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Book reviews for "Peristiany,_John_George" sorted by average review score:

Electric Interurban Railways in America
Published in Hardcover by Stanford Univ Pr (1960)
Authors: George W. Hilton and John F. Due
Amazon base price: $49.50
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The "Bible" for research on N. American interurban railways
If you are interested in understanding the history of the electric interurban railway in North America, this book will tell you info you would be hard pressed to find elsewhere, especially on obscure lines that failed early in the century. While significant data is on the corporate financial life, it covers all aspects of the line. When I travel on business, I look to see what lines ran in the area I'm headed to, and when there, ask about these lines in area antique stores and libraries. I've found that the knowledge in this book will prompt people to point out remains of the lines that I would have missed. I have the original 1960 version and still use it frequently.

A Great Book on an Obscure Topic
Hilton and Due have written the definitive book on an obscure but important industry: electric interurban railroads, which provided rural and small town America with mobility from the late 19th century until the automobile became common in the 1930s.

The book is exhaustively researched and documented, and yet very readable. It brings alive an industry that has almost vanished from the collective memory of America.

"THE" outstanding book on the electric interurban railways
George Hilton and John Due produced what has become the "bible" for any person seriously interested in the history of electric railways. The first half of the book provides general history and information about the electric railway industry which flourished during the first half of the 20th Century. Also included is the relationship many of these companies had with the electric power industry. It also touches on the utility industry holding companies which owned many of the interurban lines. The second half of the book contains (listed by state) all of the electric interurban railways in the United States and Canada. Capsule histories are given for each company that operated intercity electric railways. Although this book was originally published in 1960 it has stood the test of time and is a "must have" for any serious railway scholar


The Encyclopedia of Louisville
Published in Hardcover by University Press of Kentucky (2000)
Authors: John E. Kleber, Mary Jean Kinsman, Thomas D. Clark, Clyde F. Crews, and George H. Yater
Amazon base price: $27.97
List price: $39.95 (that's 30% off!)
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Louisville - A City Without Limits
The Encyclopedia of Louisville is an incredible reference guide and history of the city from its beginnings to the year 2000.The information on African-American life in Louisville is vast and interesting.I encourage anyone who loves or lives in the city to purchase this book. You will not be disspointed.

A Must For Every Louisvillian
While growing up in Louisville, I did not have any interest in my "little hick town". I dreamt of leaving for the big city. At 22 I left, for the west coast, eventually hitting the big cities of Dallas and Detroit, on my way back home. Now here, I find this the perfect place for raising my children. This book completes my journey, and brings me home. This is the most interesting book I have ready in years!

The World According to Louisville
This wonderful volume covers people, places, events and things in the Louisville metropolitan area from a historical and cultural perspective in encyclopedia style entries written by Louivillians. As a native Louivillian I am finding it a delight to browse thru the entries learning delightful details about my birthplace and its history. It takes many more universal topics and relates how they have impacted the city and its people. A must for Louisvillians that want to learn more about our rich history and cultural legacy.


The International Library of Piano Music (16 Volumes Plus Index in 15 Books)
Published in Hardcover by Natl Univ Society (1986)
Authors: John Brimhall and George W. Cooke
Amazon base price: $85.00
Average review score:

Piano Music
I, personally having purchased this wondrful set of volumes of piano music and a music student of 17 years, belive this to be one of the finest collections of piano music ever assembled. Not only is it a great collection for the music student and teacher it is also a great addition to any music collector. A must have for anyone who truly apreciated great piano literature and music.

Organized Study for Piano Students
An excellent collection of piano works. This method provides a very efficent use of ones time in piano study. It is a comprehensive collection that gives the student a broad education toward mastery of the piano.

WONDERFUL!
This is a wonderful set of volumes that has just about every piece of music ever written from Haydn and Vivaldi to Ravel and Copland! I like it because it is so wonderful becuase you don't have to search around from the sheet music, you can just look in the index and find the piece that you are looking for and the just play away! A wonderful set that teachers can use for teaching the music of every period like Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and 20th Century Music! This is also a wonderful set for aspiring music educators!


On Writing Science Fiction: The Editors Strike Back
Published in Paperback by Wildside Pr (1981)
Authors: George H. Scithers, Isaac Asimov, Darrell Schweitzer, and John M. Ford
Amazon base price: $12.25
List price: $17.50 (that's 30% off!)
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A great book for ALL fiction writers
The 1981 editors of Asimov's magazine use stories from their own periodical to illustrate some excellent points about how to write good science fiction. Do not worry if your stories do not involve robots and aliens, any fiction writer would find plenty to help here.

