Just look at a globe or a map. To the modern man, it all seems so final. Everything is mapped out rather specifically, with all kinds of scientifically and mathematically refined numbers and measurements ordering the physical world. Just a set of numbers can identify any place on Earth now with almost perfect accuracy. After reading Mercator, you realize what a different world we live in compared to the world Gerardus Mercator inhabited around five centuries ago. To Mercator and his colleagues, who were considered the high point of scientific knowledge at the same, the world was a dark mystery that seemed limitless in its expanse. They had little to reference, save fanciful stories of explorers and the Old Testament. It was up to a group of unbelievably talented men to make the leap that mankind needed in order to fully understand the shape and scope of the world we live on.

Gerardus Mercator was by no means born into greatness. On the contrary, the Flemish born genius was of very humble origins. As Crane reminds us, humble at the time meant barely living. Every day was a struggle. Luckily, the bright young boy that would give so much to mankind had a fairly prosperous uncle who funded his education at the Church academy at Leuvren, Belgium. I considered this part of the book to be the best. Crane does a very good outline of the emerging world of western intellectualism that was taking hold in the Low Countries. The Church and its allies, at least in certain areas, were taking fairly enlightened stances, letting non-churchmen hold ecumenical exclusive positions. This resulted in a great flourishing of ideas, especially in the field of cartography and theoretical mathematics. At first, Mercator was more of a simple student, but he soon fell in love with math and its mystical promises. Rapidly, his genius would be fully engaged with the image of the world.

Unfortunately, that image was not agreed upon by some important people. Leaders did not like to see the representations of their own land reduced in any way. Nor did the Vatican like certain new features added that seemed to cast doubt on certain church doctrines. Mercator, like many other intellectuals of the era was caught up in the net of the Inquisition. However, he lived through that experience, and we are all the better for it. Crane goes very indepth into Mercators methods and mindset. The reader gets a full understanding of the calculations and stakes involved. I felt Crane gets bogged down sometimes in minutiae, that does not really help the story, but the book is very good overall. It just brings a sense of awe to the reader that the western world could produce men such as Mercator, it truly is a credit to our civilization and the ideals we all aspire to.

Who hasn't heard of "Mercator projection"? You see it every time you pick up an atlas and look at a world map with all its longitude and latitude lines.

Well, lo and behold, Mercator was a person, Gerardus Mercator, not just a projection.

This is a terrific book for anyone interested in history that goes beyond the ordinary. In fact, there have been a lot of books about scientific history and this is a worthy addition to the genre.

Mercator was born in poverty in the Low Countries and lived to become the preeminent geographer of his time when drawing an accurate map involved doing the best you could from limited resources. Starting with globes he created the conventional way of putting a map on a flat surface with minimal distortion.

This is not the easiest book to read, but it was excellent. I recommend it to anyone who wants to deal with history beyond the usual political history.

Cartographers are generally an anonymous bunch. If you know one cartographer, it is probably Mercator, and you probably only know his last name because of his ingenious projection to make a flat map of our spheroid Earth. Gerard Mercator was a mild and modest man, less interested in making a name for himself than in improving knowledge of our planet. It was for others of his era within the bustling sixteenth century to cross the seas and bring back riches, and more importantly, geographical data. Mercator himself never even approached an ocean, his exploring restricted mostly to libraries and obscure reports from those who made the voyages. He never had a biography in English until Nicholas Crane produced _Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet_ (Henry Holt). The life of the cartographer is integrated with the tumultuous military, political, and meteorological events around him, for an engaging look at an original thinker.

Mercator was born as Gerard Kremer to poor parents (his father was a cobbler) in Flanders in 1512. He was fortunate in being helped in his education, and became an apprentice to a maker of instruments and globes. His engraving into copperplate was beautiful and influential. In 1537, Mercator published his first map, a portrait of the Holy Land. Four years later, he made his first terrestrial globe, and Crane makes understandable how huge such a project was. Making the lens-shaped map papers to glue onto the sphere may have inspired Mercator to calculate his projection, a map that was to be an aid to navigators ever after. Mercator lived in a tumultuous time, and his moderate views, shared with the humanists, about such things as faith in Christ being more important than ritualistic ceremony, were considered heretical by others. In 1544, he was actually imprisoned for seven months for alleged Lutheran sympathies (charged with "_lutherye_"). He remained busy until the end of his long life, during the final three decades of which he worked on a book of maps of lands all over the world which was only completed by his grandsons. There had been other such books, but Mercator's was more comprehensive. It was also more influential; he named it after a Titan of Roman mythology, and ever since, any book of maps has been called an atlas.

We are less surprised by maps than those in Mercator's time; we have instantaneous satellite pictures of the world, whenever we want them, and _terra incognita_ continues to dwindle. Everyone recognizes the true silhouettes of continents. There was a time when such knowledge was still new, and tentative. Crane has written about the many influences on his subject within this complicated historical period, and has produced a remarkably full portrait. Mercator assimilated information and made a new picture of the world, a picture now familiar to us all. His influence is not even confined to the Earth he served so well; when the Mariner missions mapped Mars, the resultant charts were Mercator projections.

