by a soulless man. De MAn understands nothing about the texts he reads, adn the reason for this is that it is clear that he has no real love of literature.

Paul de Man's "Blindness and Insight" stands as one of the cornerstones in contemporary literary criticism. Not only does De Man understand the essential open-endedness of every text, but also he is right when asserting the prior role of the reader in that open-endedness of every text and the rejection of the intentionality on behalf of the author. As Wlad Godzich asserts, "De Man does not read then to constitute his identity or that of the text, nor to reach some beyond of the text, by whatever name it may be called. He seeks to locate the blind spot of the text as the organizer of the space of the vision contained in the text, and the vision's concomitant blindness."
The intentionality of the author highly acclaimed by the New Critics is, from now on, collapsed. As a reader in favor of the active role of the reading process I must say this is a valuable work to understand the process of critical reading.

I must confess a sympathy for de man. He usually gets pilloried by the right and everyone who is for truth, justice and the american way, but his readings of texts are very precise. There is a certain mathematicism in de man, such that his interpretations can be stated very quickly and don't require the accumulation of much detail. For instance, his discussion of the second discourse as an allegory and the contrast of painting to music is very interesting, although I suspect that he borrows alot from Benjamin (who I have not read). The structure of the 2nd discourse is the argument of the 2nd discourse--very elegant and precise. Ultimately wrong, but there you go. Unfortunately, the precision has the effect of reducing texts to their form. For instance, if we know that "leonine Achilles" is a metaphor, and then think the structure of metaphor, we know nothing about why Achilles is compared to a lion, we know nothing more about Homer or the Iliad. De man is ultimately precise but dull.

After missing the first collection of essays on this brilliant recluse published soon after his death, I picked up the present version as soon as I was able. It did not disappoint.

The book is a collection of four lectures given in the subject's honor in 1995 on the tenth anniversary of his death. The final lecture and the latter part of the third are highly mathematical and technical and clearly intended for a professional audience.

But for me, the first lecture by Abraham Pais is worth the purchase price alone. Pais was not only a contemporary physicist, but also a close friend and as close to a confidant as was possible with such a reticent man.

Through Pais' eyes, we see a mathematician turned physicist who was very different from the man to whom Dirac is most frequently compared, Albert Einstein. Einstein was a physicist first, mathematician second. Dirac was exactly the opposite. Einstein became a social and political critic, Dirac never strayed far from his study. The two were similar in that both viewed mathematical beauty as primary and both hated the modern remake of quantum mechanics (after the initial theory) for very similar reasons. This last point was interesting as Dirac was the first one to combine all his contemporaries' work on this improved quantum physics into a formal mathematical structure. His resulting equation, called naturally the Dirac equation, is classic Dirac, short and sweet. It combined Einsteinian relativity with the new quantum theory and Dirac considered the result to govern most of physics and all of chemistry. Stephen Hawking, the renowned theoretical physicist, says in his introductory memorial address to the book, "If Dirac had patented the equation ... he would have become one of the richest men in the world. Every television set or computer would have paid him royalties." For this work, Dirac shared the 1933 Nobel Prize with German physicist Erwin Schroedinger. One unexpected consequence of this work was a mathematical conclusion that defined a "negative energy" matter (aka antimatter) solution. Simply put, he had discovered a universe noone had imagined. To this day, we see the effects of this discovery from medical necessities (PET scan imaging-Positron Emission Tomography) to science fiction (Star Trek).

The quotations and anecdotes Pais chooses are well placed and often very funny. They are also supported by the images of Dirac portrayed in the sketch on the cover and in the few photographs scattered through the first two lectures. They reveal his character well. He saw mathematical and physical realities so clearly that he simply could not understand why others did not see them as well. The photo of him "listening" to future Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman in Maurice Jacob's section is one of the most amusing of the collection.

In the second lecture, Jacob shows the path of discovery and effect on latter day experimental physics of antimatter. He goes too long in spots but is generally fine.

