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Book reviews for "Brunclair,_Victor" sorted by average review score:

A Monastic Year: Reflections from a Monastery
Published in Hardcover by Taylor Pub (1996)
Authors: Victor-Antoine D'Avila-Latourrette and Latourrette Victor-Antoine D a
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Uplifting, inspirational, wise, and deep
This is a beautifully written, small book about the circle of the seasons in an American monastery, as viewed through the lens of the Catholic calendar of holy days. Beyond the lovely, heartfelt descriptions of the monastic joys and rigors of each holiday, Brother D'Avila-Latourrette (also the author of some fabulous cook books) includes personal musings on the meanings and origins of each of the high holy days, fascinating and little-known tidbits of information on the lives of the saints and the origins of the holidays, as well as some refreshingly broad-minded thoughts on the state of modern Christianity. While this book might have a more immediate impact on Catholic readers, I myself, a non-Catholic and an only vaguely Christian-oriented reader (my bias is more towards Buddhist thought) have found this book moving, inspirational, uplifting, and a joy to read and to re-read. This book is an act of generosity and love, offering great insight into Christian mysticism and faith. Highly recommended.

Beautiful expose of the liturgical year
Brother's book is simply a beautiful expose of the liturgical year. He presents meditations and short readings on all major feasts and seasons of the year in a clear, thought-provoking manner. Anyone wishing material for meditation will love this volume. Brother's prose is so exquisite that it is a joy to read. Taylor publishing have done a great job with this book -- it is small, hardbound and easy to hold in the hand; the binding reminds me of the good-ole days when books were bound for a lifetime. Classic woodcuts are used to illustrate the text. This book makes a wonderful gift.


My Best Games 2: Games with Black
Published in Hardcover by Edition Olms (2002)
Authors: Victor Korchnoi and Ken Neat
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Wonderful game collection
This is a wonderful game collection by Victor Korchnoi. It has a very handy index of openings, of which you will find a food variety from the Caro-Kann (one, white played the advance variation) to Reti to King's Gambit and many others.

Dispite being one of the best players in his day (and indeed, he continues to be very strong to this day -- still at 70+ years old in the top 50!), the annotations are at a level class players like myself can understand. Variations are kept to a bare minimum in the book.

This book is very similar to Yasser's Winning Chess Brilliancies, but more games, and a little less depth. Victor just gets to the point rapidly, explains the nuances of the position, and moves on.

This book was also named BCF book of the year, for I think good reasons. A third volume in this series should be out soon, I look forward to it, and will purchase the first volume as well.

Thank you for this masterpiece, Terrible Viktor!!
Every chess player can easily say a few essential chess books: My system, Alekhine's best games, Tal's life and games. Fischer's 60 games ... well, after the publication of this book we have to rearrange our list!!
Viktor Korchnoi - two times challenger to the title of World Champion - has been around for ever, he has played and beaten the stars of the 1950s through to players who are stars now at the beginning of the 21st century.
Here Korchnoi has chosen 50 of his games with Black from 1952 to 2000, he stresses that he is rather old-fashioned about his black opening strategy, not being a regular exponent of the King's Indian or the Pirc or other 'nihilistic' ways of playing with Black.
This is the second volume of a two volume work and there is no doubt: this is the most eagerly waited book of recent months; the first volume last year won the British Chess Federation's Book of the Year award: the decision was unanimous. If you are a chess player you can't live without this book.

Furthermore this OLMS edition is very well done.


Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric
Published in Hardcover by State Univ of New York Pr (1996)
Author: Victor J. Vitanza
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To read this book is to challenge all you k(no)w.
With his Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric, Victor Vitanza makes a gift to us, his readers, of an "attempt at an 'erotic' book without reserve" (9). Yet, in order to receive this gift, in order to attend to this book, we must make our own attempt to not ask what the book means or what do we want from this book (9). For these questions are framed in terms of subjects of desires (What Do "I" Want?)--which as we know require negated objects. Such a question restricts the question of desire within a dialectical frame of mind. What if, however, we stop asking "What do I want" or "What does this mean?" (which is the same question, after all)? What if we, contrariwise, figure desire within a general economy where we stop figuring ourselves as subjects of desire (masters) or libertines (sadists) but as sovereigns, where the question of desire is one of How to give? How to attend to the other?