Despite the outdatedness, as the editors lecture on how to set your typewriter in order to produce clear manuscripts, using the short stories is a great idea. Even the stories' authors admit their work is flawed. Throw in a great bibliography and reading list, and some very funny observations from the editors about submissions (they are rejecting papers you typed on, not you personally) and this is a quick read and very informative. I highly recommend it if you can find it!

Key to the understanding of literature
This book is not only suited for people preparing their break-through as a science-fiction author. It
is as well suited for all who care about books and do not just simply want to consume them.
Instead of reading tons of boring theoretical papers on literature, those people should rather
consider reading this book. Besides a theoretical introduction, it contains commented short-stories.
A very good mixture.

The Insider's View of Publishing
After chatting informally with George Scithers a few times in the rec.arts.sf.written newsgroup, I decided to get the book and read the answers to all the questions that I didn't dare blurt out in the newsgroup, primarily "how do you get published! "

This book did a wonderful job of showing me the other side of the desk, of what editors are looking for when they look at manuscripts and how to ensure the story you tell is the one that they absolutely must have. (It's not a formula book; it's showing how to shape your story so it fits the -story's- needs, rather than a preconceived notion of what the editor wants.)

Highly recommended.


Pragmatism Versus Marxism
Published in Paperback by Pathfinder Press (1983)
Author: George Novack
Amazon base price: $19.95
Average review score:

tools for fighters against the horrors of capitalism
If you came to this page and are checking out the above title because you are interested in Marxism and/or other "isms" as tools for fundamental social change, to turn around and defeat the injustice and brutalities brought upon working people and farmers here and around the world by this system, this book can help you a lot, as can any other book by George Novack. Here he is answering the "official philosophy" of Yankee capitalism: pragmatism, as put forward by the liberal philosopher John Dewey. While Dewey was often an opponent of the evil things this system does, Novack points out the dead end of a philosophy that is primarily concerned with "practical results"-in the short term only. Novack defends the long view of history that is the view of Marxism: history-as-present as well as the past. He defends historical materialism, which means that Marxists do not believe that history (and history-as-present) is made by a deity or deities; and that social phenomena are directly or indirectly determined by society's economic condition. Novack teaches you how to look at society and events like the New World Depression we have and entered and the string of imperial wars that go with it, in a scientific, objective way. He does this for the sole purpose of making the scientific world view first propagated by Karl Marx and his collaborator Frederick Engels useful as a weapon for today's fighter for a fundamental change in the order of things. He stands alongside them to repeat that "the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

Pragmatism: the philosophy of capitalism
This book is one of several written by the revolutionary Marxist George Novack. In it he counterposes Marxism to pragmatism, but not as one philosophy against another. Marxism is not a philosophy at all; instead it is a scientific method for understanding social history and change. As such it explains the origin, development and social significance of all forms of ideology, including specific philosophical schools of thought.

The overall course of cultural development, since the emergence of the ancient slave-based civilizations, has been driven by the motor of class conflict. Throughout history, each class can be characterized by its own distinctive features of social psychology, morality and outlook, although they are modified in different social contexts. The dominant class of modern society, the capitalist class, is no different. It has its own fundamental moral and social outlook, which is best revealed in the philosophy of pragmatism.

The philosophy of pragmatism was best explained by John Dewey, an early twentieth-century thinker who developed keen insights into the outlook of the ruling class of the United States. He pinpointed and formalized the essential elements of the outlook of the average capitalist and developed these into the principles of a philosophy he called pragmatism. These include an individualistic and optimistic approach to life, a practical, "can do" attitude, a disregard of history and its lessons ("History is bunk," said Henry Ford) and a disdain for any "theory" that does not produce practical results in short order.

Marxism, with its deep concern for the facts of history and its rigorous analysis of the inner logic of social development and change, can explain the development of classes and social modes of production. As part of this, George Novack demonstrates, Marxism can also explain how the guiding ideas of a class are linked to its historical role and needs. And this helps workers to understand the class with which they are forced to do battle, and provides them with valuable lessons they can use in winning the battle.

A master work, a labor of love, a classic
George Novack, the most outstanding Marxist Philosopher of the 20th Century after we lost Trotsky and Lenin, saw it as his special task to critique the Empiricism and Pragmatism that dominated American culture in his time. He felt a special duty to examine and critique John Dewey, who Novack met and respected and worked with in civil liberties struggles, especially in the defense of Leon Trotsky against Stalin's slanders.
If he began this work in his small book the Origins of Empiricism, he felt this work was completed with this work. He could have published a simpler critique of Dewey much earlier, but his goal was to get to the roots of American Pragmatism and expose its strengths and weaknesses, and to indicate the answers dialectical thought in general, and Marxism in particular had for it.
When the smoke clears, when the struggles of working people push away the confusion that the Stalinoid Moscow and Peking hacks have anything to do with Marxist Philosophy, or that petit bourgeois opponents of Marxism who masquerade as Marxist from university chairs can help fighting working people, farmers, youth, and real revolutionary intellectuals, this book by a life-long revolutionary fighter will be known as one of the classics of Marxist Philosophy.


