I don't believe I've seen more than two of Mazursky's films but I enjoyed his book, especially the juicy chapter on his adventures with the increasingly more bizarre Peter Sellers. This is not a biography, but rather a series of essays about his involvement with different Hollywood people and some chapters about his current life and childhood. Recommended.

An interesting, light and witty Summer read that gives you insight into Mazursky's career and tales of movie production. Mazursky, born in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn started out as an actor (Blackboard Jungle), moved on to be a comedy writer (Danny Kaye, I Love You Alice B Toklas) when acting parts were infrequent, and made his directorial debut with Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. My favorite scenes in the book? When a young Mazursky catches his zade eating his bubbe's herring on the afternoon of Yom Kippur; when Eisner and Katzenberg ask Mazursky if he thinks that the I.B. Singer story (Enemies, A Love Story) is too Jewish... maybe it can be about the Cambodian Holocaust instead of the WWII one; when Richard Dreyfus pulls out of the Enemies project; and the creation of Down&Out in Beverly Hills.

I loved reading this book, both from the standpoint of appreciating Paul Mazursky the director of many of my favorite films and reveling in Paul Mazursky the no-holds-barred storyteller. But--and, I'm sorry, there is a 'but'---why devote one sentence to the great Art Carney, who Mazursky calls the most pure actor he'd ever worked with, and then not tell the reader WHY he feels that way about Carney? There are no anecdotes to share about Jill Clayburgh or Robin Williams? Come on, Paul, give! This lapse is mostly compensated for by Mazursky's tales of traveling in the "then" Soviet Union and South America, his memories of working for Danny Kaye and his sharing the bitter and the sweet about his family, his friends and the ups and downs of his life. The chapter about Mazursky's relationship with his mother is especially powerful and a reminder that much of the pathos within even his funniest films came honestly to him. So, five stars for what's here---just would've liked to have seen more!

Wyndham Lewis is the kind of writer who everyone respects
but almost no one reads. Apes of God has all the trappings of a masterpiece: iconoclastic prose style, heavy-duty intellectual content, penetrating psychology and a shadowy and mythic, bombastic and possibly insane authour.

The book however, has 2 serious faults IMHO

The first could also be an advantage, depending on your point of view. Wyndham Lewis was a very, very bad man. He shared Ezra Pound's addiction to Fascism and had, in the words of Hemingway "the eyes of an unsuccesful rapist."
His "right-wing" politics were/are the reason he is not generally taught in universities or colleges. He is called a mysogynist, and indeed his female charaters are all exceptionally shallow and stupid. I happen to like the brilliant vitriol and Lewis makes no claim to objectivity.

Secondly Apes of God is too long and exceptionally boring in parts. The long satires of the artsy-fartsy social scene accomplish their goal, but personally I don't find reading about the insipidity of dinner parties very titillating. My biggest gripe however is The Sex. Sexual tension holds the plot together, but Lewis has a strangely victorian inability to write about the act itself. The Socratic homosexual relationship between Dan and the Protaganist Zagreus is rendered in a totally sterile manner.

