Yes, we all love Avedon, Bourke-White, Capa, Doisneau, etc. But do we all understand how photography evolved from gelatine and silver plates, to Man Ray and then Newton? If you want to have a general perpective of the history of photography, and access to wonderful pictures not previosly divulged to the general public, I would recommend this comprehensive and well organized book

This is a lot of book. A lot, a lot of book. It's essays are well written to be easily accessible, clearly showing that the contributors understand and are passionate about photography. Clever thematic content allows you to browse at topics that interest you rather than get lost in a strictly chronological rendition of photography's development. The essays deftly weave together the various influences on the medium as it mutated over time. But best of all are the hundreds of photos, many that neither I nor other professional photographers I know have ever seen published elsewhere. Serious photographers are interested in the development of photographic representation. This book is the ideal place to begin to get to grips with that whole fascinating topic. Highly recommended.

SylverHawke, my eldest sister to whom I owe my life. -Claudia!

This is without question one of the best cookbooks ever. I can't get my mind around how it is absolutely "just right". The food is lavish and beautifully presented, yet, it has this simplicity about it that brings it back from pomposity. There is a touch, a feel, that is as good as I've ever witnessed. A certain maturity that exudes extreme confidence.

Stylistically, the closest thing to this in my collection is the new edition of Larousse Gastronomique. Yet that book is full of recipes that are sloppily either over-the-top or ho-hum. Imagine that kind of cuisine taken to its absolute apex.

The descriptions are utterly clear, and detailed, and in a very helpful format of preperation, finishing touches, and presentation. This takes you through the mise en place carefully and then shows you what you need to do when ready to fire the plate and put it together. A quantum leap, IMO, in recipe presentation.

The photos are breathtaking. If you are intimidated by the recipes, you can always make yourself happy just viewing this as a picture book. But if you force yourself through these recipes a few times, you will lose the intimidation and wonder why you weren't cooking this way all along? Go ahead dive in the deep end...even a sloppy, crude rendition of these recipes will be worth every ounce of unnecessary stress.

I think Girardet has created a new watermark in cookbooks and look forward to seeing attempts to top this.

PS Serious sleuthing has revealed what "Nion" is (for the Nion Tart). Nion is the compressed nutmeat left over from creating nut oil. Girardet calls for grating walnut or hazelnut nion for his tart. It will take significantly more sleuthing to get one's hands on some nion, however!!!

Of course, no gourmet cookbook would be complete without calling for a tablespoon or two of pure unobtainium.

It's a huge, thick book filled with color photos of her work -- some are foldouts. In French, German and English. Highly recommended.

Okay, the reason why Foucault did not interpet the reasoning behind the crime was because the issue of guilt or innocence was not his topic. He was more interested in how people treat crimes and approach the issue of criminality.

It is not Riviere who is at trial *again* in Foucault's book, but rather it is a trial described, which could be any trial. A crime after the fact is a story, a memory for those who were involved, but we all become involved in an event as if it were a story we have heard before. What other way to approach a murder that is to us words and the heaving bosom of a witness, the placid tension of the accused? We confront a forced performance with confused or feigned characterizations.

Yet even said, this is not Foucault, nor what Foucault was reaching for. All Foucault does is show how people act in response to crime and reveal the obvious ploys that repeat themselves throughout history, because the story that composes our lives has not died.

And if a man approached you with a mark on him, and claimed to have killed his brother, and the soil did cry out to you, would you raise your hand against him?

This book is a good accompanyment to his work Discipline and Punish.

It is early in February, 2001. Can it be said that America is in love with its Serial Killers? Sure. With the range of "Reality TV" and movies, the writing is on the wall. What about a healthy alternative to all this bloodbath? What about a truelly intellectual examination into the complexity of the criminal mind. Part Dostoyevsky, part unbelievable, "I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother ... : A Case of Parricide in the Nineteenth Century" is a highly thought provoking analysis of the social construction of the criminal. The book guides you through the labyrinth/maze that is the criminal justice system and the mechanism involved in the prosecution of the criminal. The book is comprehensive, it includes testimony (from several angles), a suspect written confession, trial examination and post archival examination. Foucault has brought together through his talent to uncover archives and present them in an interesting manner. If you are looking for an alternative without sacrificing the excitement of a murder mystery - this is your entry ticket to the Post Modern examination of crime. Nothing less than 5 stars!

The story of the young Frenchman who murdered his family is a fascinating piece of documentary work by Foucault and his student assistants. However, I would have liked to know much more about how they interpret this "unusual" behavior.

Sometimes I am simply proud that I have read a book. This slim volume falls into that category. The fourteen short chapters explode with new ideas, fresh perspectives, and tantalizing viewpoints. To summarize these riches is unlikely to do them justice, yet I will try.

