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However, once Kerouac makes his descent and rejoins the world in the second half of Book One and through all of Book Two, the way that his mountaintop experience informs his perspective in places like New York, Mexico, and Europe is engrossing and surpisingly intelligent. Drawing from a wide variety of influences from St. Paul to Buddha to Hemingway, Kerouac revisits familiar places and people with a broadened and more cynical point of view. Desolation Angels is more candid, forthright, even explicit, than its predecessors about drug use and sex. But it also reveals a more exhaustive spiritual hunger in Kerouac, and leads the reader to conclude that the author, in his quest to meet God, realized he had indeed found Him.
By turns a thoughtful, pensive, funny and risk-taking novel, Desolation Angels is canonical Kerouac.
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Williams' emphasis on plate discipline and mental approach, combined with his teaching of how to analyze your own swing gives you the basic tools you need to be an excellent offensive player. For pitchers, this book is a must to understand the weapons available to the batter.
For fans, this book will help you understand what's important and what's just filler by the broadcast team. If you're under 14 years old, buy this book, or go get from your local library, and study it on a field with a tee and a bag of balls. Then read it every day before you do your hitting reps.
This book turns bad hitters fair, and good hitters great. You just need to put in the work.
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The candidates for SEAL training may well have started out that way, but by the time the few survivors had graduated (a minescule percentage of the original applicants) they were very different men indeed.
In an odd sort of way, Roat's CLASS-29 is a love story. We watch as the young trainees learn from their own experience that no matter how tough they think they are, they can only survive with help from the guy beside them. Soon this evolves into a sort of reliance, as they learn that they will only survive as a team; and then into genuine affection and respect. These kids come in all puffed up and clueless, and they come out as men who would lay down their lives for the good of the team, for the survival of their teammates. That they are superbly conditioned fighting machines is secondary - vitally important, but secondary none the less. Now that macho attitude has a vital core of respect and integrity.
It's a wonderful story. Roat spins a good yarn. The physical challenge of the training will make your hair stand on end. That these guys were able to joke in the midst of it is a tribute to their resiliance. That they came out of it imbued with absolute respect for another as well as love of country is a tribute to the training.
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Reading this book, you are at the beginning of philosophy. There are beautiful dialogs concerning the most profound questions anyone can ask.
An advantage of this particular book is that for a reasonable price you can own Plato's complete works in modern scholarly translations. The volume is skillfully edited and there are handy notes.
Plato is one of the few philosophers who can be read for pleasure. His influence on Western thought is immense. As Whitehead says, subsequent Western philosophy is just footnotes to Plato.
Here are some of the works collected in this volume -
Apology - Socrates defense of his life
Phaedo - a defense of the immortality of the soul
Euthyrpo - a criticism of the Divine Command theory of ethics
Republic - the ideal commonwealth, what is justice, theory of ideas
Meno - the recollection theory of knowledge
Timaeus - Plato's story of the creation of the universe, his cosmology
Except for some of the shorter works, (Euthyphro, Apology, Symposium), Plato's works are not easy to read. Some works are so dense and difficult that you can't see the point of his argument (e.g., Parmenides). If you need some help interpreting Plato, a good introduction to his work is G.M. Grube's Plato's Thought. It provides clear exposition on a number of subjects, including the theory of ideas, the nature of the soul, education, and statecraft.
One needs to decide whether Plato's thought is vital today or just historically important. Those who treat Plato as important today fall into one of two groups. There are those who think he is the source of that evil called Western Civilization. Post-modernists see modern philosophy as a series of rhetorical tropes started by Plato. They hold him responsible for the metaphysical nonsense espoused in philosophy today about reality, objectivity, and knowledge. If you think Plato is total nonsense and think his characters Protagoras (man is the measure of things) and Thrasymachus (might makes right) are largely correct, you might want to compare his work to Derrida or Nietzsche.
Then there are the Hellenists. They think that Plato said it all and nothing (or not much) more needs to be said. You usually get Alfred North Whitehead's quote here about philosophy being a series of footnotes to Plato. If you are so enthralled, you might want to try Allen Bloom, Stanley Rosen, or Leo Strauss.
Personally, I think both readings are wrongheaded for the same reason. In the 19th and 20th centuries especially, philosophy has made conceptual advances on Plato. Frege's logic, Kuhn's history of science, Peirce's communitarian pragmatism, and Wittgenstein's later language theory step beyond Plato.