Wyndham Lewis's ( founder of VORTICISM= the only British Avant-Garde movement of the 20th century)Apes of God is a vicious satire exposing the posture and posuers of the art world then (circa 1920's London/Paris/New York et.al.)and's wholly applicable before and aft as all areas not just the arts are riddled through with scavengery: shams and fakers lusting after popularity, getting on their knees in curtsies and bows before their corrupt Gods whom they shamelessly ape (ie.copy,mimick)in the devout worship of finance and social prestige; for which they sacrifice and abuse the very name of ART, using it only to profit greedy wiles and have no concern whatever as regards beauty or the bettering of humankind, much less the quest for absolute knowledge and solutions to humankinds varied cosmic dilemmas. The apes practice strictly black magic, a voodoo of the dollar whence they make idiot dolls of both the public, and their brethen, and mock the genuine bohemia by fostering appearances, such as upper middle-class citizens dressing in expensive outfits to look poor---the absurdity of the accepted norm really does summons an image of apes wearing clothes to fit in with humans! As comparison is legit and somewhat inevitable, Lewis' satire exceeds in both depth and vituperation that of George Orwell,and in its lyrical balled is more beautiful than Jonathan Swifts'. Lewis is of that rare species of sufficient force to prosper and forge single-handedly a one man advanced guard, as his graphic works equal in everyway and exist on a perfect par with his literary works; he was also, besides brilliant novelist, satirist, and painter who by many is said to best Picasso,he was a profound philosopher, an essayist of biting wit, a rare playwright and poet who wrote "An Enemy Of The Stars" - a futurist-fuelled expressionistic masterpeice published in one of several of his literary journasls' as a fearless, undaunted and unswayable critic he established himself in the guise he took in all his eclectic works: THE ENEMY! In which sense his condemnation was itself a form of praise, testifying to the fact he considered it worthy of his towering abuses. His works, published extensively by Black Sparrow Press, numbers perhaps 50 titles, many of them numbering well over half a thousand pages apeice; he even wrote, as his last major work a spiritual science-fiction trilogy which I pray will be published in the near future...Lastly, Wyndham Lewis unlike his contemporaries, including those like Pound and Eliot who champion his works, has over time wholly retained all the vigour initially constructed round that swirling vortex he single-handedly created, a veritable tower of Babel of achievments which will stand for centuries to come as one of the great wonders of the world of Art; and The Apes Of God, though some claim to be an elephant,ghostly white with wide red eyes, still romps through the literary jungles, levelling with terrifying stomping power all in its way, and a trailing desolation in its wake. His Apes Of God are still pounding their chests, all claiming to reign sole and supreme king of the jungle, yet scatter like field-mice at the approaching tank of a man that is Wyndham Lewis, perhaps the only artist left from his generation or this one that's capable of killing every last one of them who would otherwise take over the planet. I am, and remain, grateful some select few still can revel in his handsomely republished works such as this missive, thanks to undaunted publishers such as John Martin at Black Sparrow, dedicated to the works they print, which is a rare enough occurence these days.

This Book Is Helpful Becouse it shhows you how to win every battle. which is kind of bad becous than youdont have to think. Thats the bad part the good part is it it shows you how to do almost every super move. All and all this is a fairly good product.

This book is cool! I'm glad I got it becuse I have hard times beating it sometimes but not anymore. Save up your allowances and buy this book.

While this is an excellent and sensitive overview of the history of computer science from a critical standpoint, it may miss the essential point.

This is that while the announced intention of Cold War data systems efforts was to indeed provide a logically closed structure that would ensure national security and a narrow form of economic growth (which excluded unions from power), as Edwards himself reveals, these systems in significant ways failed to accomplish their technical goals.

The problem is that people with the traditional liberal suspicion of computers miss either this fact or fail to grasp its significance. Edwards fails to grasp its significance.

What it means is that on the ground, in the apparently highly controlled mainframe computer rooms, a highly "open" and possibly even "green" for of chaos operated as software (in one noted example) bayed at the moon when it mistook the moon for a missile. This chaos was presented as its opposite in a rhetorical trick which conceals the labor, and in some cases the very existence, of software creation.

The troubling fact, invisible to humanists outside the field, is that the upper-level administrators of these systems did not really care that they did not work, as long as the public viewed them as a closed and working system. They'd also prefer to conceal the origins of the software that controls these systems in labor and in writing.

Edwards in the main fails to link this rhetorical sleight-of-hand to C. Wright Mills' work in which the general public is systematically deceived, and a white-collar class creates the tools of its own destruction.

The Sage air defense system did not work and did not, in fact, protect the United States from attack: what protected us from attack was the decision of men to back down from macho and nuclear-armed confrontation, including Eisenhower's decision to not back Britain, France and Israel in 1956's Suez crisis and Nikita Krushchev's decision to back down in 1962 over Cuba.

The real technical illusion is not that the closed world is "better than" the green world. It is to not fully close digital worlds but to present them as closed, and to prevent the rules of their closure from public oversight, and control.

This book is written in an accessible and practical format. It assumes nothing but at the same time treats the reader as an intelligent participant on the journey to understanding evidence based practice.

It is up to date and I was especially impressed with the web address it gives to ensure the reader is kept abreast of any changes since publication.

It systematically explains the need and use of 'evidence', how to find it (the search advice is comprehensive and includes details such as search terms and the best search engines aswell as web addresses) how to evaluate it and also how to act on it.