...but a tiring survey of previous typologies that must be read before you get to Jung's version.

Jung's theories are absolutely amazing. Anyone who is interested in psychology should read this book!

A deep look at the mechanisms of the "psychic functions". Surely instructive for layman with its analysis of human behaviour in everyday life. This work best explores the Jung's concept of the unconscious and proves that his concept is far from being a mystical one as some critics wrote. It also gives a historical perspective of the thoughts of some great thinkers (Schiller, William James and some others )on the problem of psychological types.

"The really important psychic facts can neither be measured, weighed, nor seen in a test tube or under a microscope. They are therefore supposedly indeterminable, in other words, they must be left to people who have an inner sense of them, just as colours must be shown to the seeing and not to the blind." (Jung p. 238) This sentence reflects much of what this book is about. It highlights the drive behind Jung's attempt to make the invisible visible through an analysis of alchemical thought; it shows his complicated sentence structure and presents some of the hurdles one will have to jump in order to comprehend Jung's work on Alchemy. The preceding volume 12, "Psychology and Alchemy," would serve as a good introduction to this volume, and volume 14, "Mysterium Coniunctionis," might make Jung's thesis easier to comprehend.

This volume of collected works contains his commentary to "The Secret of The Golden Flower" which is almost useless without the actual Golden Flower text. It also contains Jung's analysis and commentary on some of the major metaphors of Alchemy.

According to Jung, Alchemy was the precursor of Western psychology, and that alchemists projected their mental/spiritual states unto the inanimate objects and processes of Alchemy. This work examines these projections in the light of modern consciousness and with the process of individuation in mind. `

Stripped to its essence, Jung's psychological theory states that humans have an unknown meta-consciousness that some will discover through a process he called individuation. This is a recapitulation of the ideas found in all religions, but is here represented by Jung in the terms of modern Western Culture as a scientific analysis of the Soul through an analysis of Alchemy.

Several years ago I read through this text without a clue as to what Jung was talking about, but found some of his observations noteworthy. About two years ago I had some experiences that made the insights contained in this book valuable, and I found that my previous reading allowed me to understand what I had read retrospectively. It also helped me in understanding aspects of Chinese Alchemy as metaphor. It is not recommended to casual readers.

...into the world of alchemy made the world aware of how rich a symbol-system had been lost from time out of mind. It was Jung who discovered that alchemy, a "chymical" art compensatory to the Christian emphasis on spirit over matter, also represented a projected psychology of the unconscious; it was, in fact, a forerunner of depth psychology itself.

To prepare for my first semester teaching statistics, I asked several colleagues for advice and references. Texts by Brunk and DeGroot were very useful and helped me organize and clarify for my students the material in our "statistics for engineers" text. Recently I discovered the three wonderful volumes by Hoel, Port, and Stone. In particular I found nice pictures to illustrate and explain the central limit theorem. There are also many exercises and worked examples. The next statistics course I teach will be greatly improved thanks to these books and the work that went into writing them.

When I was a graduate student at Stanford in the mid 1970s I took my first course in stochastic processes out of the companion book on stochastic processes by these authors. The three volumes "Introduction to Probability", "Introduction to Statistics" and "Introduction to Stochastic Processes" were produced at about the same time with the intention of covering the first three graduate courses on these subjects in a statistics porgram. I had different texts for my probabilty and statistics courses but these three texts were excellent and very similar in style. They are all clear and concise and could be best studied in the order given above.

Few books on international law ever touched upon the problem of the legal status of the divided status. Yet Prof. von Glahn has a section specifically devoted to the discussion of the problem of divided states under international law.

Also, I found his use of cases to illustrate the various issue in international law especially helpful. Otherwise,the teacher and students have to go to another case book such as the one put out by Briggs to find the cases.

The author wastes 3 chapters trying to have the fittest explanation of international law's legitimacy. However, there is no need to dwell on such reasons and waste valuable space. The case studies were very crucial for every international law undergraduate, therefore, they were very useful tools in developing the analytical skils of readers. Nevertheless, he could have provided an overview of the history of similar cases, together with the countries which may have signed treaties.

Great if this is the topic you are looking for. Spectra of diatomic molecules are hard to interpret if you dont have the right resources. Also very useful in physical chemistry lab classes.

This book is basic to the study of every discipline that depends upon spectroscopy, not so much for the rather good fundamental handling of theory, there are many good books on the subject. My favorite aspect of the book is throughtout its pages and especially its Table 39, rich with experimental results, contains references to seminal works in the field, the starting points of the study of a vast array of subjects in the basic sciences and a singular reference of my work in the study of diatomics.

