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Charles Mackay first details France's Mississippi Scheme & England's South Sea Bubble (from the early 1700's). Then he covers the famous Dutch "tulipomania" of the 1600's. These are all enjoyable reports of financial manias and their aftermaths (though the South Sea Bubble chapter dragged on a bit). But the financial reader will be surprised when she realizes she's still only 100 pages into a 700 page book! Mackay proceeds to cover:
Alchemy - 150 pages of exhaustive (& exhausting) detail of hobbyists & serious investors who were convinced they could turn base metals into gold, if only they could find the right ancient recipe & stoke their workshop cauldrons just a little bit hotter.
The Crusades - 100 pages that prove that modern Islamic fundamentalists did not invent the idea of a "holy war". I had no idea the Crusades came out of official harassment of Y1K religious pilgrims! Remember this: If your country is being inundated with religious pilgrims, just try to think of them as a tourist opportunity. You don't want to get them angry!
The Witch Mania - 100pp. This section was unexpectedly chilling. As I read about European witch trials of the 1400s-1600s, I kept thinking of our recent satanic child abuse trials. It's all been done before: The wild unprovable accusations, including eating dead babies; trusting unreliable witnesses specifically BECAUSE of the severity of the charges; False Memory Syndrome. At least the rack & Trial by Ordeal are no longer recognized as valid forensic techniques.
The Slow Poisoners - Murder isn't really murder if you poison the victim slowly enough, is it?
Also covered: Animal Magnetism, Prophecies, Fortune-Telling, Hair & beard fashions in men, catch phrases & slang, Relics, Duels & Ordeals, Haunted Houses, & Popular Admiration of Great Thieves.
At times the book dragged, especially in the chapters I wasn't interested in. (But hey, that's what skimming is for.) So with that caveat, go ahead & get the book. It'll be a great investment of 12 bucks!
I particularly liked the chapter on witchcraft and witch hunts since it told me everything I'll ever need to know on why seemingly intelligent groups of people band together to banish or murder innocent members of society - just because they are different. Another engaging chapter deals with millennialism - the fear and dread that grips society at the end of each millennium. If you thought the end of the last one brought turbulence, you should read what happened a thousand years ago.
This book is often quoted by stock market pundits and talking heads as if it were a treatise on irrational behaviour in the financial markets. In fact, it is much more than that. It deals with irrational behaviour and mass stupidity in all walks of life. Five Stars.
While Mackay's points about the irrationality of crowds are useful for the investor, these "lessons" about Dutch tulips and other financial manias are cliches today. You need not read this book to find out about them. This book's true value lies in its comprehensive history and analyses of other fads, hoaxes, and "manias," most of which have, fittingly enough, been forgotten today.
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still though it needs more on managing trauma, and more details regarding laparoscopy. And probably a larger chapter on operative techniques in general. The images are generally good although some of them date back to really old editions.
It really depends on what u want from a book, thats all.
That is both it's good and bad point.
Good as it succeeds. Bad as it is not big enough to really finish off the job.
However, as a busy medical student looking for concise yet comprehensive treatment of ALL fields of surgery.....this is the book to get. Sabiston and the rest are all too big....unless of course you don't go out much and read it all night.
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THE BOOK TRACES THE EXPLOITS OF CHARLES SELDEN FROM THE TRENCHES THROUGH FLIGHT TRAINING, THE LAFFAYETTE ESCADRILLE, AND INTO THE U.S. ARMY FLYING CORPS WHERE HE IS SHOT DOWN AND CAPTURED. THE BOOK CLOSES WITH HIS ESCAPE AND RETURN.
THE REGULAR MEN AND WOMEN AND THE HEROS OF HISTORY ARE VIVIDLY PORTRAYED TO THE EXTENT THAT YOU SEEM TO KNOW THEM ALL AND MAKE FRIENDS WITH CHARLES SELDEN. IT'S 1999 NOW AND I HAVE ONLY AVERAGE MEMORY, BUT I'VE NEVER FORGOTTEN THIS SPECIAL BOOK EVEN THOUGH I'VE NOT READ IT SINCE 1964. IT'S THAT GOOD.
