If you think that you can't read classic American Literature because it's all so big and intimidating (i.e., Moby Dick) think again. Some of the short stories in this collection of Melville's "other" work are incredibly well-written insights into human nature. (As is Moby Dick, but I digress).

Billy Budd's encounter with "justice," Bartleby's statement that he would "prefer not", Benito Cerino's exploration of slavery-- these tales are not to be missed. You should read this book as a starter, then move on to the BIG OLD white whale.

Darkly humorous, cynical, horrific and melancholy, Melville's later works are the capstone to the author's deepening discontent with his America. The vision here can be frustrating: Melville conjures up the most painful, soul-searching mysteries, and then refuses to knot them up with tidy solutions. Instead, Melville deepens the moral ambiguity that seeped through the skin of the transitional Moby Dick in full-length works like Pierre and Billy Budd, Sailor. And the shorter works--among them The Piazza Tales, Benito Cereno, and Bartleby the Scrivener--are imbued with such a longing for any kind of graspable meaning, that their readers, like their characters, find themselves in a ponderous state of shock. The human condition, Melville seems to say, is one of isolation, cast adrift, searching alone for a truth that is, and always will be, inscrutable.

Far more up to date, comprehensive, and non-dogmatic than Marx's writings on capitalism. A must for anyone starting to study socialism in any form.

Pierre Jalee has written a brilliant pamphlet which is a resource tool for all who are concerned by the blind faith in free markets that is prevalent the world over.

Jalee gets to the core of the capitalist system and free markets, and also deals with the exploitation of the third world by imperialist powers. This book enables the user to gain a thorough understanding of basic capitalist and marxian economics.

A must read for anyone concerned by the dangerous proliferation of free markets. Especially important to people in Asia and Africa.

This book is still available in India!!!

A classic work of mysticism worth returning to time and time again. Explores the interconnectedness of the world in a vibrant, fresh style that proves eternal.

If only more Catholics could give up the dogma and go with the hymn...

I have read this book five or six times, and each time i read it, I discover something new that i never noticed before. It talks a lot about relationships between things that happen in the universe, and is a great book... One of the best i have ever read. Allthough, it is a bit more advanced.

I wish I had known about this book while fighting my way through "Outline of a Theory of Practice". Bourdieu is a compelling social scientist and his ideas only look better after seeing them dissected and explained in this collection of interviews and speeches. Like "Power/Knowledge", a collection of interviews, speeches, and other works by Foucault, this work gives readers a "second chance" to enter an important body of theoretical work. Of course some chapters are more compelling than others, but the good ones are very good indeed, and I found soemthing useful in just about every one. If I had to pick an unforgettable passage in this book, it would be where Bourdieu explained why he writes in such a difficult way--it is on purpose! In sum: this book makes a terribly important but often difficult body of scholarship more accessible.

It is not that you understand all the conclusions. It is not that you share the same point of view. Pierre Bourdieu, who did this January 2002, is the philosophical leader of the people, who do not accept everything as served by the media. Read the recent works of Bourdieu also, and you understand the unrest some people have with today's power sharing in society.
A MUST-READ book to understand "modern" people.

I'm an aspiring historian, not a sociologist. Bourdieu's work, however, is of such a caliber that it transcends arbitrary academic boundaries. It's essential reading for anyone who's interested in the ontology and epistemology of humankind.

He's difficult to read, though. That's one of the reasons this book is so valuable. Loic Wacquant (no sociological slouch himself) has undertaken to provide an exposition of Bourdieu's ideas without trivializing them. Some of those ideas that struck a chord with me include replacing the false antinomy of structure/agent with notions of "field" and "habitus" (structure and agency's relationship to one another); cultural capital and symbolic power (more balanced perspectives on the philosophy/sociology of language); and the inherent bias of the intellectual qua intellectual (apart from race, class, etc).

Bourdieu is definitely postmodern, but once the reader grasps the technically precise language in which they are articulated, his ideas are surprisingly down-to-earth. P.B. would probably not much like that I write this--he abhors the intuitive in social science--but that's what comes of thinking well and writing carefully. This is a job well done by Wacquant. I highly recommend it for serious students.

