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I find this book to be an excellent introduction to Mussar. It is almost painless but it does require effort and concentration.
The tradition in question is Mussar, which has its roots in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. This so decimated Mussar practitioners that Mussar did not gain prominence in the study of Judaism as a whole. So, for Alan Morinis, after much research, it was a "find". His description of it is so impelling that it is hard to put aside. As an autobiography, the character of the author as a secular Jew comes through very clearly in all its ramifications during his journey towards spiritual fulfilment.
Also central to the book's treatment of Mussar is the character of the person who ultimately became Morinis' teacher. Rabbi Yechiel Yitzchok Perr, living in New York to where the author travelled several times from Vancouver for study. Rabbi Perr, though orthodox himself teaches without imposing orthodoxy on the learner as the writer might have expected, since he found the subject grounded in orthodoxy.
However, Mussar is not only for studying, but for practising: its basic principles emanating from the soul of every practitioner, different as they are from every other practitioner.
I found the book positively exciting because of the honesty of expression about the author's feelings at every stage of the journey. The writing is imbued with a very human quality that draws the reader into the author's soul, which is the whole point of the exercise of Mussar: to develop the soul toward spiritual perfection as far as possible.
We are all different from each other with regard to the elements of our characters. Mussar calls these elements, "soul-traits". "We don't have a soul. We are a soul". Through the discipline of Mussar we are helped to improve these various soul-traits: for example, by working on our anger, impatience, etc. until we become more holy. Rabbi Perr side-steps a definition of holiness, saying that, "you'll know about holiness just from the experience."
There's a lot more to the book than can be described here, such as what the Mussar exercises consist of. Suffice it to say that the end result of the book is a beautiful document, the essence of it being the "soul-perspective", leading to the possibility of all who read it to face life with equanimity.
A. Naomi Katz
The theme is a story of getting lost on life's journey and on finding a way back- no easy task in our North American culture of "materialism and self-centeredness".
Alan Morinis generously shares his "journey" which took him to the little known ancient Jewish spiritual practice called Musar.
At first through his reading and studying of obscure texts and eventually with the guidance of a wise and compassionate teacher, the author rediscovers his "true nature".
The book overflows with wisdom and ancient truths and the practices and techniques of Musar are clearly laid out at the end of each chapter.
Morinis wrestles with the question of whether one has to be a practicing Orthodox Jew to follow the path of Musar and concludes that one doesn't. In fact, I think that the path of Musar is open to all who genuinely thirst after truth and wisdom.
The author generously shares his "journey" and his discoveries in a way that enables the reader to begin an ancient practice that can be life transforming.
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There are ten short stories in this collection, with many of them previously appearing in horror magazines. The first story, "The Piper," is a grim reworking of the "Pied Piper of Hamlin." But there aren't any mice in this tale. Instead, a man who has spent his life helping others discovers that when children die in violent events, they tend to come back in spirit. Through a case of mistaken identity, this man, John Piper, must find out why the children haunt him, and what he can do for them. This is one of the better stories in the collection, and an excellent way to start the book.
Another personal favorite is, "Four Elements and an Emphatic Moon." This story is about reincarnation of a type that would make Shirley McClaine shriek in horror. The starting point is medieval France, where a group of nuns comes down with some sort of disease. One of the nuns is not what she seems, and a woman who falls in with this monstrosity becomes attached to her through the ages. Through endless reincarnations the two seek each other out for some sort of sick reconciliation. The grue flows like water as Aztec rituals, mental asylums, and autopsies all make an appearance.
Charlee takes a stab at Lovecraftian horror with "The Begetting," and "The Vanishing Point." In "The Begetting," old French rituals in a Florida town reemerge in the modern day when a man calls a degenerate local woman for a mating ritual. The subsequent scenes of conception and birth are too sickening to include in this review, but Jacob's prose does worthy tribute to Lovecraft. Check out this line:
"In her mind Nicole saw a creature shaking a rattle filled with dead stars and howling the end of aeons."
