For those interested in understanding cultural processes, Regis Debray's Cultural Transmission is a must-read. This underestimated book begins with the question why the Christian faith, and not any other among the Eastern religious movements that competed for converts in Roman times, became the dominant religion of the Western world in the aftermath of pagan Rome. Debray asks a similar question regarding the different destinies of Anarchism and Marxism, the two revolutionary movements of the industrial era. However, Debray's historical concerns rest more on the side of an anthropological history of religion. He notes how the parallelism between the angelic cult of the early faith and the organizational patterns of the early Church contributed to its historical survival. The book ends with a critical appraisal of the theoretical fashions of our epoch. Along the journey Marshall McLuhan encounters Walter Benjamin in an original, remarkable, insightful, and ironic account of how culture is transmitted from one generation to the next. If you have not discovered them yet, Cultural Transmission will let you to the works of André Leroi-Gourhan and Bernard Stiegler. Contrary to the contemporary view that has language and discourse as the dominant entities by which social organization and cultural transmission happen, mediology - the discipline that aims at challenging the dominant theoretical view of culture - focuses on how the means of cultural transmission (e.g., rituals, books, films, Internet web sites, etc.) modify the cultural meanings that are being transmitted. The main argument of this book is aimed at formulating a critique of the ubiquitous theory of discourse that has become the trademark of poststructuralist circles. Debray argues that discourse is always predicated on the technological and organizational means that make it possible its transmission. More important, mediology is aware and critical of both the determinism and the cultural optimism that have been typical of much of the Anglo-Saxon tradition regarding technology. Following André Leroi-Gourhan, Debray sees technology as mediating between the human mind (e.g., ideas, language, etc.) and the human body (e.g., behavioral reflexes, cultural skills, etc.). From this perspective Debray examines a gamut of contemporary and influential theoretical positions about culture. Debray is particularly critical of the sociological theories of Pierre Bourdieu. Debray also argues against cognitive theories based on a narrow biological interpretation of human cognition. This book represents an encompassing and stimulating contribution to the understanding of culture.

Larry Kimmet and Margaret Regis have produced an outstanding compliation of facts, figures and harrowing stories which serve to underline the incredible heroism of our WWII submariners. 25% of the men and boys who shipped out on sub patrols never came back. Told in an engaging and well presented fashion, no library without this book can consider itself complete on the subject. Highly recomended. You'll finish it in one sitting, but refer to it again & again.

I had received this book as a present in 1992 when I lived in Lyme Regis full-time, and took this marvelous guide with me on my travels in and around the Undercliff. Mrs Franks has obviously spent much quality time studying the flora and fauna of this precious ecosystem and with her talented pencils has reproduced her vision of that world in a beautiful and just manner (butterflies with tattered wings, etc). I can't say (write) enough about this reference - except that if one views it solely as a reference book then half the fun and excitement laying wait within its pages will be sorely missed.
Three cheers to the author/illustrator, Elaine Franks -

Who Got Einstein's Office offers an interesting look at Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study, the famous people that work(ed) there, as well as their work. The book seems to suggest that the tenured researchers at the Institute of Advanced Study have done their best work before they joined; That somehow at the Institute, they were isolated from a vibrant academic life, from contact with other researchers and students in their field, etc. As such, the book is definitely worth reading.

Having said that much, I feel that I should voice my indignation at the way the author depicted and presented one of the greatest lights of this century, the logician Kurt Goedel.

It's almost embarrassing to me to mention this, since Goedel's work -- profound and deep and beautiful, is what most people that remember Goedel at all remember him for. But Goedel apparently had some difficulties of an emotional and mental nature that effected his life -- from adolescence to adulthood, difficulties that the author, Ed Regis, finds the generousity to mock. In describing Goedel's relationship with his mother and the influence it had on his romantic life, Regis refers to Goedel as "Kurtele" -- a diminutive of Goedel's first name -- like turning a "Richard" into "little Dicky"... This is but an example. Regis goes to greater length to belittle Goedel and the appreciation of his work. This is beneath contempt. However bizzare and eccentric and troubled Goedel's life was, Goedel himself was its only victim. Goedel left the world precious gems of thought and changed the world of logic and mathematics forever. I think he deserves quite a bit more respect and compassion than Ed Regis afforded him.