All in all this book was great, and I would reccomend it to anyone involved in evidence based healthcare practice as it will guide you through the thorniest problems.

I'm teaching this book at the University of Bahrain, and I think it's a real interesting one. In-addition to that I'd like to share any comment with any person who could be interested in this book. Good Luck.

In his compact book, veteran Paul M. Edwards has written eight essays on various aspects of war films in general and the Korean ones in particular. He discusses the political ideology of the time, the isolation of the war, how Hollywood handled the subject and why not many of those films are very good. The second half of Edwards' book is a listing of eighty-four films (at least three of which have nothing to do with the war but take place in Korea before or afterward). These listings feature brief credits and incisive commentary regarding the films' authenticity, popularity and quality. Also included are a chronological list of the films, appendixes for actors and actresses (and one dog), producers, directors, and screenwriters, and - most welcome - an extensive list of documentary films about the Korean War. The book also features a bibliography and an index. While the book isn't comprehensive, it certainly covers most of the major films and many minor ones as well. It's easy to read and Edwards makes many thoughtful comments throughout.

This book contains numerous lengthy excerpts from John Paul II's writings and speeches about non-Christian religions. It also contains essays about John Paul's view of non-Christian religions by Catholic and non-Catholic writers.

The most surprising thing about JP II's theology of non-Christian religions is how favorable he is. Particularly in his addresses to non-believers, his praise seems to know no bounds. He refers to Moslems as "brothers in God" and tells Buddhists and Shintoist that "On this earth we are pilgrims to the Absolute and Eternal." This last statement is particularly strange in light of JP II's belief that "Buddhism is in large measure an 'atheistic' system." (p. 53.) At times one gets the impression that JP II thinks the problem with the world is not a lack of Christianity, but a lack of "religion." For those who think that JP II is a reactionary who is opposed to all things non-Catholic, this book comes as quite an eye-opener.

This leads to the major fault I have with the essays. While they are for the most part informative, the authors never ask the question of how someone like JP II, who is supposed to be such a conservative, orthodox Catholic, can be so favorable to non-Christian religions. Could it be that JP II is not the traditionally minded Catholic that the media and his conservative followers portray him? This question is never asked. Not surprisingly, then, the essayists fail to interact with the one book I am aware of that raises this question: Pope John Paul II's Theological Journey to the Prayer Meeting of Religions at Assisi by Fr. J. Dormann. The Dormann book (actually a series of three thus far) has some flaws. He is intent upon taking much of what JP II says in the least orthodox light, and in the context of JP II's alleged universalism. Nonetheless, the book highlights important facets of JP II's theology.

All things considered, this is an important and timely collection.

Mr. Herman documents a case of western disinformation surrounding the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. He provides a service by documenting the participation of a diverse set of players including Fascists, the CIA and Italian Freemasonry, which has been implicated implicated in the Vatican Bank scandal and the assassination of Pope John Paul I in the book "In God's Name" by David Yallop. Mr Herman drops the ball and, perhaps intentionally, masks larger issues when he tries to promote the notion that the P2 Masonic Lodge's actions were "against the longstanding tradition of Italian Masonry that excluded political discussions." In her book "In Banks We Trust" Penny Lernoux touches on the broad role of Italian Freemasonry as a network used after WWII by Americans, who promoted Fascists to fight Communists. She notes, "Membership in a lodge was reliable evidence of the anticommunism required for a successful career in a NATO military force." The P2 Masonic lodge wasn't an anomaly. It reveals the essential character of organizations like the Masons.

This may in fact be the best of the entire "Choose Your Own Adventure" series, which is saying something, since this was always an interesting series, especially in its early days. Packard is the master of the genre, and the tangled web herein is suspenseful and atmospheric. Lots of fun for kids.

For me, this was the book that got me addicted at the age of 9! Edward Packard is a genius and one of my American heroes for inventing such an amazing literary genre! Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey? is a great mystery, full of suspense and interesting character development. It also stands out from the early CYOA books because it only contains 14 endings, thus making for a longer story.

This book was also one of the few selected to be published as a Grey Castle Press hardcover!

Choose Your Own Adventure books, I mean the Bantam Books ones, are the best! I want them all! It's amazing - the earlier ones are from around 1980 or even before, and can still be enjoyed thoroughly, as if they were written yesterday!