you must take it, buy it, bring it your home, and enjoy these so many precious fotos or very important his interviews in this book. I have various books about Kubrick, but this Michel Ciment's Kubrick is the best book in published ones ever I think. Do your best for finding one!! All your efforts for this book would not be wasted, EVER!

As one who's not prone to buy "coverups" and "cospiracy" theories I was skeptical when I bought the book about what would be inside. To my surprise I found Brun didn't wildly speculate but rather offered ideas based on hard factual data. His research was impressive and his style of presentation was very well thought out. The idea that this could have occured is believable for the height of the coldwar. Reagan did some very foolish things to "push the buttons" of the soviets and this scheme is entirely plausible. As a relative of someone who was in a special forces unit in the army. It's quite plausible that many service man did infact die in this operation and their poor families are none the wiser.

At last, a logical and reasonable explanation for all the confusing radar and radio information. But he doesn't quite answer all the unanswered questions, ie, What happened to the bodies? Where is the plane? There should be answers, somewhere.

Only a year ago, I watched a History Channel presentation of the "official" story of KAL 007, whose flight-number designation seemed so cruelly appropriate. Shortly thereafter I was recommended "Incident at Sakhalin" by a person who had been heavily involved in US Cold War strategies of the eighties. "Read this," he insisted, "if you want to know how close to the brink of nuclear war we came." He refused to say more, but the book is an eye-opener. On 1-Sept. 1983, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, enroute to Seoul from New York via Anchorage, disappeared over the Sea of Japan. An extraordinary propaganda campaign and coverup ensued immediately following the events surrounding this incident -- on both sides of the Cold War Iron Curtain. In that perilous and paranoid time, the disaster nearly precipitated World War lll. To this day, the four governments involved in the Sakhalin Incident would prefer that the "official" conclusion remain in effect: that is, the passenger jet had innocently strayed off-course and was mistaken for the Cobra Ball spy plane which was detected at the same time in violation of Soviet airspace. That story generated much suspicion, which resulted in numerous Congressional investigations and accusations regarding CIA use of foreign civilian airliners for its surveillance missions over the USSR. Passengers were routinely and unwittingly used as pawns, a chilling revelation in itself. But Brun's book goes way beyond that. The author has impressive credentials; he is a French aviation expert and aircraft accident investigator, fluent in five languages. Moreover, his political neutrality ensures an unbiased presentation of the facts he had spent some ten years gathering. Several mysteries of the Sakhalin incident are widely known. For example, neither the wreck of the plane nor the remains of the 269 passengers has ever been found in the shallow area of the Sea of Japan over which KAL 007 was allegedly shot down. Meticulous research, aided by post-Cold War release of previously classified materials, reveals more of the disturbing story. In fact, Flight 007 was not lost over Sakhalin, but continued to fly and transmit messages for nearly an hour after other intruding aircraft were intercepted there by Soviet MiGs. The evidence shows that a poorly-conceived US intelligence and provocation operation launched a two-hour-long air battle with Soviet fighters over Sakhalin. In this battle, US Air Force and Navy aircraft and personnel were lost, and KAL 007 disappeared some 435 miles from where it was "officially" claimed to have crashed -- by means and reasons after all these years still unexplained. Boris Yeltsin, in his 17-June, 1992 speech to a joint session of the US Congress, mentioned Soviet-held American POWs in conjunction with the KAL 007 incident. This was interpreted by the American press as reference to the Korean and Vietnam eras; and the Reagan Administration offered no enlightenment to the public. We Americans have become accustomed to some misinformation and coverup on the part of the government, some of which is conducted in the name of national security. It appears that the Incident at Sakhalin was the result of a massive blunder with tragic, embarrassing, and nearly devastating ramifications. Get the book! Loaded with technical facts and stats, it is a fascinating read.

This book is extremely heavy on the esoteric, philosophical lingo. As a virtual environment systems designer, I found it to be essentially useless. My guess is that it would be of value only to academicians and others not directly involved in the technological aspects of VE and other digital domains. Although I suspect there might have been some useful stuff here, the writing is too tangled to unravel. If you speak academese, you might fare better than I did.

The word 'virtual' has had a fair amount of exercise in the last few decades, and it would be a pity if some were put off reading this wonderful book due to the misguided belief it may be populated with computer lingo and people with wetware engaged in simulated 'virtual' sex. Levy's understanding of the virtual extends far beyond information technology; he gives the concept a proper philosophical and even anthropological foundation, and even goes so far as to show that we have in fact always been virtual, and this is what has made us human.

Technology is probably what separates us from all other living creatures, or at least sophisticated technology, such as machines. Yes, other organisms utilise simple tools and what have you, but none of them are going to the moon in any sort of hurry. Levy's work is essentially about artifacts, be they software like language or symbols, or hardware like tools and machines. However, following on from the work of philosophers such as Deleuze and Serres, Levy is profoundly against the two common (mis)conceptions about them: that they 'dominate' us, or that they are simple tools in our hands, doing our bidding. Heidegger and his ilk were very keen on the domination idea, but that's only because they didn't really understand machines; sure, your VCR will seem to dominate you, if you can't work it, as many older people will tell you, but after a good dose of swearing and fumbling the usual result is a machine that just sits there doing nothing. Hardly despotism. Or you may have its measure, and say it's just a tool for capturing video images, for whatever purpose, and yet it changes the way you watch TV, capture memories of your kids, and the entire institutional set-up of the film industry. Quite a clever tool, that.

