I found this book with a highly social impact, it is a very rational viewpoint of the reality of the pro-detah mentality. I felt I was traveling throughout the world with the author who has very good talent to describe the atmosphere where he was. I highly recommend this book.

The title of Paci's book aims at a very high goal: to situate scientific praxis within a serious endeavor to understand what it means to be human. In my opinion, Paci's accomplishment is remarkable. For anyone with a phenomenological / hermeneutical / humanistic Marxist (etc.) orientation, the book should be both useful and enjoyable. Paci synthesizes Husserl's work and extends it into wide-ranging study of the constructive potentialities of social life under conditions of advanced technology. I will risk summarizing Paci's position as follows: Everything that is, both nature and culture, is merely raw material for creative re-new-al through the cooperative reflection and action of persons living as community of peers -- and we can appropriate the sciences and technology to help realize such a form of life: the unsurpassable project of humanity always surpassing its current conditions through ever deeper self-reflection, aiming at self-accountability and renewal, i.e., genuine *progress* (not what calls itself "progress" but is often, at best, ambivalent, and -- to use one of Paci's own words: self-occluding). A very fine book. We would live in an unimaginably different and better world than in fact we live in, if this book (and, of course, others like it) informed the imagination of the educated public.

Each Marx/Allstate/Montgomery Ward/Grants/Western Auto/Walgreens train set made by the Louis Marx company came with a number of instruction sheets. At the least, there was the basic sheet showing how to connect the transformer to the track and how to put the track together. It included a synopsis of how to lubricate the locomotive.

If your set had any type of accessories, these were covered by additional "IS-#" sheets (where # is the sheet #). A deluxe set sold at any of the listed stores might have a instruction sheet for the track/engine/transformer, plus the sheet for each accessory.

If you need replacement IS sheets, this is the book for you!

RJ-Casares@worldnet.att.net

I consider this the most important work in Marxist "economics" after Henryk Grossmann's *Law of Accumulation and the Breakdown of the Capitalist System*. A careful reading of the chapter on the mixed economy will reveal that Mattick developed a critique of Keynesian state interventionism on the basis of Marx's concept of FICTITIOUS CAPITAL of which state paper issued for the purposes of deficit financing is a form. There are only scattered comments in Marx's Capital, vol 3 on state debt as fictitious capital. Yet after World War II government deficit financing became the most important new feature of capitalism. Mattick thus had to develop a theory of the potentialities and limits of deficit financed government expenditures on the basis of the concepts of Marx who never did write a separate book on the state as he had planned.

Despite the explosion of Marxist economics, I think very few works can be said to be based strictly on Marx's own labor value-theoretic foundations which, needless to say, Mattick did not see destroyed by the so called transformation problem that has excercised economists. Grossmann's reconstruction of Marx's crisis theory is one such strictly Marxian work; Mattick's critique of the Keynesian interventionist state is another. Both theories were soon after their publication massively confirmed by events: the world was thrust into Depression only months after the publication of Grossmann's magnum opus in 1929; Keynesianism went up in stagflationary ashes only a few years after the publication of Mattick's magnum opus (1969).

As for an introduction to Marx's basic concepts there are two other important works: William J Blakes Elements of Marxian Economics and Its Criticism (1939) and Karl Korsch's Karl Marx (1938). In my opinion, no serious student of Marx should be without these two works, as well as the contributions by Grossmann and Mattick.

These works develop a Marxian theoretical perspective differnet than the one presented in Anglo American Marxism by Dobb, Sweezy and Meek.

I also cannot more highly recommend each and every other work by Mattick: Critique of Marcuse, Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory,
Economics, Politics and the Age of Inflation, and Marxism: last refuge of the bourgeoisie?

Developing Marxism is helped by taking over the major theoretical clarifications and accomplishments of the past. And Mattick's work remains just that important, I believe.

Still have original paperback version of this great book. Each chapter covers details and behind the scenes stories of each of the films the team made, from The Coconuts to Love Happy. Very well done, with a good mix of pictures. I'd recommend it highly.