This book consists of three parts. In the first part Wacquant offers a general summary of the key points and works in Bourdieu's oeuvre. The second part is an extremely entertaining interview with Bourdieu. Here, Bourdieu demonstrates that he is far from a cold scientist of social culture. Of particular interest, is Bourdieu's reflections on his book 'Homo Academus' which is an internal critique of the French Academy. In these passages, Bourdieu's comments reflect his passionate committment to his work, and in the ways that his own interest and investment in a social field must (somehow) become an object of reflection. Also, Bourdieu's comments reflect his great passion for art despite his own analysis of art strictly in terms of cultural capital and social status. At times, Bourdieu is dazzling. The final section is a transcription of a seminar, again, on the practice of sociology that remains conscientious of its position and limitations.

This book also includes an extensive bibliography of Bourdieu's writings up to 1992, as well as another bibliography of relevent external sources and commentaries.

I am so pleased to have found this excellent book on Commedia Dell'Arte! We provide authentic Italian masks for performers, students and collectors all over the world and are frequently asked for more information. We highly recommend this comprehensive work by Duchartre, and will refer inquiries to Amazon for purchase now that we have located a source for the book. We invite you to visit us at maskart.com where you will find all the characters from The Italian Comedy brought to life.

If one is interested in the Commedia Dell Arte, buy this book. It includes a history, a disscussion of performance method, and a chapter for each of the basic stock characters and their family. Ducharte includes a collection of engravings detailing commedia work. A must. The only thing it lacks is a detailed description of traditional Lazzi.

Seldom have I enjoyed a book as much as I enjoyed this one. So much so that I feel compelled to reverse my prejudices and offer this on-line review. Pierre-Antoine Bernheim's erudition and eloquence make this one the most gripping, surprising and rewarding histories that I have read in recent years. Jesus's brother, James, for centuries reduced to a footnote in the history of Christianity, is brought to life with consumate skill by this author. Sifting through every shred of available evidence, Pierre-Antoine Bernheim manages to get closer than any exegete in our history to finding the answers to one of Christianity's most elusive historical puzzles. Who was James, described by St Paul as "the brother of Lord"? Was he effectively first pope of the Christian Church shortly after the crucifixion? Was he even one of Jesus's disciples? Why was he killed? What was his relationship like with Jesus? Why does the Catholic Church in particular play down the role of this seminal Christian? What makes a Jew? What does epipasm mean? Bernheim finds the answers to these and a thousand similar puzzles, writing in fluent prose, (beautifully translated from the original French by John Bowden), with an energy that never flags. As a scholar Bernheim leaves not a stone unturned in his exhaustive quest for the truth. He gives a fair hearing to all sides of all arguments. As a writer he ensures that this is a reading treat which can be enjoyed by anyone who feels the slightest atom of curiosity about the extraordinary historical enigmas of Jesus Christ and the early Christian church. What a feat! Bravo Bernheim!

James, commonly knon as the Lord's brother, has remained an elusive historical figure. New Testament and early Christian traditions suggest that he was the son of Mary and Joseph. However, he is often portrayed as Christ's cousin to preserve the ideal of Mary's virginity. Pierre-Antoine Bernheim has written a lively and well researched biography of this controversial character who played a crucial role, alongside Peter, in the early Church in Jerusalem. This book challenges our previous understanding of the origins of the Christian Church through the life of this enigmatic man who was almost written out of history.

A prophet twice revisited.

One only thing there is not. It's [called] the oblivion.// God, that saves the metal, saves the dross// And ciphers on his prophetic memory [of us]// The moons to come and those passed beyond.//

Sólo una cosa no hay. Es el olvido.// Dios, que salva el metal, salva la escoria// Y cifra en su profética memoria// Las lunas que serán y las que han sido//

Jorge Luis Borges. Everness. English version: Gerardo García.

Teilhard de Chardin's Man's Place in Nature, also subtitled The Human Zoological Group is to the late Jesuit's written corpus the same thing the film "The name of the rose" is to Umberto Eco's novel : a shortcut and a compendium.

In Teilhard's warning words :

".... the following pages do not at all pretend to render an exhaustive definition of Man. ...... the much circumscribed end of this work : attempting to experimentally define that mysterious human, fixing its actual position, historically and structurally, in relation with the other forms, that in the course of times, the cosmic matter surrounding us has adopted."

"....... Man is not anymore (as it could be thought before) the motionless centre of a wholly finished world .... tends, to the contrary, from now on, to depict to our experience the arrowhead of a Universe making headways, simultaneously, towards ever accelerating material "complexification" and psychic interiorization. A vision ..... that should act with such strength over our minds .... that would even transform our philosophy of existence."