We were ourselves participating in the inauguration of the Paul Dirac memorial in Westminster Abbey. Especially the speeches of Stephan Hawking and Abraham Pais were very touching as they did not only touch Dirac's work but also his personality and life. He was a very complex person and a great physicist. This book reflects that more than others about him.

Paul Jenkins presents four storylines in Spiderman: One Small Break...one of them is good. I'm a huge fan of Spidey but he has been portrayed in a much better style (both plotwise and artistically), look no further than J. Michael Straczynski's Spiderman: Homecoming for a perfect example. Jenkins stories seem to slide back-and-forth between serious and cartoonish way too easily, the artwork only emphasizes the cartoonish nature.

The storylines presented here cover Peter Parker: Spiderman issues #27-28 and 30-34. They include...

#1 - Spiderman battling his arch-enemy Stromm...and then being placed into a situation where he has to decide, "Is it right to kill someone if thousands of future lives will be saved?" Interesting question but it could have been presented in a much stronger light. The villain of Stromm is also not one of the stronger antagonists that Spidey has battled.

#2 - Spiderman battling a revenge hungry foe called Fusion. This storyline takes several interesting turns, the most interesting being when Spiderman receives that "One Small Break" of the title's name. Overall an average outing but there was plenty of untapped potential.

#3 - The best storyline of the bunch (and the only one worth reading in this collection) is a story dealing with Peter Parker (not Spiderman) and his past relationship with his Uncle Ben. The story focuses around an annual attendance of a Mets game and it works on several levels. Again there is some cartoonish nature that detracts from it and keeps it from reaching a "Best of..." level, but overall this one is a great read.

#4 - A silly and stupid and underdeveloped story about a man cursed with dangerous powers and who is being chased by some friendly monks (in the Monk-Mobile!). UG! Why was this story written in the first place...much less included in a TPB? What a waste of space and it doesn't say much if this is the higher level of story to be included into a mainstream TPB.

If you're "Jones-ing" for a Spiderman read then you may want to pick up One Small Break. But if you want to read Spidey in some of his top storylines then look for other TPB's available such as: The Death of Gwen Stacy, Power and Responsibility, or Untold Tales of Spiderman, you'll have a better time there.

While many people have been dissing Mr. Jenkins in favor of the current "Amazing Spider-Man" team, he actually presents a very good collection of stories. His tale on assisted suicide makes you think, and the baseball story was touchy. I for one also enjoyed the William story, due to it's inspiring ending. However, the highlight of the book is the Fusion saga- Fusion, an cool-looking villian, has a very personal gripe with Spidey, even though they've never met. What's this guy's major malfunction, and why is it driving him to kill hundreds? You'll have to read the book to find out!

The most fascinating part of the De Man saga is the fact that he lived a lie for roughly forty years, like some sort of film noir of a lie lived in plain sight. Everything he wrote after the war can only be seen in the light of the fact, not only that he was a collaborator, but that he must have known that his past would eventually turn up, and that everything he wrote about guilt and truth and language would eventually be read in that light. His nihilism was in a sense one long exculpation. And why was he never fingered during his life? Was there no other Belgian refugee who said, "Wait a minute, I remember this guy from Le soir vole!" How could a highly visible collaborator survive a very public career in the US without even changing his name? The only way to explain it is by saying that he was Belgian and wrote in Flemish, but even that doesn't explain it. And if he was such a cad, how come none of his Belgian friends--or even his wife, who he deserted--ratted him out? Strangely, Lehman never even mentions that, as if the question never occurs to him. De Man's writing is magisterial and affectless, and it is not hard to understand why his students admired him so greatly. His story reminds me a great deal of that of Leo Strauss, another refugee who came to the US (under very different circumstances) and also founded a sect on the basis of a method of reading, deconstruction in the one case and esotericism in the other.