"The Vanishing Point" is also Lovecraftian, although a bit harder to decipher. It seems to be about an alternate dimension (or is it our dimension?) populated with dead people and strange creatures that undergo plastic surgery to hide their hideous physical forms. Well, reading Lovecraft is tricky at times, so this story fits right in with that author's strange writings.
"Window for Anon" is a creepy story about an interstellar cloud slowly nearing the Earth. Before the cloud arrives, people who look into the sky see something so horrifying that it literally causes them to freeze with their eyes locked towards the heavens. The story is also about a Gellie, a mother imprisoned for arson and her strange son, Anon. It is difficult to discern whether this story is an apocalyptic tale or a story about a mother and child because of the hallucinatory imagery that runs rampant throughout the story.
Finally, there is "Guises," the last short story in the collection. In this tale, a woman, named Tombi, is born with a real chip on her shoulder about her looks. Tombi manages to somehow acquire the ability to change her appearance, often with horrific results. At the same time, a few gruesome murders occur that have a direct bearing on Tombi. While the ending isn't very satisfying, it is the trip along the way that bears real fruit. Tombi's transformations are unsettling, to say the least.
As for the poetry, all that should really be said is that it's free verse and it often conjures up some strange imagery. If you enjoy poems that stray far from accepted standards, the stanzas in this book should do the trick quite nicely.
The cover art on this book in no way relates to some of the excellent stories found inside. Ignore the cheesy cover and pick up a copy of "Guises." Remember, these small press books go out of print fast. Charlee Jacob's next novel, if anything like her previous work, promises to be an impressive addition to the horrorphile's bookshelf. Read "Guises" to steel yourself for the coming horror.
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What is implied in Christian Jacob's book is quite broad and revolutionary. In color plate 2, page 288, "independent populations climbing peaks" reminds me of the recent findings of a particular species of parrot (thought extinct in South America since 1910)living currently on some Volcano in South America by residents there by accident. Yet, through evolutionary models, one can track species and perhaps any existence.
What is most interesting is what is implied--that tracking can be used to oppress or cause extinctions (such as poaching) and so it could be implied that randomness would occur by species under these conditions to avoid tracking such as avoiding evolutionary tracking. Randomness would therefore be an evolutionary process to survive. Finding randomness could suggest a species or whatever is possibly trying to avoid being tracked through evolutionary tracking. Evolutionary tracking is relatively new and so this is why there is perhaps little randomness (or maybe none has been discovered yet), but randomness is a possibility that seems to be a probable result and not clearly an original play--since so far, not much randomness if any has been found.
If one turns Color Plate 3 on page 289 upside down, one is perhaps presented with an ocean. Recently, life that does not need oxygen to exist has been found living deep in an ocean. The life was most likely dicovered without using evolutionary tracking models, though the models would suggest something is there though what has evolved or not is not clear and would need more elaborate formulas and charts of various sorts. That ocean life found uses other sources as reported by this science news wire:
[URL]
So, Color Plate 3 is quite interesting as it would suggest that in addition to the findings of the scientists, there are at least two other entities there they have not discovered...
It is as though the models and formulas can be applied in a variety of instances due to lack of randomness and that evolutionary tracking has so far not been avoided with randomness...
This suggests early birth of Earth and evolution of all or most species and things on Earth, evolutionary tracking not done until recently by Earthlings or others, or that evolutionary tracking so far is used for good and not to cause extinction or disruption...
I would say the book is written for scientists mainly and there are a number of formulas, but they do apply to the humanities.
The author here, Jacob, does an excellent job of introducing the reader gradually to the different concepts of simulating evolution. As you can download the Mathematica notebooks and run them on your own computer, this quickly becomes a fun and interactive book.
The book starts with simple selection processes for reproduction. Select shapes, colors or features and see a next generation evolve! This can be a fun game. See breeding and mutation be used to search for an optimum of a three-dimensional function, where the reader knows the global optimum, while different "populations" try to find it by evolutionary methods-mutating or breeding to a different spot, which they evaluate and according to its height be successful in the passing of their genes or not. Other fun chapters include evolutionary production of mobiles and flowers. The culmination is in the evolution of algorithms. This evolves small programs for searching for food in a maze. The successful programs "breed," "mutate," and reproduce, while the unsuccessful ones starve and die. The result is a complex path toward better algorithms for searching for food.