I have made a point of reading each book in Paul Strathern's "--in 90 Minutes" series on philosphers and thinkers as they have been published. His slender volume on Karl Marx represents Strathern at his ironically informed best. Solid information presented with insight and humor. I cannot imagine a better starting point for an introduction to Marx and Marxism. Highly readable.

Robert Wolff confronts Marx's most demanding writing, the development of the value form in the first chapter of Capital, that even the most serious commentators shy away from. But Wolff's real revelation is that Marx's writing can be fun. Wolff turns the dialectic into a Jewish joke 'Mrs Feinshmeck's blintzes', to help the Germanic medicine down. For all that, Wolff's treatment is up there with the most serious exegetes of Marxism. Most pointedly Wolff explains that Marx's style is not contradictory in itself, but an attempt to capture the essence of a contradictory world

This delightful story about a little girl's adventure with her mom and dad picking raspberries and making jam is a "must have" for all elementary school libraries and homes with young children. Like many children's books, the illustrations are what makes this cute story come to life. My pre-schoolers who can't yet read love looking through page after page of colorful, creative illustrations. Please take the time to notice the painstaking details illustrator Paul Michalak has inserted on every page. This is talent you rarely find in children's books these days. Looking forward to more stories by the Marx-Michalak duo.

Here after decades of supression we have an updated edition of a classic work of American Marxism. This was the book that gave Hook his reputation as this countries most original Marxist thinker in the 1930's. Rejected by the Communist Party USA as revisionist for his pragamatist/Marxist co-mixing, Hook eventually became a dedicated Cold Warrior and refused to allow this book to be reprinted. (He even tried to have it taken out of libraries!) Now his son had authorized this new addition that contains enough supplemental material to satisfy nearly all sides regarding Hook's contentious legacy.
In this new edition we find Hook's son giving us a full scale apolagia for his fathers political drift from revolutionary to cold war polemicist; C. Phelps providing an excellent historical introduction that finds merit with the young Hook's democratic Marxism for todays generation of radicals; a reprint of a 1968 essay by L. Feuer giving the standard cold war-liberal (soon to be neoconservative) view of Hook's relation to Marxian scholarship; and P. Berman's very interesting remake of one of Hook's own essays, in which he, Berman, interviews a dead Hook (as Hook himself did in 1955 when he interviewed Marx in Heaven).
As to the Text itself, what Hook essentially did was introduce English speaking readers to the praxis orinted tradition of western Marxist intellectuals such as G. Lukacs and K. Korsh, years before they became better known through translations of their works. This I have argued elsewere was more profound than the famous notion that TOWARDS THE UNDERSTANDING OF KARL MARX should be seen as a work of Deweyian-Marxism. Most impressive of the book's assets are Hook's explantions of Marx's dialectical method and his defence of the democratic nature of the Marxian revolutionary ideal. These stand heads above his later attempts to repudiate them, which is likley why he did not want this work reprinted.
Those interested in a more detailed look at my views on this subject can read my article "Praxis American Style" in HISTORICAL MATERIALISM No. 4 1999. Also one should read Alan Wald's THE NEW YORK INTELLECTUALS and C. Phelps excellent YOUNG SIDNEY HOOK.

This book is great for complete beginners, or for people who learned Hebrew when they were little and need a total review. When you are done with this book, you will be able to read Hebrew...not to *understand* all you read, but you will be able to read it.

This book is a truly effective method of learning Hebrew letters. It has the repetition needed when learning a foriegn language. In studying it, you are able to recognize letters many pages after you learned them. I recommend this book to anyone needing to learn to read Hebrew.

I have been struggling with the Hebrew letters for years. All the standard grammars introduce you to the letters and then whoosh! You are looking at pages of unfamiliar symbols that make your head ache and your heart sink. This book is a godsend. It takes you slowly but surely through the letters and you put them together in small words at first and being rewarded with quick results, you end up doing more than you would have done without this feeling of achievement. The text is not patronising at all and just one week after purchasing this book I can read the Hebrew Bible making the correct sounds; I might not know what I am reading but I can now get on with that stage! If you are struggling at the same stage as me (proto-beginner) invest in a few bucks and get going with your Hebrew!