If you read this book (and you should), Levy will tell you that all artifacts, including less 'material' ones like language, virtualise our lives. That doesn't mean making them less real, the common usage of 'virtual'; it means problematising them, opening them up to possibilities. Making them MORE real. And this isn't naive techno-optimism, because not only are not all these possibilities not nice, but when you virtualise something you take on-board the requirements of the virtualising medium, which have to be met to keep it running, and you become entwined with the other people associated with these artifacts, such as video repair men. Technology can truly make you feel like a god, but it always needs to be fixed, and you have to undertake profound social relationships for it to happen at all (nobody builds an aircraft carrier alone in their backyard). Or take our oldest and most 'simple' artifact: language. Language, says Levy, virtualises 'real-time', by which he means our everyday interactions with other people. That's what it means to 'discuss' something, you take an immediate issue confronting two or more people, and you use language to open it up to different resolution paths which aren't immediately obvious. And again, this isn't artifact as god or slave: the language doesn't dominate you, although it has in-built constraints which you must adhere to if you want to be understood, and you can't just tell people what to do and see it happen, because not only are allowed meanings consensual or social, but also there is no direct causal link between utterance and action.

Levy explores the way we virtualise every aspect of our lives, from real-time interaction through language, to our actions through technology, and our social relations through institutions. And in each case the mechanism is the same: we create some artifact, more or less material, which allows us to shift what's at stake away from the immediate here-and-now and towards a problematic where new possibilities open up. And again Levy avoids simplistic determinism of any persuasion by emphasising that each of these artifacts simultaneously creates new social arrangements, and introduces new imperatives through the need for their upkeep. This is how the philosophy becomes anthropology, and why Levy says to be human IS to be virtual; it is our species that has taken these artifacts into our collectives, that has used the world to mediate our social lives. And the world extracts a price too, because artifacts impose requirements back upon us, if we want them to keep working, that is. The end of domination, either of artifact by human, or human by artifact.

This is Levy's most accessible book, in English, relatively free of the sometimes over-blown prose of Collective Intelligence. Like Bruno Latour, also an admirer of Serres and Deleuze, Levy allows us to see exactly how our technological, modern world is every bit as religious, barbaric, enlightened, enchanted, mystical or whatever as it has always been; you just have to understand artifacts. (It is also a tremendous asset for philosophy students who don't fully understand the scope of the Begsonian/Deleuzean 'virtual'.)

And as another reviewer has hinted, there's even theology in nuts and bolts, if you know where to look.

This is one of those rare books that will re-wire many minds. Lévy gives us a new way of seeing culture. He achieves this by linking specific cultural activities, and thereby humankind, to a fundamental process that is outside place and time - the process of virtualisation.

That the book produces its profound cognitive effect in so few words is stunning. Part of the credit for this feat must go to the translator, Bononno.

'Becoming Virtual' in my view surpasses that other classic,'Understanding Computers and Cognition' by Winograd and Flores. Lévy depicts cognition and action as both social process, and process occurring within the individual. He introduces concepts sparingly and tellingly, illustrating them with examples reaching from the dawn of the human era to the present day.

A book that can be read at one sitting, but will demand to be picked up again many, many times in the years ahead.

Modern scholars are often driven by a host of pressures to
produce monographs, particularly tenure and in some cases
prestige. Even so, it is possible to produce competent
work that is precise and offers empirical evidence as well
as the insights of other scholars. That is to say, the best
academic work combines actual research with commentary on the
work and writing of one's peers.

Levy's _Cyberculture_ offers neither. It is a pretentious,
pompous exercise in self-aggrandizment that masquerades as
scholarly writing. The book lies in the tradition of McLuhan
and Nostramdomus, in that it offers prognostications and
claims for experientiality without much evidence. Many
technical details are shoddy or wrong, and there is a stunning
lack of detail that suggests the author might not have spent
much time exploring the current state of "cyberspace". To take
one example, the author's position that the importance of
the Internet for digital music is really related to its potential
for collaboration holds little weight against the massive
current use of it for music distribution, the production of
Def Leppard's _Eupohoria_ notwithstanding. Levy presents
no backing for his claims, and seems to ignore what's currently
happening.

Like all academics, the author attempts to create and define
the terms of his own debate. Scholars do this now so that
they can have something to write about, first off, and second
to attempt to form a legacy (in that other scholars will quote
them). Levy's attempt is centered around the Internet
as "Universality Without Totality", and of course these terms
are highly suspect and open to contention. Whither the
Digital Divide? Not here. Just like the lack of proper
documentation for sources in text. Just like any intellectual
merit beyond self-indulgence and blind seer-work. Proper
education teaches us to be wary of claims for universality,
and if Levy had stopped for a moment to consider the lack of
Third-World internet providers, or even the disenfranchised
in North America, he would have understood that there IS a
totalizing dimension to the Internet, which revolves around
ACCESS, the terms of which are CAPITAL and to a less extent
PRIVILEGE.

In short, there are many superior works on the impact of Internet
technologies on society. All of them are necessarily premature,
as Communication History teaches us that the printing press,
television, radio, and every other new medium took years to
"settle out" (it's called the "Incunabula" period). Still,
it's possible to use empirical research to understand the
current state of affairs with its concommitant implications.
It's also possible to skip merrily through some terms of
your own devising, making broad claims that bear tenuous
connection to lived reality, which Levy does par excellence.