Vitanza's book then asks its readers to receive this gift without reserve--that is, to read by way of a general, not restricted economy. If we receive thus we will have accepted his challenge to reconsider desire and to revisit our (erotic) relation to others in/through language. Vitanza's gift to us is wrapped in the immediate challenge to overcome the History of Rhetoric as it has been canonized via the Negative; but of course, as we continue to unwrap the text, we are also offered the gift, the challenge to overcome our own subjectivity--a subjectivity based on bad faith and ressentiment, subject to k(no)w. And if we accept this challenge, we will find ourselves attending to the kai(e)rotic moment wherein desire desires desire, not its fulfillment, and where it luxuriously, unreproductively, uselessly spasms via "rherotics" (24): subjectivities without reserve, language without reserve, histories without reserve.

Georges Bataille argued that during the twentieth century, the intimacy between self and other had become merely a relation of self and things, demanding returns and profits; likewise, today, at the end of the twentieth century, we could argue that the relation between self and other has become merely a relation of self and information. The question of/for desire within this economy is always: "What is the pay off?"--Answers, of course, which risk nothing, but merely keep exchanges within the restricted economy of supply and demand. In contradistinction to this economy, Vitanza asks us to desire dangerously, without reserve, without return, as a sovereign. The figure of the Vitanzian Sovereign requires that one sacrifice both the self and the other. This risk appears to the subject as irresponsible, apolitical, and apathetic. But it is a risk that must be made, if we are to overcome the negative and its death-grip on all we know of sociality, community, and the other. We are subjects, subject to the Negative. But the sovereign contrariwise is a figure of (non-positive) affirmation.

As we come to risk ourselves and the other, we will have become sovereign and will be able to accept the book for what it "is" a sovereign lover's gift: a sacrifice which expects no return, which is by its very definition useless splendor--and hence divine--as in "impossible, yet there it is" (Bataille, Erotism 206)--as in the schizophrenic's excessive table (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 6). Of this gift--the one given without reserve--Barthes's writes: "The gift is not necessarily excrement, but it has, nonetheless, a vocation as waste: the gift I receive is more than I know what to do with, it does not fit my space, . . . it is too much: 'What am I going to do with your present!'" (76). Indeed, what are we to do with Vitanza's gift? Nothing! and everything. We will ask, not what does it mean, what desire can it fulfill, what use can it serve, but we will ask: how to give?

Read this book.
Vitanza, a (post)modern day sophist, is (not) serious. When he explodes the border zones of RhetoriK's History by exposing its hystery, by "letting in everybody," by enacting a radical affirmation that says No *only* to (k)no(w)--he does (not) mean for us to take him seriously. If we were to ask him "Are you serious/Seriosus?!" he would un/surely respond with a resounding "Nes/Yo." Vitanza is after a "general" (Bataille) or "libidinal" (Lyotard) economy of thought/desire, and this/his "book" (more on that in a second) devotes itself to detonating the borders/boundaries that restrict free flowing desire. What is it that Vitanza wants? To attend to the (radically) Other. He's not so much interested in the sophistic trick of making the weaker side the stronger as he is in exposing and embracing the fluid middle/muddle, the excluded third, the dirty underside that must be silenced/effaced for any "dichotomy" to show up *as* a dichotomy. Vitanza, then, is a sophist of the third kind, a harbinger of the Third Sophsitic. In his efforts to denegate the negative, to offer a radically affirmative historiography, he embraces *as* rhetoric's history the very voices that had to be excluded for The History of Rhetoric to present itself as such. "There are hysteries in rhetorik rather than The history of rhetorik," Vitanza says, and "[h]ysteries of rhetorics speak through the savage silences of Dora, through the savage miraculating body of Schreber and savage dreams of the Wolfman, through the savage acts of Lacan's Christine and Léa Papin--all of which are excluded, through "negation" (repression/suppression) from The History of Rhetorik (oppression)" (319).

Whether Vitanza's "book" can really be called a book is an interesting question. Its very structure disrupts and challenges the sense of authority and closure that is typically expected from the book as a medium. Vitanza's performative prose enacts language in a way that exposes the hypertextual playfulness beneath the discursive imperative. That is, it both addresses and *performs* a linguistic overflow that "civilized" discourse cannot finally expel or absorb. So, while certainly progressing forward, it also proceeds to "steal and fly"--as one of his most important influences (Hélène Cixous) might put it--to steal and fly seemingly *everywhere*, in all directions at once. Through his light manipulation of typography--his unusual and/or illegal diacritical marks--and his joyful skewing of grammatical/mechanical injunctions, Vitanza manages to write a "book" that is no book, that in fact acts as a showcase for language's perpetual mis/behavior--indeed, this "book" exposes and affirms the "authority" not of the author but of the language that takes the author hostage.