The Self and Its Body in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (Toronto Studies in Philosophy)
Published in Hardcover by Univ of Toronto Pr (2001)
Author: John Edward Russon
Amazon base price: $65.00
Average review score:

Rigorous and readable account of the body in Hegel's thought
John Russon's ambitious aim in this book is twofold: (1) to identify the conception of the body that is implied by the argument of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and (2) to provide a systematic argument that shows this conception of the body to be both comprehensive and compelling. Not only does the book make a good case for having succeeded in these aims, it also provides material for a very careful and provocative reinterpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology that should prove readable and insightful for both general readers with interests in the history of philosophy as well as trained philosophers.

Russon shows that the body that animates the forms of experience that Hegel studies in his text cannot be adequately conceived as reducible to the merely physical organism. In an important early chapter, Russon gives an account of the systematic way in which Hegel's philosophy challenges and overcomes the dualism of immaterial mind and physical body that stands at the heart of early modern philosophy and science. He argues that the body as we experience it is not merely a natural entity (physis), but is a construct of habit and institutions; our experience of the body is not one merely of nature, but of second nature, as Aristotle described the habitual formation of social dispositions (hexis). The final chapters of the text aim to show, moreover, that this "habit-body" should be conceived ultimately as emerging through communicative activity (logos), and that the ongoing process whereby we (non-arbitrarily) constitute ourselves and our world along with others is precisely what is thematized in Hegel's dialectical phenomenology.

Considering the difficulty of the topic, and the vast resources that the argument draws upon, the text is remarkably clear (and concise, at just 137 pages). You need not have spent several years poring over the details of Hegel's challenging and dense text in order to gain much benefit from reading Russon's book. In addition, the book has the merit of demonstrating (against a number of prejudices from a number of sources) that Hegel's philosophy can be a rich resource for thinking through a number of topics of contemporary concern. Russon's conclusions in fact converge nicely with recent efforts in a number of disciplines to draw attention to the embodied character of experience, cognition, and culture.

Russon on Hegel and the Body
Russson's book is nothing less than a re-organization of the *Phenomenology of Spirit*, one that makes explicit the conceptual commitment to embodiment that may have been concealed from many readers. This re-organization is accomplished with an all-too-rare philosophical sophistication, as Russon draws on a variety of sources and informs his reading with a strong command of 20th century phenomenology.

Among the book's strengths is a startlingly lucid and original reading of Hegel's text, a reading that illuminates many familiar passages and arguments in striking fashion. Russon's account of the master and slave, and his account of Sittlichkeit, re-animate texts often thought to have been exhaustively understood, revealing both the richness of Hegel's text and the power of a serious reader like Russon. But Russon is also adept at uncovering new insights in passages under-represented in the literature, and it is perhaps here that this book makes one of its strongest contributions. Russon on the reason chapter, and on the unhappy consciousness (the analysis of which is one of his central arguments), provides original and compelling arguments for the centrality of embodiment to the Hegelian understanding of self-consciousness.

But arguably the most significant contribution made by this book is that it reminds us that a Hegelian argument can and should be a philosophical argument. Rather than limiting himself to contributing to ongoing debates within Hegel circles, Russon has engaged philosophical inquiry itself, and shown how Hegel's text, at the hands of a keen reader, can speak, indeed argue successfully, to the broader philosophical community. This book is an argument for the complete understanding of phases of embodiment as conditions of self-consciousness, and thereby an argument that brings phenomenology and Hegel into the centre of important contemporary discussions.

