A book about a place where people go to die will not by definition be a easy book to pick up and glance through. The photographers, Nan Goldin et al, do a remarkable job bring these people to us in a situation none of us would want ot be in. There is compassion and dignity in situations which can all too often lend themselves to the snap and run mentality of today's press coverage. It is worth buying especailly if you have an interest in quality, non-sensational photography.

i'll admit its hard to look at but the way you get right there in it, is amazing, it's just photographed beautifully. Each photographers style was evident. I especially enjoyed Jack Radcliffes section because his more than any other, i felt was about life under harsh circumstances, but still about life more than death itself.

Someone gave me a copy of this book back in 1991, and I finally got around to reading it just lately. It's a real treasure trove of Reflexes, Theorems, Laws, and Effects from many different disciplines: nuclear physics, medicine, psychology--to name a few. Here you will get an understanding of the Munchausen Syndrome, which enables you to understand why one notable version of this is called Munchausen's by Proxy. You'll also see one effect, syndrome, or factor compared with another, such as Janiger's Law, which predicts--somewhat in the way that the Peter Principle states that one will rise to the level of his or her incompetence--that people will persevere in accomplishments and encounters with new experiences only to the extent of their anxiety about the experience.

For each effect, there is described a metaffect, that is, a transference or application of the affect to behavior or feelings in everyday situations. By knowing the various theorems, principles, etc., one can recognize when others are being controlled by them, or when one is is danger of say, succumbing to The Bandwagon Effect or, in contrast, trying a new way of doing something, as in The Fosbury Flop.

In the end, "The Babinski Reflex" provides a way of understanding our world, as well as the metaphoric filters that people place on experience. I recommend the book whole-heartedly.

In 1955 the Brooklyn Dodgers won their one and only World Series championship, when 23 year old lefty Johnny Podres shut out the New York Yankees in game seven 2-0. Philip Goldberg's "This Is Next Year" is set in Brooklyn during the fall classic. Since there is no suspense over who is going to win the series (unless you know nothing of baseball or the Dodgers, in which case, why are you reading this book?), this book is more a celebration of the team's victory and a period piece of the time and place. The narrator is 12 year old Roger Stone, whose family is caught up in the momentus events as is the rest of the neighborhood. No baseball team was every identified with a city the way the Dodgers were with the borough of Brooklyn. When they played in the 1955 World Series the Dodgers were clearly the greatest team never to win the title; "team" is here defined more in terms of being a franchise. The Dodgers had started losing to the Yankees in the World Series in 1941 and in the Pee Wee Reese era had lost in 1947, 1949, 1952 and 1953. They would lose again in 1956, but in 1955 the Lords of Flatbush finally overcame their Yankee tormentors. The Yankees lost all three games at Brooklyn as the Dodgers became the first club to lose the first two games of a seven-game Series and come back to win, thanks to a memorable catch by San Amaros of a ball hit by Yogi Berra. But beyond the baseball, wherein Roger's family and friends all hang on every pitch, Goldberg provides the sort of period atmosphere that baseball fans should just love. But what makes this an above average baseball novel is that in telling the story of the Dodger's big moment of glory Goldberg also shows the seeds of tragedy. Two years later Walter O'Malley would move the Dodgers to Los Angeles and rip the heart out of all the fans in Brooklyn. Goldberg works the inevitability of this move into the novel as we see the urban decay in Brooklyn, the changing nature of the population, and the undercurrent of racism. It is only when Goldberg suggests that the 1955 World Series was special because it represented the triumph of the underdog do I think he is overstating his case; it is hard to consider a team with Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges, and even an aging Jackie Robinson to be "underdogs" like the 1969 Mets. "This Is Next Year" is about Brooklyn and the Dodgers, and even for a Yankee fan who still winces at the memory of the L.A. Dodgers winning in 1981, this is a book that captures why those two weeks in October 1955 were so special.