The bottom line: _Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric_ is a linguistic tour de force, a must read that will leave no reader unmoved.


Nevada's Northeast Frontier
Published in Hardcover by Univ of Nevada Pr (1991)
Authors: Edna B. Patterson, Louise A. Ulph, and Victor Goodwin
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Nevada's Northeast Frontier By Edna B. Patterson
First Edition published in 1969. A very informative and well researched book.702 pages.Signed Authors copy.Absolutly in mint condition.An EXCELLENT edition to any book collectors collection.

A well researched history.
This book is a very well researched history involving one of the most important transportation corridors across Western America detailing the merging of various cultures including that of the Native Americans. Easy reading, accurate, historical documentation.


Oak Furniture, the British Tradition
Published in Hardcover by Antique Collectors Club (1986)
Author: Victor Chinnery
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Simply the best, most informative book available.
This is the most informative book I have seen on all subjects of wooden furniture and does not limit itself to only oak. It describes in great detail the facts on why varying woods were used in each time period due to availability and why only certain trades were allowed to do specific work due to guild laws. The descriptions and photos are amazing, ( WARNING, you will be spellbound for hours looking at these...:) ), and the index at the back of the book uses the best system that I have seen by far, each picture is displayed in thumbnail size pictures and arranged by catagory. Simply look at the index section for chairs, see the thumbnail photo of the one you seek and the page location is written underneath. Family and friends borrow this book so much that I have often contemplated buying a second copy just to be sure of having it around all the time...:) This book will never go out of date. If you only ever buy one book on earlier woodworking, this is the one you must see. Would also make the best coffee table book I've ever seen.... Its BIG, its impressive and its the best, what more could you wan't?

wonderful book on early furniture . . .
if you have an interest in the development of early furniture . . . and how to recognize real pieces that are still on the market . . .and still surprisingly available . . .this is perhaps the definitive book out there . . . it is highly recommended despite how costly it is . . .


Ofelia: A Taste of Brazil
Published in Hardcover by Konemann (1901)
Authors: Annuciato Rames, Sergio Pagano, Josimar Melo, Ofelia Ramos Anunciato, and Victor Burton
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The definitive Brazilian cookbook
I was given this cookbook as a present by my Brazilian mother-in-law. It is truly a great cookbook, even though (I must be honest) I rarely cook from it. My husband (in spite of being half Brazilian-with Brazil having the world's longest continuous coastline) doesn't like fish. This book is fairly heavy on fish and seafood, as it should be.

To eat even with your eyes
Ofélia, a kind of Julia Child of Brazil wrote this masterpiece about brazilian cookery as the book of her life.
Recipes are fantastic and easy to do , pictures and lay out are simply wonderful.
You really will have a taste of Brazil with this book


On Tyranny
Published in Hardcover by Free Press (1991)
Authors: Leo Strauss, Michael S. Roth, and Victor Gourevitch
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Additional Comments
The writer of the above review has done a great job of conveying the basic arguments and value of Strauss's translation of the Hiero and his discussion with Kojeve. I think that there is yet more to be said. Strauss as a political philosopher argued the case that with Machiavelli modern political thought begins. One cannot help when reading the Hiero to begin to see further, it was already convincingly argued in Thoughts on Machiavelli, how Machiavelli's famous treatise The Prince is in many ways a response to this dialogue from Xenophon. The discussion of tyranny and the "joys" and "protections" that stem from such a life are questioned in the Hiero because of the ramifications of tyrannic rule. Strauss, in typical fashion, articulates and expands on the argument presented in the Hiero. The responses from Kojeve bring the classical into conflict with the most progressive of modern thought, the concept of the universal state. Particularly valuable in this edition is the collection of the correspondence of the two respondents which clarify, and present a more honest argument, the public discourse extant in the formal essays. Read this book as a companion to "The Prince" or studies of Hegel to see the dialogue between "Classical" and "Modern" or even "Post-modern" thought.