It certainly doesn't have to be the case that if you don't respect someone you also don't understand his work. It's just ironic that the author, who refers to Goedel mockingly as "The Grand High Exalted Mystical Ruler", fails to understand even the most basic things about Goedel's work: The incompleteness result is described as "... the mathematical equivalent of the assertion that 'This statement is unprovable.'" What could be simpler? Add to this Goedel's own self-doubts, and the author now begins to wonder whether the incompleteness theorem isn't in fact a rather obvious and straightforward result.

But as the saying goes, "God is in the detail", and the author doesn't even begin to see the subtleties involved: Mathematics "talking about itself" -- Goedel numbering as a mechanism for mathematics to encode sentences about methematics, a mathematical proposition "refering to itself" -- indexicals, expessing "this" in thematics... As a consequence of "mathematics talking about itself" -- the effective computability of the provability predicate -- What Goedel did in fact is write a scanner, parser and interpreter in type theory -- all in 1931 -- twenty-something years before there were computers around, and people could write canners, parsers and interpreters for programming languages. And Goedel got them all right -- scanner, parser and interpreter -- written maticulously as recursive and primitive recursive functions. Merely envisioning these back in 1931 is a tramendous intellectual achievement.

Not having appreciated the depth of Goedel's contributions to logic, it's no wonder Regis doesn't appreciate Goedel's admirers: In describing a meeting between Rudolf Rucker and Kurt Goedel, Regis qoutes Rucker's words of appreciation of Goedel's understanding and insight into the problems he raised during their meeting: "perfect understanding", "informative laghter", ... to which Regis has to contribute: "Of course! Why not? We're not talking about talking about a man, after all, a mere mortal. We're talking about the Emperor of the Forms, the Grand High Exalted Mystical Ruler."

Well, shame on you Ed Regis!

I'm surprised I didn't know about this book sooner. It was published in 1988 and definitely deserves to be better known.

This is one of the more enjoyable books on the history of science I've read. It details the history of the Princeton Institute for Advanced study through the lives and careers of some of its most famous scions. There are chapters on Einstein, Kurt Goedel, Oppenheimer, John von Neumann (the inventer of the electronic computer), and Ed Witten, the author of the string theory, and many others.

The book is full of amusing and fascinating details and stories about the many famous and often eccentric scientists and mathematicians who worked in its cloistered halls. For example, referring to Einstein's eventual obsession about disproving the uncertainty aspect of quantum mechanics, Oppenheimer once said, "Einstein is cuckoo." Oppenheimer once learned Greek so that he could read classic literature in the original. Upon learning that several of his fellow scientists were meeting to discuss Italian literature, he learned enough of it in a month to start reading the books. Godel developed a paranoid delusion and spent his last months refusing any food, eventually starving himself to death, having become convinced that his doctors were trying to poison him.

Before Einstein came to the U.S., there was a movement in Germany against "Jewish physics." One hundred supposed scientists joined this group and once held an anti-Einstein meeting at a large auditorium, with thousands of people in attendence. Einstein himself went to the event just to see what the whole thing was about, and finding out of course that their objections were nonsense and "absurd," as Einstein said. But it was at that point that Einstein finally decided things were getting a little too overheated in the Fatherland and he finally left for the states--their loss and our gain.

Another funny thing about Einstein was just how crazy the public went over him. They named everything from their children to their boats after him. One time Einstein visited the famous biologist J.B.S. Haldane in England, and his daughter fainted dead away at the sight of him.

The public may not have really understood much about Einstein's new ideas--light having weight, space actually being curved, and so on--but all that mattered was that Einstein understood it. He was the prophet of a new world order and would revolutionize our understanding of reality with his unique genius, and the public was practically giddy as a schoolgirl about Einstein as a result.