Part of the value of this book for me is that it really shows the limits of evolutionary analysis. You can simulate the successes--the butterflies that do manage to change colors to avoid falling easy prey when the environment changes; the evolutionary mechanisms that find the global optimum of a function-but there is no concrete way to determine or describe their efficiency ex ante. This is a major failure of evolutionary analysis generally, rather than a drawback of the book. If anything, the book deserves credit for making this failure understandable, although Jacob does not spend time exploring or solving the problem of determining evolutionary fitness.
[To put it in an example, suppose there are two evolutionary mechanisms. An organism can evolve by mutation or by reproduction. Mutation is the random change of some individuals in the population, and the change makes them either more or less successful in their environment. Reproduction means parents producing an offspring by mixing their features, and the different offspring will have different degrees of success in their environment. We can simulate their operation in a hypothetical environment, by for example, saying that the background foliage changes color and organisms have different probabilities of being eaten by predators depending on their color. We run the simulation and see which evolutionary mechanism adapts to the new environment faster and better. Nevertheless, we cannot conclude that the evolutionary mechanism that won this test will win every test. Needless to say, when designing evolutionary systems this conclusion is crucially necessary. If we are designing a computer search program, should we have it "mutate" or "reproduce"? Since we do not know the challenges it will face (the changes in the environment that it must overcome) we cannot evaluate its success ex ante.]
With the caveat of not exploring measurements of the success (fitness) of different evolutionary mechanisms, this is a spectacular book. It is worth comparing it with the books of the various biologists, who simply offer examples of evolutionary changes from the past or hypotheses of evolutionary explanations for various phenomena. Those are speculations of amateurs compared to the experimentation and verification that Jacob's approach offers. That the field is not ready for rigorous conclusions is unfortunate, but something that is no fault of this author.
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Cheers!
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I opened the book, and on the first page read, "The State of Israel was established on the broken necks of the Twelve who were sent to the gallows by the British hangman." So said Professor Joseph Klausner in 1947.
I turned the book over and read Jabotinsky's famous declaration many years before the Holocaust: "We are standing at the edge of an abyss, I see an avalanche on the Horizon rolling toward us. We are facing an elemental cataclysmic calamity of immeasurable consequences and proportions. Either you liquidate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will liquidate you."
I turned the pages of the book, I read in bold letters the words of Moshe Sharett, The second prime minister of Israel and a member of the Labor Party: " I said that I utterly reject Peres and see in his ascendance the most malignant form of political corruption, ... it will be a cause for national mourning and the State of Israel should render Kriah (rendering garments over the dead) if Peres becomes a minister in the government of Israel."
Ester (Cohen) Bar-Natan July 1998, Charlottesville, Virginia
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I also read the book with the hope to find out whether urban planning could serve as an analogy for software development. I think that it can, but I haven't thought about this enough to express the ways in which it's relevant. Jacobs writes that neighborhoods which have particular properties (short blocks, diversity of primary uses, etc.) will "work" -- that there are properties which, when present, almost guarantee that neighborhoods will thrive. I have a feeling that such properties exist for software development teams and the systems they develop; the question is what they are.
This book is one of those that stay with you, and influence your thinking in other areas.
From the outset, Jane Jacobs makes it clear that this is an attack on City Planning as it's done by most city governments. It's almost Jeffersonian in its recommednations: teh cities that are the most livable are those which are the least planned by top-heavy, over-manageed bureaucracies.
Like all whose insigts are brilliant, Jacobs' observations and recommendations are deliberately distorted or totally ignored by those who are actively involved in "city planning" in nearly every American City.
THE ECONOMY OF CITIES and Jane Jacobs' writings generally, serve to illustrate the major problems for those with brilliant insights, sagacious advice, and great wisdom: the people who should be the prime audience are not interested.
A simply wonderful book.