Philosophy at its intoxicating best!
This astounding book, On Tyranny, pits Leo Strauss against Alexander Kojeve in the never ending battle of the Ancients against the Moderns. The book begins with the text of Xenophon's Hiero, followed by Strauss's in depth discussion of the Hiero. Then the fireworks start!

Kojeve, in his discussion of Strauss's comments, will elucidate his peculiar mixture of Hegelian, Marxist, and Heideggerian philosophies in order to defend the unity of 'Tyranny and Wisdom' at the end of history, with some amusing asides on Strauss's tendency to build a philosophical cult. Modern tyranny (Stalinism) is rational, or wise, because it leads to the universal, homogenous state. The state in which everyone -- people, politicians, and philosophers -- will be fulfilled. This state, where the people will be safe, politicians renowned, and philosophers enthralled by the rationality of it all, will happen as a result of historical action, or work. We will be living in a world that we made with our own hands. And, as the conflicts of history weed out ever more irrationalities, we come to feel more and more at home in this fabricated, technological world. This leads to less conflict and more fulfillment. Which means, as Kojeve said elsewhere, "History is the history of the working slave." This leaves some of us, Strauss included, wondering if the only thing more wretched than being a slave would be living as a contented one.

Strauss comments on all this in a reply that briefly starts out with a discussion of Eric Voegelin but then turns to the main event. Strauss wants to know how anyone will want to live in this world where everyone thinks the same, feels the same, wants the same. A world in which anyone who thinks/feels/wants differently, as Nietzsche said, goes voluntarily to the madhouse. A world that as Reason is woven into it, Humanity is pushed out of it. His prescription is a return to the ancients, who, as the Hiero shows us, knew that philosophy both could not and should not be realized in time. Otherwise, Humanity will end up engulfed by its own artifacts. Or, as Ernst Juenger remarked, "History is the replacement of men by things.


The Pioneers (Cavanaugh, Jack. American Family Portrait, Bk. 5.)
Published in Paperback by Chariot Victor Books (1996)
Authors: Jack Cavanaugh and Publishing Victor
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Great read!
The adventure and emotion of this novel (and all of them in the series) made for a great story! It is very entertaining and interesting, as well as providing good Christian morals. I recommend the whole series!

A great part of an excellent series
I enjoyed every step on Jesse Morgan's adventure. There were surprises all along the way. Each time I read it, it keeps getting better. I wish there were more books in this series because I have read each one many times. (Maybe Mr. Cavanaugh could start with Amos Morgan and work backward.) I love the way he develops the characters and the plot. Keep it up, Mr. Cavanaugh!


The Plate Spinner: Playing With Time
Published in Paperback by Marik Pub (1995)
Author: Victor Margolis
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The Best Manual For Piano Players Young and Old
This book by Dr. Victor Margolis has a great balance of humor and wisdom. The author puts his words on paper like no other. The book is immaginative, interesting and one of those books that you just can't put down. This book is for all who are interested in piano from the beginner to the seasoned pro. I for one am going to buy this book for everyone in my family for the holidays.

Piano with Love
For the amateur musician, especially the adult piano player, this book is one of the best manuals ever written. It deals in great depth with all aspects of learning, playing and performing. It answers in a very comprehensive and informative way all questions, and doubts, that an amateur (and perhaps many professionals, too) may have about playing the piano or other instruments as well. - This book is a fantastic motivator and is written in a captivating and entertaining manner, one cannot put the book aside without finishing it in the shortest possible time. - A GREAT BOOK !


Professional Psychology in Long Term Care: A Comprehensive Guide
Published in Paperback by Hatherleigh Pr (15 January, 2000)
Author: Victor Molinari
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A solid book on psychology in long term Care.
A very readable and useful book on taking care of the psychological needs of residents and staff members in a long term care setting. The writers (different sections are written by different writers) really know about long term care facilities and offer many useful suggestions for working with the residents and meeting their psychological needs. I would recommend this book to anyone working in long term care in a clinical or mental health capacity.

I really learned from this book
As a professional already working with the geriatric population, I was unsure about the usefulness of this book. However, I was pleasantly surprised. It reminded me of many issues in LTC that I tend to forget from day to day, as well as taught me a few new bits of information is well. It is certainly conveniently organized, with specific chapters for individual issues. Recommended!


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