There are many other interesting and funny stories about the lives of these emminent thinkers in the book, but I'll leave the rest for you to read for yourself. This book is definitely worth your time and money.

A fine history of The Institute For Advanced Study, endowed as a place that would "permit a haven where scholars and scientists may regard the world and its phenomena as their laboratory without being carried off in the maelstrom of the immediate. . ."

A memorable series of oral histories / stories about the interaction of some of the 20th century's most famous theoretical physicists: Niels Bohr, Einstein, Max Planck, Lorentz, de Broglie and so many others who passed through the Institute. A fascinating look into the every day lives of some of the brightest stars in physics.

You don't need to know a thing about math or physics to enjoy this fine portrait of a fascinating group of minds at work and play.

When I returned home from work Monday, I had a wonderful surprise. My pre-order of "Dancing with Granny" had arrived. I sat down and read it from cover to cover in about 3 hours. It made be cry, laugh, and get mad. The remembrances of the author's "granny" brought back wonderful memories of my Irish and German grandmothers. The picture painted of the author's Granny was very vivid. I,too, am from a large, very close bonded family. I come from the Midwest and so have not ever encountered any prejudice like that encountered by the author and her family in Mississippi, and even up North when the author went to college. It made me angry to believe that people would treat other people that way. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and anxiously await Frankye's next one.

if you like a book about the bygone years you will love this book. especially about the family. i enjoyed the book so well i hated to see it end.

I am from from MS - yet did not experience some of the details listed in Dancing With Granny. I never worked in or visited any cotton fields but, heard about tough times from some family members. I can relate to most of the language and upbringing that was a way of life for most blacks then. I am thankful to God that times have improved. It is a reminder of what our parents endured and for us to remember where God brough us from.

The title sums it all up. The book is indeed useful, you can find all sorts of neat features by using it, but it really is a bit simplified. Perhaps it's just me, but it was GREAT for my kids (8 and 11) who are both, well, they read. Anything. As long as they can catch it.

This was the text for part of our Field Camp. I was fortunate enough to have the Dr. Fritz as my personal guide to Yellowstone National Park. I still use the book as a reference in my personal studies of U.S. Geology. It is must for anyone traveling to Yellowstone with even the most remote interest in Geology.

I'm a nerd. I was left with nothing to read in the cold nights. I was also having trouble sleeping. I thought this book would help.

Yes it put me to sleep because reading about rock and millenia of dirt moving is tiresome.

But what I absorbed made me look at yellowstone in a new way. The book was quite clear-and I could see and easily understand how Americas greatest monument to beauty was madeof millions of years.

It's like seeing the Louvre after taking an art class. The paint on canvass comes alive with history and meaning.

So too if you read this.

Regis's book logs many of the days(incl some holidays) between 6/15/94-5/19/95 with some of the yesterdays prior to 6/14/94 .....Good intro by the Regis and Cathy Live staff at that time( Michael Gelman and Cathy Lee Gifford) Gelman still Gelman and Cathy Lee ,has moved on for even better someday.. ,plus there is much levity through out( It was given as a gift to me for Xmas 2000,I've skimmed through the entire book and got a few chuckles without even getting to much into the NY ,NY details(photos were great,& joke about Perry Como quite funny). It ends with smoothness and ease:as Regis, in his biography says to the reader" I've got to find my plane tickets,back my bags and get ready for the next show.After all,I'm only one man". 12/27/00 abj

Reading this book is like sitting down with Regis and listening to him tell you stories. You will be able to look deeper into the man that engages in Host Chat with Kathie Lee everyday. This book is an example of how far Regis really came in life and how hard he had to work for it. This can almost be a self-help book in a way because it portrays the commitment to excellence put forth by Regis to achieve his dream....and did he ever!