De Certeau inverts social values and cultural hierarchies. His hero metaphor is not the exemplar, but rather the ant. Wisdom resides not in the pronouncement of expert or philosopher, but in the routine discourse between ordinary people. To De Certeau the definitional constraints imposed by the experts result in artificial distinctions. Only the discourse of ordinary people is firmly rooted in experience and embraces the varieties and logical complexities of living.

Among these complexities of life is the amazing adaptive capacity of the ordinary. Even the most oppressive and controlling of cultures cannot eradicate the subversive agency of the peasant. This subversive agency is expressed through mythic stories, common proverbs, and verbal tricks. De Certeau refers to the adaptive capacity of the ordinary as tactics of living, and these tactics may be best exemplified when the worker does the personal while on the clock.

The distinction between strategy and tactics is central to De Certeau's thought. Strategy refers to the top-down exercise of power to coerce compliance. Tactics refer to the opportunistic manipulations offered by circumstance. The conflict between strategies and tactics is ironic - as strategic forces expand to increase dominance, there is a corresponding increase in opportunity for tactical subversion.

De Certeau relates his ideas to the theoretical work of Foucault and Bourdieu, and continues his inverted perspective by looking anew at the concept of city, commuter travel by rail, story telling, writing, reading, and believing.

This book is more of a riddle than a narrative; de Certeau provides glimpses of his meaning from time to time, but deliberately avoids propositional clarity. This style requires that the reader take an unusual stance toward this book. Instead of expecting the author to communicate, the reader must content himself with hints and suggestions of meaning. I am convinced that these hints and suggestions are more than worth the reader's investment of time. Find a quiet place and enjoy!

Michel de Certeau's brilliant book is one of the primary nodes in the historical switchbox that eventually crossed the signals that led us through structuralism and practice theory to critical realism and Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. His classic exploration of everyday life will send flashes of light and pleasure through the mind on a constant basis - his dense, absolutely masterful, and witty expository quasi-poetry on economy, power, and practice is essentially an extended series of aphorisms, upon any one of which an entire essay could be based. And a good one, at that.

What we have here is a celebration of the everyday, the common, the mundane, and the wonderful capacity of life to resist systematization and classification via its organic flexibility and espirit de corps. It is a wonderful wake-up call: "A few individuals, after having long considered themselves experts speaking a scientific language, have finally awoken from their slumbers and suddenly realized that for the last few moments they have been walking on air, like Felix the Cat in the old cartoons, far from the scientific ground. Though legitimized by scientific knowledge, their discourse is seen to have been no more than the ordinary language of tactical games between economic powers and symbolic authorities."

Writing in the tradition of Lefevbre (more so than anyone else who comes to mind at the moment), his work touches upon contemporary Foucault and Bourdieu only briefly and then moves on to do much more. For example, in the way of analyses of strategic and tactical behavior, resistances, spatial practices, sublatern hermeneutics, and state/scientific ideologies of secrecy and knowledge. In de Certeau, we see not just a clearing of the intellectual path for towering figures such as Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Giddens, Lash, Appadurai, and Taussig (to name only a handful) - enabling them to come whistling along with their variously insightful ideas from A to Z - but we see it done with a panache and "Ich weiss es nicht" that is memorable in the persona it invokes.

And as long as you're sitting on the Paris-Munchen ICE, scratching your chin and contemplating the axiological implications of beer or coffee at 9am, I can't think of anything better to read than de Certeau's comments on the rite of passage of Railway Incarceration and Navigation (Chapter VIII), in which a whole series of transformations is extracted from the mundane in a suprahumane and very-French manner. Bon voyage!

This is one of the great books of French post-structuralist thought. I realize that to some people that might be like saying "one of the nicest Nazis I know." But for those who don't immediately dismiss the entire genre, there is much to be gained from reading, and rereading, this book.

In essence, Certeau is challenging the rather despairing vision of Foucault's The Order of Things, with its image of the panopticon from which no one can escape. Certeau focuses on everyday practices to see how people do in fact escape the all-seeing gaze of the panopticon. In particular his distinction between "strategy" and "tactics" is useful and intriguing.

The language is highly poetic and at times difficult going, but *how* Certeau says what he says is in some ways as important as *what* he says. He wants to write in a way that at the same time uses and escapes the constraints of ordinary language. It takes some getting used to, but it is worth it.

I used this book for a global operations class. It contains both text and cases in one book. However, cases in some chapters do not directly relate to the content presenting in those chapters. Moreover, some cases are really difficult to read and understand the context of the case for analysis. However, there are some good HBS cases.

is a good text. easy to understand .

This book was a disappointment. It is good for an epidemiologist looking for peripheral information, but not for a non epidemiologist looking for detailed epidemiological information. It lacks many basic terms and concepts.

Somewhat technical for the average person who's trying to get a handle on the issues (i.e. me). Now somewhat outdated as well. Check out Dreaming Equality for a more modern view.