this book is simply wrong. not just details, but the big picture. the anarchists weren't like that. the artists weren't like that. these people lived in a ferment of intellectual and moral commitment. i didn't feel the author was 'sensitive' to them at all: very much the opposite. i felt he was dismissive and patronizing.

There's a difference between nitpicking over minor historical innacuracies and making up nonsense out of whole cloth. This unfortunate book is of the latter sort. It's distorted by what the late Hal Draper called "falsifictions": self-invented statements uttered with an air of scholarly objectivity. The work will indeed transport one to another world: naturally so, because it isn't real.

Fortunately there are alternatives which are vivid, entertaining, and careful with the facts. Richard Ellmann and Barbara Belford have excellent, colorful biographies of Wilde. June Rose has a very fine biography of the fascinating Suzanne Valadon. Alexander Varias has a good account of the fin-de-siecle anarchists. Roger Shattuck has a truly superb book on the rich artistic ferment of la belle epoque, the 30 years or so before the first world war: "The Banquet Years". Shattuck's book is at once a definitive work of scholarship and a hugely fun read. Sweetman's is neither.

Incidentally Sweetman's bio of Gauguin suffers from the same tendency toward posturing. Whoops!, suddenly we're in the midst of detailed technical excursus into problems of large-scale engineering, or of epidemiology. (Gauguin tried to live in Panama at the time of the digging of the canal.) Is the author expert in these subjects? He certainly seems to want us to believe that he is. Nevertheless one doubts and, in doubting, questions his expertise on the subjects of art, literature and politics as well.

If you're looking for an entertaining experience from the pen of an expert, read Ellmann or Rose or especially Shattuck. Give Sweetman a rest.

Great read, but it's the same book as another by the same author that is under a different title

Before buying this outdated book you should be aware that Dr Mann, who is essentially the father of Western acupuncture (he treated me back in 1960-1) has recanted everything this book is about. He no longer believes that points or meridians exist. Read, rather, his Re-Inventing Acupuncture and skip this.

but,it's very older! isn't it? it must be renew. and you don't give any explanation about this book.Can you throw an e-mail about this book intent

This book is an excellent teaching tool. My shiatsu teacher brings it to my acupressure therapist class every week and it is one of his treasures we must be very careful of and we refer to it often. The book is easy to understand (front, rear and side views of the body) showing bones, muscles, meridian lines and acupressure/acupuncture points. One great feature is the book lays flat when the charts fold open (about 2.5 feet).

Although there are interesting facts about life in the Sixteenth Century, they are few and far between in this book. Probably a good doctorial thesis, this is a tedious, at times redundant, read

Readers should understand that this is not a historical novel, but a detailed narrative about Europe during a period of great religious, political, social and cultural upheaval. Tracing the lives of the Platter men, Thomas and his two sons, Felix and Thomas, Jr., the author reveals a society often overlooked by modern readers. While most historians deal with the political side only, LaDurie focuses on the religious turbulence that ultimately resulted in a new Europe. The fact that Thomas Platter, Sr., an illiterate peasant, was able to rise to a position of respected teacher and publisher, one who was a contemporary of Calvin, and published his Institutes, tells us much about the opportunities for social advancement during the period. Felix's experiences in southern France and his relationships with Spanish Jews sheds a great deal of light on another portion of "hidden history." The influence of the "New World" is also beginning to be felt across! the continent at this time. For any student of social geography or religious history, this book is an absolute treasure chest.

This short treatise on the causes of and remedies for thinning hair ranks at the top of my list of all-time worthless and pretentious bunk. In short, the author holds that thinning hair is caused by combing your locks the wrong way. Too much and in the wrong direction, and it falls out. Forget about other causes: like malnutrition, emotional stress, hormonal imbalance, heredity, environmental toxicity, aging, etc. Just brush it backwards and watch your sink fill with loose hairs. Don't waste your time and money on this bald and toothless argument wearing a false and flowery academic wig.

A must read for anyone concerned about how to properly manage hair and scalp to prevent baldness and maintain healthy hair.

Guattari is an important and rich thinker, but he seems to succumb to the poststructuralist illusion that one must make use of obscure writing in order to produce creative thinking. There are many thinkers who have explicated complex issues without resorting to this sort of writing: Freud, Marx, de Man, Kant, Aristotle, come to mind. It is unfortunate that Guattari feels that he must write in a way that makes the issues he grapples with more difficult, rather than less difficult, for us to grasp. This is the reason poststructuralist thought will, unfortunately, NEVER initiate any kind of social change: these thinkers are more interested in aggrandizing themselves through arcane writing directed towards an intellectual elite than they are in creating a dialogue with the rest of us. Guattari is a great theorist and should be read, but he creates an extremely hierachized, stratified space of readers (between the knowers and those who don't know), and this confining structure needs to be explored and called into question.

Mr. Justice Frankfurter was a member of the Supreme Court of the United States until 1962. He was closely associated with Holmes and Brandeis JJ. He had been a Harvard law professor and had staffed the New Deal from there, for FDR. Whilst on the Court, his were the foremost views of the judicial restraint wing of the Court.

The book is a sound and interesting one, but it plainly enough puts a legal realist perspective on such vital areas as the extent of federal power under the interstate and foreign commerce powers and the restriction of state power implied by the vesting of the power over such commerce in the Congress.

