I give this book a high rating because of its influence in the field. It is the first case study of laboratory science ever published, and is often quoted in anthropology, sociology, and philosophy of science. The book's conclusion is social constructivist in nature, to a very extreme degree. Scientific facts are not discovered, they are constructed through social processes. The actual study was done by Latour, a French philosopher, and the method was to assume strangeness. That is, Latour pretended he didn't know anything about what the scientists were doing and tried to make up (construct) an account. The usual problems with relativism plague Latour and Woolgar's brand of social constructivism, most notably issues with reflexivity. If scientific accounts are constructed and do not have to do with the phenomena, why should we think that Laboratory Life tells us anything about the phenomena of laboratory science? Their answer is that we shouldn't. The only question in evaluating texts is, "are you convinced?" If not, fine. Come up with a better (more persuasive) account. People who think that science, philosophy, and academe in general should have something to do with the real world will be horribly frustrated by this conclusion. But everyone should be frustrated by the fact that the conclusion just doesn't follow from the data Latour gathered. It seems to come entirely from prior convictions of the authors. I recommend reading the book, however, because of its popularity and because it is a fantastic exemplar of a bad relativist and constructivist argument. Get the revised edition, which has a postscript and extra references. For a chuckle, look up some of the reviews (cited in the 2nd ed. references) from scientific journals. They are mostly cheerful recognitions of the book's subject matter (laboratory science) without any reference to--or argument with--the strong anti-realist claims. It makes you wonder if these people acctually read the book.

Latour's book "Science in Action" is more trendy... but I suggest you read this earlier book instead. It's clear and makes its points in a compelling fashion.

It seems to me that the previous reviewer is either a wooly-head theoretician or that the previous reviewer hasn't actually done any research in a laboratory. Because in this book, there are many sparkling insights into the way that science is practised.

It takes a while for Latour to get going as he is quite verbose in the early section, where he discusses his "anthropological" approach to science studies. However, after that, he makes a couple of points that as far as I know, he was the first philosopher of science to make.

First, Latour demonstrates the intimate relationship between the publication of scientific papers, scientific prestige, laboratory finances and actual experiments. He makes the seemingly obvious, though not so when the book came out, that the possibility of experiments in a lab requires the influx of an amazing out of money. The acquisition of this research money takes up a large proportion of the time of the head honcho scientist in a laboratory .

Second, Latour shows that entities in science are always defined by a network of properties that are experimentally determined. Scientific entities are hardly ever seen as objects with a few simple analytical properties. In fact, the more properties the better. And it doesn't matter if the mesh of properties is convoluted and seemingly contradictory. For each property concerned, there must be a vast array of material techniques to measure, control and manipulate that property. A new entity in science is accepted as real only when there are enough inter-locking properties to guarantee its existence. No method, by itself, is ever convincing.

Latour points out that once an object is deemed to be real, scientists often invert the logic and argue that the reason why the combined set of experiments worked in the first place was that the object was in fact real. Whether this inversion of logic stands up to philosophical scrutiny - I do not know - but I have seen many practising scientists make this jump in logic. I've even used it myself. It is here that the "realist" and "anti-realist" debate rages. However, I think Latour reports it just as he sees it.

Third, Latour carries out an analysis of scientific texts, which I have yet to see anywhere else. Scientific statments take on 5 modalities - from speculative hypothesis to proven statements to unspoken assumption. Latour gives a account of how the modalities of each statement are modified by how every other scientist in the field cites the statement in future scientific papers. They can ignore it, attack it as a useless hypothesis, bolster it by citing it as a supporting statement, adulate it by assuming that is a proven statement, and finally they just assume it's true. This scrutiny occurs continuously both inside the lab and in conferences.

However, the difference between this process in the sciences as opposed to the humanities, is that these statements are often associated with machines that act in the material world. Proving a statement means that a material effect is generated.

