This compact volume makes a good read and a great gift to any thinking person. A series of transcribed lectures, Fearless Speech introduces the notion of parrhesia - roughly "telling of the unvarnished truth" - as it has developed from Greek thought onwards. Foucault, acting here as the master historian of ideas, is precise and erudite, his language is clear, and his story inspires. The discussion begins with the origins of the word in early Greek thought and its use by Euripides in tragedy, and then moves on to discuss the place of parrhesia in democratic institutions, and ultimately its practices and its games.

Parrhesia is a type of speech that is neither rhetoric nor dialectic, though it has historically occupied an important space among both - forming perhaps a trialectic. Parrhesia is a species of truth that mandates its own telling, in a quasi-spiritual fashion if need be: the parrhesiastes, or truth-teller, is one who puts him- or herself at considerable risk, including the risk of death, with his or her words. It can easily be seen that parrhesia is an essential antecedent to criticism and critical theory, but it is also ubiquitous in many forms of discourse. The Jeremiads of prophetic speech, the jokes of court jesters, Che's formative travelogues around South America, Taussig's defacing messages to the academy, and the best-selling literature of Rushdie that was in the 1990s so ill-received by the Muslim community - all of these are examples of this powerful discourse-form at work and play.

I first ran across the term in Arpad Szakolczai's excellent volume on Weber and Foucault, "Parallel Life-Works." After reading FS, I was frankly amazed that the idea is not more widely discussed in university rhetoric classes. The concept is extremely fruitful, first of all, for anyone interested in rhetoric, dialectic, philosophy, and law. Moreover, for anyone studying Foucault's life or epistemic universe (orders of discourse, manifestation, dispositifs, and so on), parrhesia needs to be on the list of terms. For those interested in neo-Enlightenment thinkiers like Habermas and the communicative ethics thinkers like Benhabib and Miller, Rorty and the pragmatists, or the large and diverse group of scholars studying ideology (such as Teun van Dijk) within Critical Discouse Analysis, it's also a very worthwhile read.

Most of all, though, the book shows everyone - and not just the intellectual - that parrhesia needs to be incorporated within our everyday modes of thinking and speaking. To what extent are "we" speaking, and to what extent is ideology speaking through us? What power does our speech reproduce, and what might it transform? Is our speech emancipatory? Does it contribute to the complexity of thought? Does it leave more questions open than closed? Do we break new ground, or just re-hash the useless play of words? This is a book that will fuel the mind and inspire questions like these like few others I've recently read. If you're tired of reading about the "end of history" and post-post-everything thought, try this slim volume. Highly recommended.

If you are writing software which must be internationalized, then there is no question that you need this book and you need Unicode. What ASCII is for the United States, Unicode is for the rest of the world. In this world (particularly this software world) of pontificating know-it-alls-who-don't, it is getting rarer and rarer to find complete compendiums of an entire domain of knowledge which can serve as the seminal reference for all successive work. This book is one of those rare seminal references which has in it the greatest quantity and greatest quality of wisdom and knowledge on the alphabets of the world for use in computer software.

From the perspective of domestic software developers within the United States, Unicode is essentially 7-bit ASCII in a 16-bit unsigned integer. In the immensely popular C and C++ languages Unicode strings behave like ASCII strings:
. Unicode 0/null terminates C/C++ strings, just like ASCII 0/null.
. Unicode has a type in ANSI Standard C and ISO Standard C++ (and ARM-defined C++): wchar_t. For C/C++ programmers, char=ASCII wchar_t=Unicode.
. Unicode has a plethora of standard string manipulation functions already standardized in ANSI Standard C and ISO Standard C++, usually substitute the str with wcs (e.g., strcpy=wcscpy, strcmp=wcscmp, strcat=wcscat) and substitute the char parameters with wchar_t parameters. Abracadabra, your software is well on its way to being able to have strings in any foreign language as well as English.
. Unicode characters are all the same size (16-bit), just like ASCII (8-bit).
. Unicode's first 127 values are essentially 7-bit ASCII values.
. Unicode completely eliminates all that darned "code page" baloney.
. Unicode completely solves all that "How do we stuff that odd foreign character into the printable characters on screen/paper?" problem.
. Unicode is an ISO standard which came from a defacto United States computer industry standard. It is not ivory tower; it is in common use.
. Unicode was developed with you the software engineer and programmer in mind from day one. Unicode was developed with C++'s/C's wchar_t in mind from day one. It all fits together with Unicode.
. Unicode is used as a supported string technology (or the only string technology) in: Java, C++, C, Windows NT, Novell Netware, Solaris, and numerous other computing environments.
. Unicode supports all alphabets in use in the world today, plus alphabet-less languages such as Chinese, as well as languages whose alphabets are still being formalized.
. Because Unicode characters are all the same size, Unicode characters are random-access in that one can access any character (pick a card, any card) and know by looking at its value what that character is. Other multi-byte character sets must be parsed sequentially from the beginning of the string to assure that one has detected what mode some escape sequence has shifted that portion of the string into.
. Unicode seeks to solve every defect of previous multi-byte character sets. Unicode is the fittest to survive. All other multi-byte character sets should be (and will be) abandoned.
. Unicode = exportable software world wide in the global economy. ASCII = limiting your market to the English-speaking minority of the world.
. Unicode = supporting the information systems of all of the foreign branch offices of your company. ASCII = crippling your information system so that it supports nothing more than the English-only offices.
. ASCII = string equivalent of the Year 2000 Problem. Unicode = the fix to language-crippled software.

(And we won't even discuss the obvious and total superiority of Unicode over EBCDIC!)

In short Unicode is good for the software industry. This book is the official reference for Unicode from the inventor of Unicode: The Unicode Consortium.

The views contained within this feedback is in no way associated with my employer nor any other organization.

I was inspired by this book to focus on the future more in general, and in particular to deliberately imagine the future as a spectrum of possible scenarios, which I could watch emerge and either became more likely or fall away as possibilities.

The book was very dense reading, really an MBA text, and had some good case studies and methodology description.

Lot's of comment about the author's reputation and consulting gigs.

I was surprised to learn that the French had made so many very, highly, significant, and important contributions to strategic thinking.

Professor Michel Godet is a Frenchman with 14 books and over 200 papers under his belt. A specialist in strategic planning, he emphasizes the careful use of tools such as scenario planning.

The book is a valuable contribution to the literature of serious-really serious-strategic planners. It will be most appreciated by those who have a very strong scientific bent and are comfortable working with models. Godet's approach is considerably more rigorous than futures-thinking approaches applied in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The concept of the book is very long-range, evidenced by quotes like "the faster the car, the stronger the headlights must be" and "the longer a tree takes to grow, the earlier you have to plant it." English-speaking futurists tend to look more short-range and medium-range with more of an application of intuition mixed with scientific research.

Americans have become accustomed to engaging in quite a bit of internet research to gather information needed for evaluation, decision-making, and planning. Godet describes the internet as "a computerized dumpster," all the while acknowledging that one may still find gold in a dump.

This book is complex and slow reading. The content is "heavy." Nine chapters are followed by a bibliography and index. The first five chapters are titled How to Think About the Future Now, Why Do the Experts Get it Wrong, Hunting Down Cliches, How to be Rigorous with Scenario Planning, and Initiating the Entire Process. The balance of the book, save the last chapter on The Human Factor, consists of case studies.

Good marks for content. Marks off for not making the learning a bit easier to move through. If you're not a real pro-or aspiring pro-in strategic planning, save your time and money.