Why is this book out of print? It should be taught in universities as a classic work on 20th century literary criticism and "theory". Its take on the posthumous Paul De Man scandal is clear, comprehensive, and mostly convincing. De Man, a dead deconstrutionist, was revealed to have been a cad in his public and private lives. Lehman demonstrates how the equivoque and equivoation that are central to deconstrutionism allowed De Man to rationalize his past as a Nazi collaborator, as a liar to USA immigration and to influential American intellectuals in the 1950s, and as a shuffler off of responsibilities to his first wife and family, all as mere textual details that didn't need addressing in his later career as a very respected American literary critic and academic. I disliked De Man's mandarin literary criticism even before I knew he was involved in deconstructionism--I thought his insistence on universal textual equivocation, universal lack of definitive textual commitment, and universal textual self-referentiality was part of the conservative, literature-has-no-social-bearing school of literary criticism which dominated the academy in the 1950s, and remained vital though not unchallenged there in the 1960s and early 70s. I dock Lehman's book one star for his too indiscriminately lumping De Man and deconstrutionism with other, more socially involved movements in academic thought that Lehmann also happens to dislike.

In an effort to be *objective,* Mason's account bends to the negative side. The author's voice was a little too impersonal and left me without much insight into who Maharishi actually is. However, the book includes some interesting quotes from hard to find sources. If this isn't what you're looking for you may want to read "Beyond Gurus" instead.

Well I bought this book used for three dollars and it was worth every penny.In the very beginning inside the cover it states that Paul Mason has practiced TM for over twenty years yet throughout the book he seems negative about his own Guru.Perhaps he is being truthful(the reason I gave three stars) but he does not mention the benefits of TM for himself REALLY so is he trapped in a mere habit of doing TM everyday? Also he fails to mention that capitalistic Westerners are running the TM movement for the elderly Guru and with or without his permission are ripping people off for ungodly sums of money for mere words. It costs $2,500.00 to learn TM and $3000.00 to learn to hop around in the lotus position for the Sidhi techniques.He goes farther to disprove and discredit TM than a lot of anti-TM authors....thanks Paul for telling people what a line of BS TM really is. :) Save your money and look elsewhere....

There are many TM books written by those in the TM movement that are biased with all kinds of claims, from unbelievable health benefits to flying! This book is a very balanced account of Transcendental Meditation.

This novel is spread out over three years in the late '60s. The Doctor's foe is this novel is the 'Revolution man', an international graffiti artist (whose most threatening act is to leave his mark in public places). He is enabled to do this by abusing Om-Tsor, a drug with the capability of really distorting reality. Paul Leonard does some nice philosophising about the TARDIS' telepathic circuit, but then everyone in this book seems to be a philosopher. While this may be true of the age, it actually makes for a truly dull book. Paul Leonard should have called it 'Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Dialectics!', since he uses the latter word a little bit too often. Now, I'm all for using high theory in contemporary fiction, as long as it's done in an entertaining way. Paul Leonard could learn a lot from Lawrence Miles here.

The characterisation is also flat and colourless. New companion Fitz goes through the Himalayas and back, but it's hard to feel anything for him. Uncle Sam is shown to be absurdly trigger happy. The resolution is quite silly, never mind the new excuse for a guilt trip. All in all, 'Revolution Man' is competently written, but lacks both excitement and stimulation.

Dr Who meets psychedelia, courtesy of a mind-expanding drug of the 60s that we didn't know about; it's called Om-Tsor (ie. "Ommmmmmmm...", assume the lotus position first, please, and feel happy). But this wonder drug is actually flower petals from another planet, and once the Doctor realizes it has surfaced on Earth in turbulent 1967-69, he knows it could well end up in the wrong hands. In fact, a readout on the TARDIS designates the exact date the world will end, thanks to abuse, by the so-called Revolution Man, of Om-Tsor.

The best part: Fitz's sojourn to a lamasery in Nepal, along with Maddie, whom he's considering abandoning the Doctor for. In a sticky situation involving a squad of Chinese soldiers, Fitz must ingest some Om-Tsor and become rather godlike just to stay alive. His transformation to giant-size, along with his cloudhopping and titanic aerial skirmish with a similarly transformed madman, reminded me very much of Monkey King from the great tale called The Journey To The West. Fitz as cloudhopping Monkey King was cool. The whole Tibetan connection was cool.