Using this method, Latour can analyse the fortunes of the scientists in a lab. And analysing the citations of scientific papers results in a reasonably good definition of scientific credibility. As a grad student in a biophysics lab, I've seen this happen - albeit on an intuitive level.

Although Latour has since gone onto to more and more abstract studies, the beauty of Laboratory Life is that it is firmly grounded in the actual practises of an existing laboratory, the Guillemen Lab at the Salks Institute.

The work of Escher has captured the imagination of many people and in this book Bruno Ernst (a personal friend of Escher) expands our understanding of the artist. After a brief but concise biography, the author throughly analyses the most important facets of Escher's artistic output: the illusion in drawing, the use of perspective, the creation of impossible realities, simultaneous and contrasting realities, crystals, and the infinite. Escher was an artist who was unique in in his work, he stands by himself, and this book is a helping tool in understanding and appreciating the unparalleled magic of his work.

The greatness of this book on the work of M.C. Escher is that it shows how he worked up his ideas for various pieces. It also gives a thorough explanation of his thought and design process. It is truely a shame that this book has gone out of print. I sincerely hope that the publisher brings it back.

In The Magic Mirror of M.C. Escher, Bruno Ernst, an acquaintance of Escher's until Escher's death in 1972, presents a thorough summary of the life and work of Escher. Ernst devotes a chapter to the life of Escher, and uses the rest of the book to describe his amazing work. He includes the different themes and styles that Escher used, and devotes a good amount of space to each work discussed. The book is extremely thorough and includes large clear illustrations of the works themselves and also of earlier drafts of the works and mathematical descriptions to assist the reader. This is the most concise book of Escher and his work I have ever seen, and Ernst has done a fabulous job on it.

This book could have been so much better.....It is a fascinating story of psychiatry/psychology/psychoanalysis in the middle 1900s, but this book involves one person, and one person only: the author, Stephen Eliot. Why is there nothing about his family members? One photo is characterized as being a picture of his late brother....What? How did he die? Was it integral to the story? It is as though Eliot existed (exists?) in a vacuum, and things just happened to him for no particular reason. Why was he sent to the School in the first place? Why? What did he do, or what happened to him to cause his parents to spend so much money and send their son off to strangers to raise him? It is an interesting tale of Bruno Bettelheim and his practices, but he is a shadow figure in this book. I hope another student, or teacher, from the School writes a book someday that will include more than just one simple focus. Yes, I know this is an autobiography, but the author's self-centerdness, world-revolves-around-me-only got old after the first couple of hundred pages.

A wonderful autobiography from the eyes of a child who lived through a cutting edge treatment for his disorder in an era when mental health was never addressed with children. Uplifting and inspirational.The courage displayed by the author is to be commended. " For those who understand, no explanation is necessary. For those who don't understand, no explanation is possible." From a parent of a current Orthogenic School student,
this author makes the explanation possible for all.

Steven Eliot has penned a most unique and stunningly written memoir of a most unusual childhood: his own spent at the former Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School, founded and run by the acclaimed Dr. Bruno Bettelheim at the University of Chicago.

Eliot has shown remarkable courage and clarity of inner voice as he both recounts his life at the world's most unique psychoanalytically-oriented treatment facility for emotionally disturbed children. At all times, Eliot is in touch with both his developing consciousness as a child being treated for emotional maladies, as well as a very wise and inner developed adult who aqpparently has made deep, and at times painful, sense of himself.