Lancelot Fletcher lrf@aya.yale.edu
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Seth Rutherford was just about to be married. He was one day away from tying the knot with fellow professor at Gannon University, Mary Kathryn O'Malley. He had dreams of them being perfect partners in everything, from marriage to research out on Lake Erie. So he is stunned when at the wedding, his bride-to-be ditches him just as she is about to say "I do." He never saw it coming, and thought she was as happy about their partnership as he was.
Desi Smith was the wedding coordinator for this bridal disaster. She feels for Seth, and tries to convince him to carry on with the reception anyhow, since everyone is there and everything is ready. Desi has had a crush on Seth since their high school days, so her heart goes out to him as he is humiliated in front of everyone. And when he gets totally drunk at the reception that wasn't, she takes it upon herself to make sure he gets home safely, not expecting to have anything to do with him after that. Until she gets in a bind...
When Desi's assistant gets a chance of a lifetime the day before her next job, she is stuck and can't think of anyone to help her out. Her parents won't help as they have never made a secret of the fact they thought she was wasting her God-given talents in her chosen career. So her only choice is to call Seth, and hope he will help her out. He agrees, not realizing what he is agreeing to, and he is horrified to find out what she needed him for, saying she owes him for that one.
His return favor is that he asks her assistance to collect samples out on Lake Erie. She agrees and while out, she decides to get him to have some fun no matter what it takes. Seth is a stodgy professor, obsessed with his work and the logic of the scientific world. He swore to never let emotion get the better of him, having seen his parents, two overly emotional people who fight... and make up loudly and with abandon. Desi is a true romantic, who is all about having fun and enjoying life. As the two of them spend more time together, they grow more attracted to each other, finding it harder and harder to resist the magnetic pull between them. Seth has difficulties dealing with Desi's passion for life thinking there is no rhyme or reason to it. But the more he is with her, the more he realizes that maybe having zest for life - and each other - isn't such a bad idea after all.
Ms. Jacobs has done it again! Her own love of life and finding the humor in it comes through in this story, and the lives of Seth and Desi. Her love of the town she calls home is also obvious, in that this story, as are all of her books, is set in Erie, PA. Seth and Desi's opposition in everything provides numerous moments of hilarity for the reader. Her attempts to make him see the finer things in life are sometimes met with disastrous results, but that doesn't stop her from trying. Seth's insistence that everything in the world has some sort of logical explanation drives her to distraction; all the while it endears him to her even more.
Those readers who desire some lightness with their romance will find that How to Catch a Groom does not disappoint. Seth and Desi are made for each other, even though it takes him a while to figure that out. But the journey to that discovery makes it all the more wonderful when he does. Logic and emotion both have a place in life... and love. Ms. Jacobs' story proves that, and it is a delightful one. She is a wonderfully talented author who is making her mark in romance. Why not try a few others of her books as well? There is even one in the works, where the reader will find some favorite characters from this story come to life again.
Along with Russell Blaylock's book Excitotoxins: The Taste that Kills, this book is very useful to read for you to decide if you want to consume this artificial sweetner. There is even some evidence afloat that substituting diet sweetners doesn't actually lead to any appreciable weight loss, and that the mere taste of sweetness is interpreted by the brain as having EATEN a real sweet, and weight gain can occur. There are other concerns that aspartame and MSG have neurological effects.
Aspartame has crept into so many commercially prepared foods; even foods with sucrose sometimes have added aspartame. It's also found in vitamin drinks, gums and many other products. In fact it is getting darn hard to avoid.
In any case, there are fine alternatives to aspartame: if you are diabetic, you of course must limit carbohydrates, especially sweets. If you just substituting something for sugar because you are dieting, try substituting stevia extract (a sweet tasting herb found in some healthfood stores) or using a small amount of raw sugar or honey and just limiting your sweet intake. The less sweets you eat, the less you'll want, and you'll start to notice and enjoy the natural sweetness of fruits and even vegetables.
If you read this book, you'll also get a lot out of Blaylock's book on Excitotoxins. Both are essential reading to anyone who is concerned about their diet.