But, alas, this story gets bogged down in repeated sequences of the Doctor scurrying into his TARDIS after being summoned by one of his companions to come save the day. This seemed very odd, and only seemed to highlight the notion that the Doctor never really has a plan in this episode. I mean, Fitz as Monkey King, Doctor as Chicken with his head cut off, basically being yanked about by his companions (hardly what usually occurs!). Also, the plot frequently stops to emphasize how much of an out-of-place time-newbie Fitz is at this stage, and this is further played up by the Doctor and Sam practically speaking in code, and refering to oft-used strategies, which suggests they have boiled their adventures down to some kind of routine that can be carried out without much passion--all of which makes things seem kind of dull and automatic.

Then we have the shocking ending, which clears up why there's a picture of a big gun on the cover. Violence as quick solution is not usually where it's at, man, in a Doctor Who adventure, can you grok it. But the tension caused by the violent choices made by Fitz and the Doctor does at least create much guilt, anger, and frustration between the three time-travelers, once the denouement comes round.

Not a particularly memorable adventure, with some strange warts that don't usually pop up in this series. Hopefully, The Turing Test, by the same author, will be better.

The cover of REVOLUTION MAN is gorgeous, simply marvelous. It's almost worth picking up the book just for the cover-art; digital reproduction just doesn't do justice to the colours. Fortunately, the book itself is also worth owning for the stuff printed on the inside, despite a number of near-fatal flaws that detract from the main feature.

The regulars are handled adequately here, with special credit going to Paul Leonard's treatment of Sam. When I read that Sam Jones was going to be spending time hanging out with sixties radicals I experienced a sick feeling in my stomach. A lesser author might have brought the worst of Sam's qualities to the foreground, having her deliver an infinite number of speeches on how backwards and out-of-touch that decade was from her oh-so-enlightened point of view. However, Leonard manages to give us an insight into Sam's thought processes without allowing them to come across as overbearing and arrogant. He did go a little overboard in describing her reaction to the sexism inherent to the sixties, but then anything less would be out of character.

Fitz on the other hand seems much weaker than in previous stories. Granted, he hasn't been shown as the most aggressive of companions, but he manages to go from completely normal to utterly brainwashed by a totalitarian government back to being (almost) himself again within forty pages. Within the structure of the book, the brainwashing procedure lasts for about a year (none of which we witness) and appears to be totally successful, yet it takes much less than a day for it to all work out of his system. This could have been handled in a much more interesting way, yet the rushed ending (which I shall discuss in a moment) to the book and to this section are very frustrating. We don't experience any of the reaction to his entire world-view being shattered twice within a relatively short amount of time. It just seems like a quick plot device that should have been either further developed or just dropped completely.

Plot-wise this book is a real page-turner for its initial two-thirds. There's a powerful drug that is being used by different military and civilian factions, most attempting to harness its energy for their own irresponsible deeds. The Doctor must attempt to defuse the situation and restore the status quo. Unfortunately this book suffers from the lack of a proper resolution to several fundamental plot-threats. By the end we haven't been told where the mysterious drugs have come from, or what damage has been done to the time-line. It is implied that these events have only been set in motion because of some outside, unseen, time-sensitive force, but apart from the mention at the beginning, these are completely ignored. These may be addressed in future "arc" books, but as I have been avoiding spoilers, I have no way of knowing. It certainly doesn't excuse the lack of acknowledgement of these problems within the narrative of this particular story though. This is a shame, because as I noted, the opening and middle sections of this book are fabulous.