Eliot's writing is elegant, clear, free of complex jargon, and can soar to tears-inducing stunning power. Memoirs and autobiographies of 'bad childhoods', demon parents, trying lifestyles, Rags to Riches progressions and escapes from trying and crusihing times, forces and conditions abound, but Eliot's is the first voice that takes us not simply into what was the world's most unique and acclaimed psychoanalytic institition, but he takes on the far harder journey to recount---and indeed make--which is of course within himself. Most memoirs focus on the external pain inflictions and conditions causing the basis of the memoirist's tale. In Eliot's work, he takes us 'Behind Closed Doors' to what was a rareified, purposefeully kept private world( Bettelheim recounted his own experiences as the Orthogenic School's Director and 'star' in his own treatment stories, but he purposefully kept the media and most of the world out of the School for realistic fear that it could become a three-ring media circus if opened up. We also know that Bettelheim's treatment and other practices were highly controversial, and would not be tolerated in today's world, had they come to light when they occured). Moreover, most First-Person accounts of psychotherapy dwell on the dialogues with the therapist, or of issues that emerge in the decidedly one-dimensional world of classical psychoanalysis. To date, the world has not had as deep and forthright a view of what treatment, life and challenges are inside of a psychodynamically-centered milieu therapy institution as they have gotten from NOT THE THING I WAS.. Eliot, though, is not entirely within himself. He has a strong sense of community, and his often humorous, telling and varied anecdotes are within the context of his developing sense of personhood, and how this person came to live amongst others.

The 'Warp and Woof',rather than the sanitized perfect re-creation of the Orthogenic School that has prevailed in print is ably and dynamically captured by Eliot.

Eliot's inner and outer struggle, which was his process of growth and reocnstruction, is painful and challenging. In Eliot's work, we do not merely witness this process; we are forced deeply within it, and in so doing, we are forced to confront mainy painful universal truths about our own upbringing, formative experiences, and significant life cycle events. Steven Eliot's book is destined to remain read and re-read the world over for many, many years to come both for its elegance, clarity and stunning beauty, but also for its important 'travelogue' into a powerful and important inner and outer world.

This first novel by Joseph Bruno is set in New York City in the 1980s
when the crime rate was at an all-time high and the crack epidemic was
running rampant. Against this background, Detective Bill Kelly is
looking for a serial killer who is specifically targeting drug
dealers.

This is a fast and easy read with a variety of stock
characters that readers will find familiar. In addition to
hard-drinking cops, priests, corrupt officials and drug addicts, there
are the really bad guys whose acts of violence made me wince.

I
found myself caught up in the story as it moved along, reading quickly
to see what would happen next. The reader knows who the killer is
early on but it is interesting to see how he will be caught as the
tension mounts.

I do wish that the book had been edited better; I
found the typos distracting. And it even made a difference in my
understanding of the plot.

Police procedural fans might enjoy this
book. And Mr. Bruno is certainly an author to watch as he develops
his craft.

I know Mr. Bruno's writings from his boxing columns .... His boxing columns are always caustic and quite funny. In Angel of Death, Mr. Bruno writes about a serial killer loose in New York City. This killer is unique in the fact that the victims are all drug dealers. Bill Kelly, the detective in charge of finding the killer, has a daughter whoÕs a drug addict and the implication here is that Detective Kelly may not try too hard to find the killer after all. That is, if Kelly isnÕt the killer serial himself. The brilliant cast of characters range from KellyÕs mentor, Catholic priest Father OÕBrien, a crusty old coot for sure, to NY City Police Commissioner Abraham Williams, a man obsessed with becoming the next mayor. The bad guy drug dealers may be the most interesting characters in the book. They including Willie Boy Walker, a stone killer from the island of Jamaica, to Lily Tang, a bisexual Asian beauty with a heart of stone. I highly recommend this book to mystery lovers, and the laughs Mr. Bruno injects throughout the book in no way takes away from the horror and the suspense.

For Dr. Nyiszli to bear witness to the day-in and day-out horror of Auschwitz, and still be able to write about it, is quite unreal. Working as a pathologist for Dr. Mengele in the confines of the crematorium compound, we read of the horrors of the camp, and how both inmates & guards coped.

Reading this book has completely altered my perception on the human being, individually, and as a whole. The events that took place in Auschwitz were so horrific and yet they mustn't be forgotten. Any person claiming a reasonable level of education must read this book. It will literally change the reader forever.