This is an answer the previous review request regarding the background of the author. From the back of this book one can read the following: "GERHARD F.HASEL is Professor of Old Testament and Biblical Theology at Andrews University. This book is a companion to his earlier volume, Old Testament Theology: Basic Issues in the Current Debate." "Andrews University educates its students for generous service to the church and society in keeping with a faithful witness to Christ and to the worldwide mission of the Seventh-day Adventist Church." (From the Andrews University web site) Dr. Hasel (d. 1994) was conservative in his theology and upheld a high view of the integrity of the Old Testament.

please show me author's personal Histor

I have found this to be a very reliable resource to understanding the cultural background of the Old Testament. For me it gives a new, deeper meaning to the events of the Bible. It is clearly written, and a great book to have to begin your OT study...if you can find it.

There were two monumental Old Testament theologies translated from German into English in the early 1960's. One was Walter Eichrodt's _Theology of the Old Testament_ and the other, arguably the superior, was Gerhard von Rad's _Old Testament Theology_.

Using a keen sense of form criticism von Rad showed how the Old Testament grew out of the experiences of ancient Israel. Historical event was followed by layering of theological interpretation. These were arranged by ancient Israel in a cultic confession.

Von Rad noted that the destruction of the Hexateuchal framework made the discovery of the early history difficult. But the matter was very different if one took into consideration that the sequence of events conformed to a "canonical schema of a cultic nature."

The pre-Mosaic ancestors of ancient Israel were not always worshippers of Yahweh. Genesis mentions cults of the ancestors such as the God of Abraham, the Fear of Isaac, and the Strong one of Jacob. Confessional formulae of which Deuteronomy 25.6 is most important coalesced these diverse traditions into the historiography of the Old Testament.

This is the starting point of von Rad's _Old Testament Theology_.

This review refers to the 1962 edition of Gerhard von Rad's _Old Testament Theology: the Theology of israel's Historical Traditions_.

....several interesting pieces, including the Jungian view of the transference as an alchemical dialog between anima and animus. Clinical wisdom mixed with analytic theory.

This is Volume 16 of the Collected Works of Carl Jung (1875-1961), "The Practice of Psychotherapy". The first half of the volume is a collection of essays in which Jung explains his views about the interaction of a therapist and a patient. Two themes are striking. First, Jung insists that therapy is a mutual interaction, not something the therapist "does" to the patient: "the therapist is no longer the agent of treatment but a fellow participant in a process of individual development" (p. 8). Secondly, Jung is iconoclastic and utterly unsystematic: for him, the process of growth and healing is a process of individuation, so what is needed for healing at each step of the psychotherapeutic process will be unique to the individuals involved. Jung borrows ideas from Freud, such as dream-analysis and transference, but Freud would not even recognize the way Jung uses these terms in this volume. Indeed, the final work, "The Psychology of the Transference" (1946), is one of his late alchemical works; it uses the *Rosarium philosophorum*, a 16th century alchemical text, as the basis for elucidating the spectrum of issues around an individual's relationship with the Unconscious. I suspect this volume would be of particular interest to practicing therapists, because Jung discusses the profound existential issues that are often overlooked in current professional programs in psychology.

In this famous book, the historian Gershom Scholem goes through the history of Shabtai Zevi: the man who, in the seventeenth century, convinced the majority of world Jewry that he was the messiah and then converted to Islam to save his own life. The story is fascinating, and Scholem probably knows more about it than almost anybody else in the world. Although the book is a "historical" book, not really intended for casual reading, it is stirring in parts and not that hard to get through. Scholem has definite opinions about Shabtai -- e.g. how great a part Kabbalah played in the movement, whether he really believed in himself as the messiah -- that not all historians would agree with. Still, this is a worthwhile book.

How often does a scholar write a text that is uniformly considered definitive? Rarely. However, Scholem's work on Sabbatai Sevi is exactly that. So important is this text, that all other examinations before have fallen away and are no longer studied and almost all that came after are derivative. A brilliant scholar, the author goes to great depths, examining both the historical and philosophical underpinnings of Judaism's largest Messianic movement since Jesus.

The author rejects the traditional explanation that followers of Sevi were attracted to him because of the deprivation experienced by some Jews of the period. As Scholem points out, even wealthy communities of Jews in Amsterdam and Greece found him irresistible. Patterns of the growth of the movement are given great attention and are fascinating.

Many people are put off by the length of this work (almost 1000 pages of prose). However, the field is so vast, that a shorter book would not have done it justice. While somewhat esoteric, Sabbati Sevi provides a powerful window into a period of Jewish history given too little study.

If a book is going to be 1000 pages, it had better have something awfully important to say. Luckily, this tome is an engrossing, heavily detailed account of Sabbatai Sevi, whose influence on Jewish history is usually underestimated. Scholem is the perfect author to write this book: he is the foremost expert on Kabbalah, which was a major influence on the movement. There are times when I felt the book was a little TOO heavy on detail; the book seemed to be dancing the line between dissertation and readable history book. I am glad it erred on the side of too much information, however, and Scholem's writing style (which can sometimes be awfully dense) is quite readable.

I strongly recommend this book. I recommend it to Jews who want to know about their history. I recommend it to Christians, since the parallels between Sevi and Jesus are many and deep. Lastly, I recommend it to anyone who has an eye for the tragic, who is prepared to read how human frailty can bring about great acheivements and the noblest of intentions can nearly destroy a people.