The very ending of the book has been surrounded in controversy and I'll attempt to discuss this without the need for any spoiler warnings. In short, the Doctor is quickly forced to do something that seems quite shocking. While it may be bordering on being out of character for the Doctor to do this, I think that the situation he had been placed into required his acting in the manner in which he did. I do not think this would be a big problem if only the book had not ended so abruptly just after this point. Leonard seemed to be deliberately manipulating the situation so that the Doctor is forced to act in the way that he does. In fact, several events occur purely to bring him to that point. And I have to say that the situation that the Doctor is placed into is an interesting one, worthy of more attention. It appears as though Leonard deliberately put the Doctor into the situation that he wanted to, which forced him to act in a certain way, but then forgot to put in the big payoff at the end. As it stands now, the narrative seems incomplete, as if it is relying on the following book to clean up the mess that's been left behind. We only get a few sentences from the Doctor saying he's upset and a few passages from Sam relaying the same information to Fitz. What we don't see is how this has affected the crew. While this may or may not lead to great and wonderful writing in the next part of the series, it does detract from the enjoyment that one takes out of this particular volume. An extra thirty pages at the end that dealt with the reaction would have done a lot to put these concerns to rest.

All in all, if more care had been taken to the conclusion of this story, I would probably have a higher opinion of it. It certainly is not a poor book and I quite enjoyed reading it, but the flaws that I have pointed out negatively affected my enjoyment of the novel.

Paul De Man spent his early years in Europe as a confirmed Anti-Semitic fascist. When the Nazis invaded his homeland, he actively collaborated in creating and disseminating virulent polemics against Jews. After the war De Man fled to America. He was hired to teach at Yale (great background check, guys) while desperately attempting to conceal his wartime activities. De Man became famous at Yale for founding the School of Deconstructionism, an intellectually disreputable philosophy which claimed that works of art may be freely interpreted by observers without consideration for the creator's intentions. In other words, Hitler's "Mein Kampf" might have one meaning to a Bantu and another meaning to a Swede without concern for Hitler's intentions. This type of moral equivocation appealed to members of the politically correct sect, which faithfully regurgitated De Man's shallow assertions. Early in his Yale career De Man's European escapades became known to the senior staff and faculty at Yale. When confronted by his accusers, De Man lied. Yale never publicized De Man's record of violent bigotry (great moral courage, guys), allowing De Man to proselytize his message of moral relativism for decades without public recognition of the Great Scholar's character or moral fitness.

In the person of Paul De Man the politically correct are forced to confront the true nature of their inhuman philosophy. Thomas Jefferson preached freedom and liberalism while owning slaves, in direct contradiction of his philosophy, becoming a hypocrite. De Man preached genocide against helpless minorities, lied after the fact, and never apologized for his actions. In doing so he conformed perfectly to the moral relativism of political correctness. Deconstructionism became the intellectual shield behind which hides the totalitarian urge.

Although Derrida utilizes the death of a friend to illustrate reflections on other thinkers, the text primarily illustrates the double bind we find ourselves in when those close to us die, as illustrated in Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" as well as in Holderin. We find ourselves making an impossible decision. We may repair our memories inward like a "tomb", a "bad object" incorporation resulting in an inward flow of libidinal cathexes, leading to a dead, incorporated otherness and a narcissistic and deadened state, or retrieve our libidinal investitures from our deceased friend, resulting in a sense of betrayal. A timeless human dilemna illustrated beautifully here. I suppose a third choice is a healthy dose of therapy. Maybe M. Derrida should have called on his buddy M. Lacan when he had the chance, like M. Althusser? At any rate, I can't comment on De Man's political activities prior to his Yale appointment because I don't know. I suppose I'm just an irresponsible intellectual. Nonetheless, "Memoires" is worthwhile for those initiated in continental thought and some of the nuances of presentation.

While the premise is intriging, the final result and manner in which she presents her arguments is dry, boring, and difficult to understand.

Sqeakel M has it wrong. Elshtain is one of the best thinkers and writers around. I wonder what books the first review would find helpful?

The logbook style of D'Aboville's book doesn't lend itself well to a deep understanding of what goes through the mind of a solo rower travelling across the ocean. The reader gets glimpses, but not a coherent narrative. The terse entries make for a fast read and the subject matter is interesting.

It is important when reviewing a work by de Man (or anyone) to separate his character from the work itself....De Man remains an important theorist, but personally I do not care for his early work as much as for work like _Allegories of Reading_.