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It is not too long, but does not get overly technical and uses a wide variety of internationally based case studies to explain issues and topics with great aplomb.
Well worth a look if you, like me, are interested in Health Economics, or if you are into Public Health.
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What becomes clear is that even after the debacle in Russia, and the many subsequent defeats during his retreat through Europe, it was not a forgone conclusion that Napoleon, or his surrogate, would still not rule. In fact, from a military point of view, Napoleon did not have to surrender when he did. While Napoleon may have factored in the response of the Allies in determining his future, the one person who he failed to take into consideration was his ex-Foreign Minister Talleyrand.
Talleyrand knew what the Allies should have known. That Europe was not secure until Napoleon was forever removed from the throne of France. It was a tribute to Talleyrand that he was able to maneuver the Allies, French Generals and the French people into assuring that Napoleon or his son would not keep the throne.
The book is well written and although it is full of information flows easily. This is a good read.
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This book has a slightly different focus. Rather than concentrating on what Zero Tolerance is and does, it seeks to place the crime figures and approaches to crime reduction in a broader context of community. The concept of community developed both in these pages and within a wider research agenda supposedly concerned with the development of a civil society in which the state plays a smaller and smaller role has a particular slant to it.
Zero Tolerance is the latest in a line of books from the Institute of Economic Affairs Health and Welfare Unit, now a free standing institute of it's own, CIVITAS, which postulate a decline in morals and behavious which result from a growing tendency in our society to becoming more individualsitic. The model of decency and good behaviour upon which this view is based is a rather idyllic view of the English working class family as portrayed by Norman Dennis in some of the earlier books of this series. Here it's scope is widened to incorporate views on how to tackle crime which involve the wider civil society. Policing in this view is both external and internal and the police forces themselves are seen as a legitimate part of the community, reinforcing the internal rules and moralities forged in the furnace of home and family. Headed preferably, of course, by working father, stay at home mother etc.
You will not find in this book any arguments about drugs save for the superior tone about how the use of drugs has grown in our society and is therefore bad. This cannot go unchallenged. In a passage devoted to the emphasis on education and development of working men's clubs and institutes the book praises them for their contribution to improving the moral fibre of those who participated. These clubs were segregated against women drinking in the public bar and fought hard to retain that position against equality laws and became more well known for the strong and cheap beers that they sold than for moral improvement. Their innate conservatism was a major contributor to why their customers deserted them and caused the closure of many in the North East of England. While the consumption of this legal drug is condoned, other recreational drugs are the cause of much petty crime. The book ignores the setting of the laws and blithley makes assertions about theft while ignoring the basic point that laws against drugs make them more attractive to the purchasers, more profitable to the suppliers and lead many who consume them to do things out of character in order to get their drugs. I could go on but this would be a book of it's own.
Zero Tolerance is a one sided book. It excludes any consideration of the diminishing role of the church in society as one of a number of relevant institutions, and it excludes any treatment of what changing structures in our society mean for those individuals who have previously been imprisoned by those structures, in particular, for women. The supposed golden age of the working class family is a modern myth, a sociological urban legend, which did not exist for many.
Ultimately, this is yet another attack on growing individualism in our society which begrudges any positive changes and which harkens back to an age which never really existed. The causes of crime run deeper than one parent families and tower blocks. The harsh reality today is that women are valued more by society than they were which is the real reason why female wage rates are increasing while male wages rates decline overall.
Perhaps we should be looking forward and not backward to see how a healthy individualist society might develop.
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The book is good. It is not always clear, and tries to explain things on the level of a high-school student. There are times that a linguistic explanation would be much simpler, but it's a school text book. It seems a bit slow at first, and I would order some things a bit differently. However, Latin is a *highly* inflected language, so there really isn't a simple place to start. The book does its job quite well, and I'm very happy I found it again to re-learn some of what I once knew.