En el futuro, la igualdad de condiciones se convertirá en un factor tan importante en América Latina como lo es actualmente en los países del G-10, pero hoy por hoy, seguramente, es más importante que cada país se esfuerce por contar con un sistema de regulación sólido y seguro en vez de preocuparse de si dicho sistema es o no competitivo frente al de sus vecinos.

Pedro Pou, Presidente del Banco Central de la República Argentina

Un tema recurrente a lo largo de esta obra es la tensión que existe entre la necesidad de diversidad nacional en los sistemas financieros y las ventajas que conlleva la convergencia internacional.

Andrew D. Crockett, Director General del Banco de Pagos Internacionales

Considero apropiado pensar en el fortalecimiento de los sistemas financieros de los países con mercados emergentes como un desafío no sólo para estos países, sino también para la comunidad internacional en su conjunto.

Lawrence H. Summers, Subsecretario del Departamento del Tesoro de Estados Unidos

Regards sur la Russie de l'an VI : considâerations sur la difficultâe de se libâerer du despotisme is a fasinating depiction of russia social economics.

Recently, I was looking for a book about Georges-Eugene Haussmann because of a long time interest in Paris, and when you come to speak of how it developed, that is a name that you just cannot ignore. The book hasn't been out for so long, so I took a gamble in buying it (no reviews were posted pretty much anywhere).
The first part of the book is about Haussmann and how he climbed up the ladder in the civil service (without losing sight of any of the cultural or historical background), when the following parts of the book focus more on Haussmann's time in Paris and the changes he made there (what it should be about). The only comment you can give on this part is that the maps in the back of the book are not enough to understand the bigger picture. I don't know whether this should be included in the book or whether the writer should have recommended the reader to buy a detailed plan de paris. He didn't say that so that's the star that's missing, but short of that, I think it's the perfect book you can buy about Baron Haussmann, his plans to change Paris and the cultural circumstances surrounding it.

Baron Haussman was the famous 'architect' of modern Paris and has been little covered in history: enter Carmona, a biographer who sets the architect's life against the backdrop of 19th-century European society and history. A fine balance between biography and history is created in a survey of Haussmann's involvement in civic life as an administrator, and his influence on Paris politics and structures.

This translation of Surya's 1992 biography of the notoriously contradictory French writer contains nearly 500 pages of text supported by 86 pages of notes. It is the first full-length biography in either English or French. Bataille is decidedly an acquired taste, and this book may well persuade you to admire this neo-Sadean thinker who spent his nearly sixty-five years (1897-1962) as a "paleographic archivist" at the Bibliothèque Nationale and, finally, as the director of the Orléans Municipal Library. Anyone who can weave together Bataille's scatophilic and necrophilic obsessions with his literary themes and debauched private life as Surya has without sensationalism or prurience surely earns my admiration. Surya does full justice to his subject's innovative claims concerning the role of consumption in capitalist civilization; the negative features of so-called inner experience; the alleged links between eroticism and death; and the impossibility of community. Indirectly, Surya shows how Bataille's persistent preoccupation with the "informe" (formless) not only illuminates some of the most cutting-edge academic work in art history and literary criticism today, but also eerily foreshadows recent scientific theories of catastrophe, chaos and cosmic evolution. Surya is particularly good at displaying the development of Bataille's "impossible" thought against the background of French left-wing political activity and so successfully distances Bataille from any easy embrace of French (or German) fascism, a predilection for which hasty readers infer from his "The Psychological Structure of of Fascism" (1933)--the first analysis of its subject from a psychoanalytical point of view, according to Surya (p.177).
Surya's book is not an easy read, however, if you're expecting the straightforward prose of Deirdre Bair's studies of Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir and Anaïs Nin. Surya's is the prose of a philosophically trained literary man and not an historian. I would buy this book only if I were already pretty familiar with Bataille's work and wanted to situate it in his life and times. For a first look, I would turn to Allan Stoekl's introduction to a collection of Bataille's major essays entitled, "Visions of Excess" (1985).

This is a basic introduction to essential concepts, practices, and historical perspective of the Gurdjieff Work. This book was unique at the time (1973) as the point of view of an objective reviewer who was not a "student of the Work."

It clearly lacks the important emotional impact of Gurdjieff's own writings or Ouspensky's "In Search of the Miraculous." Whether it is preferable to have a rational presentation of the concepts before delving into those much more challenging and provacative books is debateable. Personally I would say that, for those who may have a true calling to this teaching, it is better to skip all the "Gurdjieff for Dummies" starter books and go straight to "In Search of the Miraculous." But for those who choose not to do that, this book is a decent candidate for a primer.

...Very feminist. Also scary

...Hay writes pithily...she is solidly within the liberal tradition and writes bracingly.

Her book should be required reading. She's a hell of a writer

Bits and pieces of useful information buried in an unreadable text-book-like format.