If Plato is important today, it is for what he started, not what he says. He began the philosophical fields that are still popular areas today, including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics. And he invented the character of Socrates, through which he developed the notions of dialectic and definition. For these reasons alone, Plato's works should be read carefully and often. The fact that you get all of them here in one relatively inexpensive book (at least in terms of price per work) should be incentive enough to buy it.
The translation is free-flowing and up-to-date. If you can read English, buy this book. If not, learn to and then buy this or have someone read it to you. It is that good and that important.
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The second thing that jumped out at me was what an ordinary job of writing John Feinstein did in this book. Yes, he reported what happened, and he used language I understood, but he just didn't write in an interesting style. Instead of developing characters on the team or among the staff to report around, he just basically ground out what happened. I had to push myself to finish the book even though I'm a big basketball fan and was highly interested in the story. This dullness surprised me because I hear Feinstein on the radio and see him on the tube frequently and almost always find him very entertaining and funny. Maybe he hadn't really developed as an author when he churned this one out.
If you like basketball and have any interest in Bob Knight or Indiana, I'd say read this for sure. Just don't expect to be captivated by the writing.
What you'll see is an inside look at the trials and tribulations of a big-time college basketball team and the sometime circus atmosphere created by their tempermental coach. The book starts off with a quick recap of the 1984-85 season which included the now famous chair throwing incident. Then you are lead through the offseason, training camp and regular season of 1985-86. Feinstein does a good job of keeping up the pace despite giving detailed recaps of every season's game. He ends the book with a brief summary of the national championship season of 1986-87.
There's no doubt who the center point of the whole book is: That of course is Bob Knight. I'm not an Indiana hoosier fan but I certainly was well aware of all the incidents Knight's been involved in over the years including the chair throwing, head butting, and choking. I can't say that my opinion of him changed at all after reading this book. The best word I can use to describe him is: complex.
In this book, you'll read how he verbally abuses players, especially Daryl Thomas. He'll play mind games like he did with Steve Alford, the team captain and best player. He'll be upbeat about the performance of the team one minute, and then the next he'll say how the team is horrible and will never win with these players. Warning: there is some profanity, but the f-words are "blanked" out.
But at the same time, this coach is extremely loyal to his players after they graduate. He'll do favors such as help get them jobs, etc. One of the most touching moments in the book is when he meets a family where the father and son are deaf-mute. Is his good side good enough to put up with his other nonsense? You be the judge!
Supposedly, BK was NOT very happy with the book. I don't know what he expected, but Feinstein clearly didn't take sides or had some kind of adgenda to [thrash] Knight. This is must read for all sports fans, Indiana Hoosiers or not.
The dichotomies of Knight are fascinating, and occasionally frightening. I was a Knight-hater before I read the book. I don't hate him, nor would I pretend to understand him. His self-view is highly nuanced and the depiction Feinstein gives reflects the complexities and contradictions of Knight, his program and the pressures of college basketball.
This book is outstanding because of how much Feinstein reveals, perceives and transmits to the reader.
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Do not think that all "The Decameron" deals with is sex. The mostly illicit sexual encounters depicted are some times funny, sometimes sad, but they share a common trait with the stories from the Tenth Day, for example (these ones are mostly about sacrifice, abnegation, and servitude), or with those of the Second: Boccaccio's concern for his society and the terrible tensions that had reached a breaking point by the 14th century. The Plague, in Boccaccio's universe, acts as a catalyst of emotions, desires, and changes that had to come.
Read, then, about Alibech putting the Devil back in Hell, Lisabetta and her pot of basil, Ser Ceperello and his "saintly" life, Griselda and her incredible loyalty in spite of the suffering at the hands of a God-like husband, Tancredi and his disturbing love for his daughter, Masetto and the new kind of society he helps create with some less-than-religious nuns, and then it will be easier to understand why Boccaccio is so popular after 650 years. And although it may be skipped by most readers, do not miss the Translator's (G. M. McWilliam) introduction on the history of "The Decameron" proper, and that of its many, and mostly unfortunate, translations into English. This book is one of the wisest, most economic ways of obtaining entertainment and culture. Do not miss it.