Reading Serrres before this book was something of an adventure... You never know in advance quite what to get out of a reading of his work. Now, being able to flesh out all of the vaguenesses of his work with a general outline of this man's mind, I am more perplexed than ever. He comes across as very childlike in many respects and also very WEIRD. Seemed like Latour was humoring him in some parts as well. I admire Serres just as much having read this, if ony because he is stepping off onto a ledge in attempts to perhaps create something entirely (? ) original in the history of philosophical thought.

Science is full of magic and myth. But so-called "primitive" people are also very scientific. So what is the difference between modern and primitive, between science and magic? Maybe not as much as we have been led to think. Michel Serres is a wild, marginal philosopher whose 20 dense, often obscure books try to break down the boundaries between science, culture, and art. Bruno Latour is an anthropologist of scientists, author of pathbreaking studies of the strange and unscientific, almost magical, work of laboratory scientists. Here we have a series of five deep, clear, and often playful conversations between the two. No jargon, fast pace, a peek at two brilliant minds on the key issues in science and literature. They both know their science--Serre started as a mathematician--and neither are Luddites who want to tear science down. But both argue that science often conceals more than it reveals, and they show how both science and arts build barriers between human beings and nature, for example, or between the present and the past, the modern and the primitive. One of Serres' best examples of how little difference there is between science and religion is his comparison between the science of a Carthaginian sacrificial rite (where children were killed inside a giant bronze statue) and the magic of the space program (where astronauts died inside a giant machine). BL ...it seems to me that there is a double test---first you link Baal and the Challenger, then they have to exchange their properties in a symmetrical fashion. We are supposed to understand the Carthaginians' practice of human sacrifice by immersing ourselves in the Challenger event, but, inversely, we are supposed to understand what technology is through the Carthaginian religion. MS Yes, the reasoning is more or less symmetrical...We could construct a kind of dictionary that would allow us to translate, word by word, gesture by gesture, event by event, the scene at Cape Canaveral into the Carthaginian rite, and vice versa...the respective cost of the operation, comparable for the two communities, the immense crowd of spectators, the specialists who prepare it and who are apart from the rest, the ignition, the state-of-the-art machinery in both cases, given the technology of the two eras, the organized or fascinated rehearsal of the event, the death of those enclosed in the two statues, whose size dominates the surrounding space, the denial...--"No those aren't humans, but cattle," cry even the fathers of the incinerated children in Carthage; "No," we say "it wasn't on purpose, it wasn't a sacrifice, but an accident," inevitable, even calculable, through probabilities....The series of substitutions functions exactly like stitches, like mending a tear, like making a nice tight overcast seam...Each term of the translation passes on a piece of thread, and at the end it may be said that we have followed the missing hyphens between the two worlds. Baal is in the Challenger, and the Challenger is in Baal; religion is in technology; the pagan god is in the rocket; the rocket is in the statue; the rocket on its launching pad is in the ancient idol---and our sophisticated knowledge is in our archaic fascinations." (159-160). BL "But you are always tripping up your readers; you are always operating simultaneously on two opposing fronts. When they think they are reading about collective society, you bring them back to things, and then, when they think they are reading about the sciences, you bring them back to society. They go from Baal to the Challenger and then from the Challenger to Baal!" MS "Its a magnificent paradox, which I savor. To walk on two feet appears to mean tripping everyone up. Is this proof, then, that we always limp?" (142) MS "All around us language replaces experience. The sign, so soft, substitutes itself for the thing, which is hard. I cannot think of this substitution as an equivalence. It is more of an abuse and a violence. The sound of a coin is not worth the coin; the smell of cooking does not fill the hungry stomach; publicity is not the equivalent of quality; the tongue that talks annuls the tongue that tastes or the one that receives and gives a kiss." (p. 132) MS "There is no pure myth except the idea of a science that is pure of all myth." (p. 162)

These are two of the most lucid and insightful commentaries I have ever read. Bonhoeffer moves beyond the usually mundane issues often dealt with when discussing the creation and fall. Instead, he places the focus on God and on how the creation and fall effect our lives as human beings.