It shows perceptive insights into the legal method of three chief justices of the Supreme Court, namely those named in the title. His Honour's views on some of these issues on the bench are shown to good effect in His Honour's sound judgment in Freeman v. Hewit 329 U.S. 249 (1946).

Why it is not a four or five star book is it is a very personal one, in an odd way, for it is reflective of the disputes over the legitimacy of the approach of the pre-New Deal Supreme Court, in which the then Professor Frankfurter was a major participant.

In the version with the Mendelssohn introduction, it is a four star book.

The material was put together mostly in the early 1940s and augmented in the early 1960s. A lot of it seems very dated to my ears, like "Soviet schools place much emphasis on the communistic education of their pupils" or "There are some men coming on horseback; one has a torch in his hand." The text is uncorrected typescript, probably just as it came out of a typewriter in 1962. The grammatical explanations are very brief, but sufficient given the focus on listening and speaking. It is the wealth of recorded material that makes this a uniquely valuable course for someone without access to a native speaker or professional instructor. All in all, though, I don't think it justifies its price tag ($295 as I write this).

My first note is that the editorial reviews attached to this book by Amazon seem to apply to a different illustrated volume of Hansel and Gretel, not the one illustrated by Monique Felix.

I ran across this on a search for the perfect edition of Hansel and Gretel. The illustrator does an excellent job, but her illustrations are far too frightening for young children. At times, Hansel and Gretel's eyes seem to glow, and the witch is horrifying... her long tangled hair has bones in it. You can almost hear shrieks and groans as you look at the pictures. I showed the picture to a friend of mine (a graphic artist), and she found it very disturbing.

I cannot give the book fewer than three stars, because it is so well done. But I cannot give it more than three, because I think it would scare the daylights out of young children. Granted, Hansel and Gretel is a scary story, but I remember coming across less frightening versions when I was a kid.

I was searching for some numerology software which would enable me to quickly construct complete charts. That isn't what this is, unfortunately. Instead it is a seperate system of numerology which is based upon different principles than the standard system with which you are probably familiar. Starting with the standard, so called Pythagorean alphabet/number table, as in standard numerology, "Instant Numerology" immediately parts company as it abstracts the raw numbers onto a 3x3 array. Energy is said to "flow" from one number on the grid to another based upon how many times a particular number is found in the name.

The resulting "chart" is heavily dependent upon the interpretation given in the accompanying book. Why they didn't include those interpretations as datafiles on the CD-Rom is a mystery - as is the el cheapo packaging for the disk itself - You will need to buy a jewel case, or some other folder for the CD, since it is merely stuck onto a piece of cardboard and held there by fold down tabs.

An interesting, if eccentric system. Perhaps it is worth looking into, but if you are hunting "numerology software" be advised that this is probably not what you want.

Another plea for gradual processes as the explanations for catastrophic events. Geomagnetic reversals (both real and imaginary) are themselves unexplained.

The Ice Ages and other climate changes (among other things) are best explained by unique events that are nonetheless similar to one another and of celestial origins.

This book is yet another attempt to try to get catastrophes to behave themselves. Try Walter Alvarez' "T Rex and the Crater of Doom", John Lewis "Rain of Fire and Ice", or James Powell's "Night Comes To The Cretaceous". The Powell book is better than the Alvarez book, but the Alvarez book is probably a good place to start if you're buying this for a young student.

Felix uses the geologic record to correlate the occurrence of magnetic reversals with sudden mass extinctions, which cannot be dismissed as mere coincidence when it has happened repeatedly over the earth's history. Felix does not explain certain other phenomena, such as why the woolly mammoths died instantly (some of them while in the act of eating, with flowers still in their mouths) nor why they were fast-frozen, leaving their bodily cells intact. Nor do I entirely buy (nor understand) Felix's theory for how magnetic pole reversals cause ice ages. But no matter: this is still a valuable and compelling read to convince one that a major climate change can occur suddenly, with disastrous consequences and, unfortunately, that another one is imminent.

After hearing an interview with Robert Felix on a radio show, I desperately wanted this book, but for some reason I just never ordered it. Well, after I finally did, I'm not disappointed in what I read.

Whether you believe that the next ice age is coming or not; and whether you believe that the dinosaurs, mammoths, etc. were wiped out by an ice age or not; there's more to this book than just that.

Mr. Felix goes into great details to explain what scientists theorize makes an ice age happens. He mainly describes polar-magnetic reversals (where the north and south poles flip); nuclear explosions on the sun, earth, and miles above the earth (those creating the Aurora Borealis); earthquakes and earthquake lightes; sudden climatic changes; etc.

The book also tells us how an instantaneous ice age can occur (feet upon feet of snow in hours). Notes are made about when 5 inches of rain falls that can actually add up to 50 inches of snow. He goes on and on about places that have received this much rain in such short periods of time, going on that it can happen with snow, not just rain. The only problem I have with this theory is that when it rains so much, its usually in an isolated area, not hemisphere-wide like he's trying to suggest.

All in all, I think it makes for one hell of a book. It's definitely one that I'm going to keep for years and years to come! But, when it starts snowing... Be afraid. Be very afraid.