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. I learned things about Regis that you won't learn by watching him on TV. I enjoyed reading about his trials and tribulations of his career, from his early days to the present. I have recommended this books to others. Whoever has my copy, please return it! This is one book you can read again.

When I started reading The French Lt's Woman, i was expecting some very sad, tragic and hard to follow, but what I got is quite the opposite: the book gives you good laughs sometimes and it is very catching. I think that the fact of being written more than a hundrer years later than the time when the story takes place allows the writer to have a critical and ironic inight in his characters and events as well.

Fowles is a master when it comes to go over the XIX century using the XX century approach. From time to time he reminds us that when the book was being written most of the moral of its characters and situations had already changed. On the other hand, we can see that the world hasn't changed at all in many other subjects dealt in the book.

I guess that when the book was first published in the late '60s it caught on, and it is easy to understand, The French... goes with the sixties ideas.

To sum up, it is a book interesting for anyone who enjoys a good writting and wants to see how different ( or similar) we are from the Victorian Era.

This is a wonderfully complex, mysterious, stunningly wrought work. Fowles succeeds in injecting his postmodern, often comical viewpoints into this "Victorian" novel. Example: I love how the narrator steps into the train compartment and sits across from Charles, contemplating his future and what he has in store for him. That is damned neat! Even more fascinating is that this narrator, god, whatever you would prefer to call him, describes himself as having a huge beard, and Fowles (if you've seen any pictures of him) has a big white beard as well.

I digress...The prose is excellent. The novel remains quite accessible and engrossing while still tackling complex ideas. I loved the exisentialism ideas swirling around the novel, and in Charles and Sarah, Fowles has created two unforgettable characters "seeking to escape the tryanny and cant of their age," as it is stated on the cover of my book. This novel captures the essence of the Victorian period as well as Dickens or Eliot would, but the difference is that Fowles skillfully penetrates through the hypocrisy and artificiality of the time with his sharp observations. Ever the postmodernist, Fowles provides us with both a Victorian ending (perhaps as Dickens would have liked it; it is practically overflowing with sentimentality) and a Modern ending. A must read!

Though the story in this novel takes place in the Victorian era of England in 1869, it was written a century later, allowing the author and the reader to view the entire time period in retrospect, and make several observations on the age as it pertains to the story he tells. That story involves a young gentleman, Charles, engaged to a suitable young lady, Ernestina, the daughter of a successful tradesman. Charles becomes intrigued by the local outcast Sarah, also known (most euphemistically) as "The French Lieutenant's Woman," and they share an attraction that defies his social station and, as a societal outcast, her lack of one.

Throughout the novel, Fowles inserts information about the era, and highlights in particular the hypocrisy of sexual attitudes and roles. Charles and Sarah find themselves victims of these restrictions, and as such their romance is doomed from the start. Charles convinces himself that he has a truly selfless motive in attempting to help Sarah, whom he sees as a victim, and ends up weaving a web of deceit to himself and others as he fails to see himself falling in love with her. As the novel progresses, one can read in the comments about Victorian standards, commentary about our own modern age. By holding this bygone age up to our own, Fowles shows us how far we've come, and how little we've left behind.

To enhance the immersive storytelling, the prose is written in a style reminiscent of the Victorian authors themselves. In fact, in one section where Fowles points out such contradictions as the fact that in this age when lust was a forbidden topic, one in every sixty houses in London was a brothel, the paragraph might easily be read as "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." But even in this emulation, he uses more modern literary methods, such as giving a false ending more than a hundred pages before the real end, and inserting himself as a character in the story. These feats are done with expertise and flair, and though they are jarring at first, it quickly becomes apparent that even the tricks are part of the story.

Held up against the story of the upper-class Charles is the subplot of Sam, his manservant. Sam also has his own romance with Mary, a maid in Ernestina's aunt's household. The societal standards for Charles and for Sam are compared and contrasted throughout the book, creating an intriguing duality of storytelling, which leaves the upper-class Victorians looking somewhat the worse for comparison.