An outstanding book on body, self and Hegel
I highly recommend John Russon's _The Self and its Body in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit_ to anyone with a philosophical interest in have to conceive body, and thus gives a new understanding of just what Hegel's phenomenology of spirit is concerned with, and what our bodies are. The latter is of central concern in much recent philosophy, and in everyday life in our political and technological culture. 2) It gives a lucid and convincing interpretation of Hegel's difficult book, one that proceeds through an engagement with historical positions in philosophy and science, and more important, through an engagement with the experience of trying to act responsibly in a situation, which experience haunts philosophy from the very beginning and is a most familiar element of life. Russon thus gets to the heart of Hegel's philosophy in a way that is illuminating for both the novice and the dedicated student of Hegel. And he thereby arrives at an important understanding of the body as that sphere of communicative and expressive existence which develops itself so as to enable responsible action in the first place. 3) The book's situation of Hegel in relation to ancient philosophy, transcendental argument and recent phenomenology invites a renewed engagement with Hegel, which is important given the role of Hegel in many current philosophical debates. In particular, Russon's discussion of the body and the unfolding of the Phenomenology of Spirit in terms of phusis (nature), hexis (habit) and logos (here meaning "expression") gives a very comprehensive and original way of grasping both the body and the Phenomenology. Likewise, his interpretation of Hegel's dialectic in terms of the relation of the empirical ego and transcendental ego and focus on recognition help clarify many crucial themes in Hegel. In general, Russon's elucidation of a concept of body in Hegel opens rich ways of thinking about our selves and our bodies.


The Serpent Power: 2 Works on Laya-Yoga
Published in Paperback by Dover Pubns (1974)
Authors: Arthur Avalon and John George Woodroffe
Amazon base price: $11.87
List price: $16.95 (that's 30% off!)
Average review score:

No better book on the subject has come out since.
This book stands head and shoulders above every book on the subject that has come out since, especially the recent glut of "new age" fluff books. (Hint: never subscribe to a philosophy with a name that rhymes with "sewage.")

On Point
This book is one of the more sophisticated of the books that deals with this topic. Givin in a traditional fashion that could be annoted only to such a scholar, and pioneer, as John Woodroffe. The detail is uncompairable and unless you have a solid understanding for the language and representations, it is a hard read.

The best work on Kundalini in English
This work will bring the reader into the power of Devatma Shakti Kundalini just by reading and pondering the text. Old feelings will find a home in the transformation from experience to understanding as the book flows forward. Gentle delight is the mark of a true Tantric text and this book, although strange and difficult at times, is pure de-light. If you want to know about Chakras and such, this is a classic text by one who really knows. Old and grand, this is a favorite treasure of mine and one I give away regularly to friends who must have more. Lam-to-Aum... Riley Jackson


Young George Washington: America's First President
Published in Library Binding by Turtleback Books Distributed by Demco Media (1992)
Authors: Andrew Woods and John Himmelman
Amazon base price: $10.40
Average review score:

History for budding historians
I thought this book would be well over the head of my five-year-old son; it has more words on each page than he's used to (because it is geared for the young reader). This book is so well written that it kept his attention throughout. And when he realized that this was someone he had heard of, he was hooked. Now he wants to know about all the presidents. (He doesn't realize how many of them there are!)

I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to start their child down the path of enjoying history.

Wonderful introduction to history
Although I expected this book to be well over the head of my 5-year-old son, he loved it. It was an interesting book that held his attention on its own merits. The pictures, although not as many as he was used to, helped the story along. But when he learned that this was a book about a real person, someone he had heard of, he was thrilled. He's asked me to get him more books about real people. I definitely will.

A children's classic
If you love your young children who are just learning about history, you owe it to yourself and to them to rush and press the order button for this classic kids' book. Lushily and lavishly illustrated, this wonderful tome details the true story of the man who would become the first president of the United States. This book is an excellent start for any young man or woman to get a grip on the early history of our great country. I am choked up as I write these words because I know this incredible book will become an heirloom that I will pass down from generation to generation. This powerful, and moving testiment to the formation of our land will never be forgotten by this impressed reader. It's simply one of the most wonderful books ever written and I thank God for its existence.


Aegis Handbook
Published in Paperback by Eden Studios, Inc. (05 December, 1997)
Authors: Eden Studios, Charles "Will" Borrall, Steve Bryant, Richard Dakan, Jason Felix, C. Brent Ferguson, M. Alexander Jurkat, B. C. Trombley, Heather McKinney, and John Nadeau
Amazon base price: $23.00
Average review score:

My work on this book!
Hello,
My name is Scott Neely and I liked the spot illustrations that I drew for this book. It has an X-Files feel to it and is a great supplement to the role-playing game. Enjoy!
Scott

Under the Aegis
The Conspiracy X rpg is one of the coolest around, and the Aegis organisation definitely needed a source book of its own. And here it is. It has loads more stuff on Aegis, including some cool new skils 'n professions. The stuff on Aegis rocks, and the advice on operations and tactics has helped my players get further into character. All in all, an invaluable addition to any Con X player's/GM's library.


The Library Shakspeare
Published in Hardcover by Trident Press International (01 September, 1999)
Authors: William Shakspeare, John Gilbert, George Cruikshank, and Robert Dudley
Amazon base price: $75.00

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