Second-hand opinions can do a lot of harm. Most of us have been given the impression that The Decameron is a lightweight collection of bawdy tales which, though it may appeal to the salacious, sober readers would do well to avoid. The more literate will probably be aware that the book is made up of one hundred stories told on ten consecutive days in 1348 by ten charming young Florentines who have fled to an amply stocked country villa to take refuge from the plague which is ravaging Florence.
Idle tales of love and adventure, then, told merely to pass the time by a group of pampered aristocrats, and written by an author who was quite without the technical equipment of a modern story-teller such as Flannery O'Connor. But how, one wonders, could it have survived for over six hundred years if that's all there were to it? And why has it so often been censored? Why have there always been those who don't want us to read it?
A puritan has been described as someone who has an awful feeling that somebody somewhere may be enjoying themselves, and since The Decameron offers the reader many pleasures it becomes automatically suspect to such minds. In the first place it is a comic masterpiece, a collection of entertaining tales many of which are as genuinely funny as Chaucer's, and it offers us the pleasure of savoring the witty, ironic, and highly refined sensibility of a writer who was also a bit of a rogue. It also provides us with an engaging portrait of the Middle Ages, and one in which we are pleasantly surprised to find that the people of those days were every bit as human as we are, and in some ways considerably more delicate.
We are also given an ongoing hilarious and devastating portrayal of the corruption and hypocrisy of the medieval Church. Another target of Boccaccio's satire is human gullibility in matters religious, since, then as now, most folks could be trusted to believe whatever they were told by authority figures. And for those who have always found Dante to be a crushing bore, the sheer good fun of The Decameron, as Human Comedy, becomes, by implication (since Boccaccio was a personal friend of Dante), a powerful and compassionate counterblast to the solemn and cruel anti-life nonsense of The Divine Comedy.
There is a pagan exuberance to Boccaccio, a frank and wholesome celebration of the flesh; in contrast to medieval Christianity's loathing of woman we find in him what David Denby beautifully describes as "a tribute to the deep-down lovableness of women" (Denby, p.249). And today, when so many women are being taught by anti-sex radical feminists to deny their own bodies and feelings, Boccaccio's celebration of the sexual avidity of the natural woman should come as a very welcome antidote. For Denby, who has written a superb essay on The Decameron that can be strongly recommended, Boccaccio's is a scandalous book, a book that liberates, a book that returns us to "the paradise from which, long ago, we had been expelled" (Denby, p.248).
The present Penguin Classics edition, besides containing Boccaccio's complete text, also includes a 122-page Introduction, a Select Bibliography, 67 pages of Notes, four excellent Maps and two Indexes. McWilliam, who is a Boccaccio scholar, writes in a supple, refined, elegant and truly impressive English which successfully captures the highly sophisticated sensibility of Boccaccio himself. His translation reads not so much as a translation as an original work, though his Introduction (which seems to cover everything except what is most important) should definitely be supplemented by Denby's wonderfully insightful and stimulating essay, details of which follow:
Chapter 17 - 'Boccaccio,' in 'GREAT BOOKS - My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World'
by David Denby. pp.241-249. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. ISBN 0-684-83533-9 (Pbk).
But one doesn't need to focus on the revolutionary aspects of the Decameron to enjoy the book; each of the stories delights the reader with a different tasty morsel, and, you can read as much or as little at a time as you please. Once you get past the introduction, (and that's probably the most serious part of the book, so be sure not to give up before you get to the first story) the stories will make you laugh, make you cringe, and make you sit on the edge of your seat. Inspiring authors from Chaucer to Shakespeare and entertaining audiences for over 700 years, the Decameron continues to delight.
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It is often easier to adapt an idea rather than think it up in the first place. When we want to contribute our time, money, influence, ideas and/or resources to help others -- there is something in this book to get us started. This book is actually a powerful force of one in itself. Choose your level and type of commitment and BEGIN!
Thank you, John T. Boal, for your extensive research to make so many productive ideas readily available. BE A GLOBAL FORCE OF ONE! is a gift idea that keeps on giving.
This book is also a very important reference tool, with great contact information.
As the photographer who DONATED the use of the cover photograph, I feel honored to be a part of John's effort to inform our world of the many ways we can continue to improve it.
Hopefully people will jump for joy (as in the cover photo) because someone read about and initiated an idea in this book within their community!