If you don't mind a novel that's hard to put down, and very tempting to re-read as soon as you've finished, I strongly recommend The French Lieutenant's Woman.

It is ironic to see Edward Hagerman criticizing Ed Regis for errors of fact in a review of BIOLOGY OF DOOM, since the book that Hagerman did with Stephen Endicott on a similar subject is so full of misinterpretations at best, and distortions of fact at worst, that it is one of the prime examples I use to show my students bad history. Regis has a gift of telling great stories, and can entertain as well as shock. He does a fine job describing the combination of competence and chaos that often surrounds weapon development. My only concern with this book is its lack of footnotes, as I would like to be able to tell where the author got his information from documents, which are generally reliable, and from interviews, which can be very problematic. Readers should also strive to read more works in this subject area if they are really interested in it, in order to get some different points of view. Regis' bibliography has some good examples.

Ed Regis tells the fascinating and complete history of biological warfare. The people, places, devices, and organisms. The book is well written, the story unfolds in a way that makes it easy to understand and interesting. One does not have to be interested in warfare or microbiology to appreciate the book.

I'm no expert on this topic, but it seems to me Regis has done his research -- the book was recommended by the editors of Scientific American, among other things -- and certainly exhibits narrative skill. In the section about a 1950s LSD experiment in which the CIA secretly administered LSD to scientist Frank Olson (who didn't know what was happening and subsequently "jumped" to his death from a New York hotel), this reads like a true-crime book -- with the world of military science as the backdrop and people like Sidney Gottlieb as the bad guys. As an overview of complex issues, this is easy to follow precisely because it is presented as excellent storytelling. Bottom line, according to Regis: although the U.S., U.K., Canada,, and Japan have stockpiled biological agents and toxins, so far there has been no serious biological warfare -- because biological weapons lack "the single most important ingredient of any effective weapon, an immediate visual display of overwhelming power and brute strength."

Of all the thousands of grimoire circulating out there, this one is an okay source. I recommend getting both Keys of Solomon and also have a lot of previous study in the Ceremonial Arts before performing these exercises.

The information in this particular grimoire is not difficult, but one should not start trying the exercises in here fresh without any occult knowledge at all, for there are hazards. I would rate this higher, if not for the fact that some of it is difficult to understand and the preface and begining portion has nothing to do with the history of the grimoire, but goes on to tell of a battle between Mathers and Crowley in which, I for one, really don't care. What these men had against each other has nothing to do with the book or it's contents and I believe it detracts from the book.

It is a good book for those who are interested in the wisdom of King Solomon, but should be handled with care, but not with kid gloves. Some of the writing is archaic and I don't believe the entire manuscript is opened for the reader. I would recommend buying the Legementon over this book in particular. Otherwise, it is great for those interested in evocation.

Greetings,

First off, I'd like to state that using this work isn't half as dangerous as many pseudo-magi would have you believe, anyone who is reasonably stable should be completely safe, the only danger is obsession.

This book is very useful, considered by many as the "ganddaddy" of all grimoires it gives access to a reasonable amount of "entities" (for lack of a better word) to work with, if these are truly demons or merely archetypes of things inside your own personality depends wholly on one's paradigm, but I digress.

The operations are quite beautiful, and very interesting to perform. The one thing that slightly flaws them is that physical impracticalities of the system, expect to be using a lot of time and money making the preparations (magickal equipment, working space etc.) this is why I've rated it at 4 rather than five stars. It should be noted that the writing is a bit hard, it may take more then one read to take in the technique.

I highly recommend it to the practical magus, results are quite easily obtained with practise.

Enjoy.

"The Goetia, the Lesser Key of Solomen the King" is instrumental in the practice of High Magick. This book gives the demonic order of the other planes. Originally compiled with the help of Alisteir Crowley, the infamous Ritual Magician, and undoubtably used in his ceremonies. This is definitely one of the Occult references to have in your library. It is not a work of fiction but considered by Occultists as a serious magickal work. This book will only be of interest to serious students of Ritual Magick.