Temptation is a poignant counterpoint to the story of the fall. It points the way through the darkness of our everyday lives and to the one who is the Way, the Truth and the Life...Jesus Christ.

If you are already familiar with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the wonderfully perceptive German theologian who was killed in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, then this book will serve to deepen your understanding of Bonhoeffer's theology. If this is your introduction to Bonhoeffer, then you are in for a delightful surprise. In his short, but dense, analysis of the Genesis story of humanity's creation and fall, Bonhoeffer asks the reader to view the familiar with new eyes - with our eyes fixed firmly on God, not on traditional readings of Genesis. Creation reveals much about God - our sovereign God of life, who worked and rested, and offered the same blessings of work and rest to us. Creation also reveals much about humanity, our desire to be God, and our guilt about disobeying God. In the course of his delightful book, Bonhoeffer wrestles with the fundamental issues of good and evil, of temptation, of the graceful limits imposed by God, and humanity's "freedom." If you, too, have ever wrestled with such questions, this book will guide you and challenge you in your thinking.

want to know about erich mendelisohm's history from the begining of his career and want to review his important works as an architect

This book from Mr. Bruno Zevi is full of sketches of and photos from Mendelsohn's works and it has a very accurate critical text. It is the only complete book available about the most important architect of the expressionist movement. If youre interested in Mendelshohn's work this is the book youre looking for.

This book is an extremely helpful resource for expat tax issues. This subject is very difficult for an individual without a big company taking care of all the details. If I had found this book earlier, it would have saved me dozens of hours scouring the internet for relavent information. Note that this isn't a book to help you figure out the best way to wangle yourself into tax-freedom. You should get this book well before moving, use it to help you plan and then visit a professional - but at least you won't be paying a professional to cover the groundwork.

I am an expat, and I found answers to many of my questions in this work book. I am not knowledgable enough in tax law to pass judgement on the quality of the information presented here. Expat tax law is complicated and intricate, involving many special cases which may not apply to you. The work book overcomes this through careful organization of chapters and topics. It is possible to locate topics of interest without having wade through large amounts of unrelated material. I gave this work book the fifth star for it's spiral binding, which makes it much easier to work with.

While somewhat mechanical in structure, the novella nevertheless gains in its simplicity what it might have lost attempting to philosophize too deeply about fate and the death figure's task of complying with it. Lujan's translation is to be commended. This is an ideal book for advanced High School Spanish students, especially if it's read before "el día de los muertos" and is accompanied by the classic film (black-and-white), although the latter strays slightly in content from Traven's original. The movie was used in the 1970's as part of the University of Arizona's curriculum for 4th semester Spanish, and may be still available either through them or through Tulane's Latin American Studies Rescource Center. Students are at times troubled by Macario's "power" being subject to fate, and therefore void of real meaning, and not dependent on the "agua curativa" he must use to free the "moribundos" from death's grasp.

Great for intermediate students or adults. Goes through a lot of Mexican culture in a very accessible Mexican Spanish. Poor woodcutter Macario meets the devil, Jesus, and Death on the day his wife cooks him the first filling meal of his life. They all want a bite of his turkey. He makes a deal with Death, that makes him wealthy, but later puts him in hot water with the Inquisition. Humor, irony, adventure, and philosophy. It can be compared with a wonderful B&W movie.

macario is a very poor man who lives in a mexican forest (woods), he is the father of 8 or 9 kids. his wife loves him so much; he works hard but any way the are miserables....he only has a dream before he dies...eat on his own a complete turkey, without share it with NOBODY, even his family....he always said this dream to his wife, so during a lot of years, and saving as much as possible, one day she cook the turkey and send him to the woods early in the morning, before kids smell the turkey...macario runs inside the woods to hide and made possible the big dream...and suddenly apears just in front of him GOD,who's starving,and HE asks for food... read the book to know Macario's answer...)then comes the devil, (great answer too...) and then comes the dead...(here is were the really story begins)