A prophet -if not the very last one- often sounds metaphoric and for that reason may be accepted as a pathfinder. The number of "metaphors" proposed in this work of the late 40's would have been more palatable to readers of the kind of the author of this review's epigraph than they were to the Roman Catholic Church authorities that banished Teilhard from publishing, or (more recently) to the School Board of Kansas ; both institutions against the evolution theory in their own respective degree, and, supporters of creationism.

What make Teilhard de Chardin's ideas worth of being studied by the maintainers of the several thousand sites that can be reached by a simple search on the world wide web ?. What make them unfortunate for the detractors among those webmasters ?.

Teilhard saw a world wiring itself into a brain of brains, the so called noosphere. His contemporary, Borges, (very closed in time, El Aleph, 1950) saw modern humans as modern Mohammeds, receiving the mountain in the coziness of their sweet homes. It took very few decades to mankind -from the days of both thinkers- to develop the internet and turn this metaphors into something else.

Whether or not it may soon come to notoriety another Galileo question or another Leibnitz-Newton question in regard to Teilhard's visions contained in this work may depend on its predictions, or accordingly to Borges metaphor : the fulfilled physiology of the prophetic mind in action.

I can name two of those: the collective invention spontaneously driven in the elaboration of some net-omnipresent pieces of software and, the confluence of religions, that has seen some difficult chapters (e pur si muove) in this times.

For a friend of mine close to the Jesuits, in what may be labeled as inner consume, Teilhard de Chardin did what the renegade Spender (1946 Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles) discovered in the fourth expedition to the red planet: " ..... in Mars, science and religion were reciprocaly enriched, without contradicting each other".

This book's value may reside in the description of a framework where a purpose for all human beings can be in common cherished and pursued. Namely, an orthogenetic ("in the strict etymologycal sense") conception of a global purpose in which vitality is indicated by tolerance towards an ever compressing social world, and the setting of a limitless source of energy : collective imagination. The point Omega, where evolution (and this framework and purpose) converges is at the same time God and the saga the pathfinder has to sing if he is ever going to be followed by his fellow villagers. Teilhard de Chardin, as exposed in this work, constitutes one of the main spellers of this "cosmic course" operation, and thus, clearly understood.

It would not be a surprise to better appreciate this nature where man is placed, after reading his book, as it should have not been a surprise for me -being mexican- to have better appreciated the mesoamerican prehispanic art after reading E. H.Gombrich's "The story of art", that barely speaks about the now world known mayas or aztecas.

From my point of view, this late work of Teilhard's is a well tuned effort to concisely stablish a phenomenolgy of this being even greater than creation : the evolution of the universe (or "creation in motion") turned self-conscious. Hence, the importance of man : the latest known synthesis of the phenomenon ("it would be enough to understand the man in order to understand the universe") and the responsibility to take the task to a good ending.

Gerardo García. Nov-29-2000

Teilhard de Chardin's "Man's place in nature", also subtitled The Human Zoological Group is to Teilhard's works the same thing the picture on Umberto Eco's "The name of the rose" is to the book of the Italian writer and philosopher: a shortcut and a compendium. In the field of so called "prophecies" as the prefiguring of the internet ("the wiring of the earth's brain"), one can name a few more: life all around the universe (given it is not a mere cinema theme), collective invention and/or investigation (any number of software pieces developed by the internet community), the scandal of the jobless -a side effect of technology- prior to any blessing this group may constitute. In Jorge Luis Borges poetry, God saves everything because of his prophetic memory that forgets nothing. How much of this prophetic book is about that kind of operation? For someone that lived the butchery of the first world war so closely (as a stretcher bearer in the french-german front) to envision peace must have been as important as the publishing of his writings. And that is what Teilhard is deep in his heart: a man for peace.

I studied this text when I was 18. Moliere is witty and humorous, which actually made reading this text a pleasure. He has lovely usage of his language.

I read this in my French class... the play is hilarious, well worth reading, and if you can't read French, you should read a translation or go see the play! It's funny, and although it is like many of Molière's other plays, it's a nice deviation from the normal play.

I found this book to be completely comprehensive on the subject of marquetry. Everyone who loves this art form will want to have this in their library.

I have two books of the same author: Masterpieces of marquetry (or something simmilar since it is written in French) and Marquetry. Each of the books cost over 100 USD in France and belong to a collection this author has published on the same subject. The Marquetry book (in English) I believe is the best book of its class. It has very detailed sketches of real antique designs. It not only explains the techniques but also stone inlaying, designing of tools and benches for cutting materials, etc.