What through the subject list appears to be a book on the power of the mind and how to harness it is simply the authors religious ideas spattered with quotes and misquotes from the bible.

This book is best reviewed in the audio section of Amazon.com. Simply put, the content is a stroke of genius. Don't put this on your MUST READ list...simply buy it and read it and get the audio while you're at it. It'll get you through those dark days - and propel you into a new thought pattern.

This book by committee offers a well rounded overview of the 1979 nuclear accident at TMI. It presents a sequence of events and human responses by officials and citizens which is a dramatic historical account. Although it is not completely accurate (written shortly after the accident), it employed independant investigators who performed a fairly comprehensive investigation. I have seen many documents at the National Archives generated by the investigators. The amount of radiation released is cited as only "estimates" but limits the uppermost value to a level which can easily be disputed by other scientists. Also, the results of radiation exposure and the misrepresentation of radiation monitoring equipment availability is misleading at best and a wrong at worst. The conclusion that fundemental attitude changes must occur within the industry was a phrase which has haunted the industry for decades.

It is a good overview, however the Rogovin Commission report is more interesting but harder to read.

EVERYTHING ABOUT PUSH PULL STRATEG

First, let me say that I value the expression of anger in this book. The author is clear that:"the wrongs of the world are not chance injustices but part of a system that is profoundly wrong" p.2 and that there is "no inevitable happy ending". p.6

The author understands that the beginning of our rejection of capitalism is not thoughtful or analytical but rather emotional:

"We start from negation, from dissonance. The dissonance can take many shapes. An inarticulate mumble of discontent, tears of frustration, a scream of rage, a confident roar. An unease, a confusion, a longing, a critical vibration.

Our dissonance comes from our experience, but that experience varies. Sometimes it is the direct experience of exploitation in the factory, or of oppression in the home, of stress in the office, of hunger and poverty, or of state violence or discrimination. Sometimes it is the less direct experience through television, newspapers or books that moves us to rage." P.1

This anger is recognised as dangerous:

"Often the No is violent or barbaric (vandalism,hooliganism,terrorism): the depravations of capitalism are so intense that they provoke a scream-against, a No which is almost completely devoid of emancipatory potential, a No so bare that it merely reproduces that which is screamed against.....And yet that is the starting-point: not the considered rejection of capitalism as a mode of organisation, not the militant construction of alternatives to capitalism. They come later (or may do). The starting point is the scream, the dangerous, often barbaric No."

The author also recognises that for various reasons this dissonance and rejection might be suppressed because of peer pressure to "fit in" or the promise of material benefit or fear of sanction. When this happens we become our own internal censors:

"In order to protect our jobs, our visas, our profits, our chances of receiving good grades, our sanity, we pretend not to see, we sanitise our own perception, filtering out the pain" p.9

So far, so good. Then the author moves onto more debatable ground. The main assertion is that: "The world cannot be changed through the state. Both theoretical reflection and a whole century of bad experience tell us so." P.19

The reasoning behind the assertion is that the State is so tied-in to the economic relations of capitalism that it cannot be used as an instrument for change: "the constitutional view isolates the state from its social environment: it attributes to the state an authority of action that it just does not have. In reality, what the state does is limited and shaped by the fact that it exists as just one node in a web of social relations. Crucially, this web of social relations centres on the way in which work is organised. The fact that work is organised on a capitalist basis means that what the stated does and can do is limited and shaped by the need to maintain the system of capitalist organisation of which it is a part."p.13

Of course this is an implicit criticism of Marxist (and particularly Leninist theory). Later the author makes this criticism explicit:

"The difficulty which revolutionary governments have experienced in wielding the state in the interests of the working class suggests that the embedding of the state in the web of capitalist social relations is far stronger and more subtle than the notion of instrumentality would suggest. The mistake of Marxist revolutionary movements has been, not to deny the capitalist nature of the state, but to misunderstand the degree of integration of the state into the network of capitalist social relations." P.14

Let's look at what Marxists actually say about the State when before we consider whether they "misunderstand the level of integration between the state and Capitalism". In "The Communist Manifesto" Marx and Engels say: "...the bourgeoisie, has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." Engels put his views on the State forward in his work: "The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State". The State in a capitalist society is less obviously coercive, Engels argues, than in a feudal one. Still however power resides with the ruling capitalist class. No government can ignore the economic power of that class.

From this it seems pretty clear that the founding fathers of Marxism had a very clear idea of the way in which the State and Capitalism intertwine. Marxist structuralists such as Nicos Poulantzas have developed this further.

Despite this understanding Lenin saw the State as a means of crushing the capitalists referring to the "special apparatus for coercion called the state" (The State and The Revolution, August-September 1917). He never said it would be easy - in fact he argued it would need a revolution!

I waited in vain for an alternative proposal from John Holloway:

"How then do we change the world without taking power? At the end of the book, as at the beginning, we do not know. The Leninists know, or used to know. We do not. Revolutionary change is more desperately urgent than ever, but we do not know any more what revolution means." P215

What a cop-out! My advice? Read this book only alongside those of Vladimir Il'ich.

This book is huge - but a lot of the details are not practical to the average electrical engineer. How many details of junction boxes and fittings do we need ? About 20% of the details are worth having. However, the book has good technical disussions.

The sample specifications are useful as a commerical grade "sheet" specification, but not full book specification. Please note that the book says that you can write for an electronic copy of the specifications included in the book. Sad to say, the author has passed away since it was written and his firm does not provide the specifications on disk.

If you are looking for a good electrical power reference book - look to Bob Hickey's Electrical Engineers Portable Handbook.

Ah, the Reagan years ... when Newt Gingrich was a rising star, Bill Clinton was an obscure Southern governor, and Republicans knew Congress was the enemy. Within just a few years, the same people and institutions who railed against the 'imperial Congress' would find themselves in control of that institution. By that time, the White House was the enemy again, and Republicans devoted their energy and determination to rolling back the presidency and using Congress as an engine of 'reform.'

As a monument of that earlier, innocent era, this book has three elements: an indictment of Congressional abuses of power, an analysis of the 'separation of powers' doctrine, and policy prescriptions for the late 1980s and beyond. Of these, the last is largely outdated now and the first is incomplete: the problem isn't that Congress is too powerful vis-à-vis the presidency, or vice versa, but rather that *both* branches have far too much power (just for good measure, so does the judiciary), and *both* should be severely, brutally, uncompromisingly scaled back.

The middle element, the analysis of 'separation of powers,' still stands up fifteen years later, however, and is worth a read for students of political science.

This book shows where not to make mistakes when writing characters(lines sticking out in wrong places, how to space lines)and has plenty of example sentences. It has many tests to see how you are doing. However, material in the tests are sometimes different than actual studied material. Full reading of kanji are given in the book.

this book was an indepth look at the life of J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI. It goes into great depth on his life and his services in the FBI. It is a source for information, however the writing is a bit slow at firslt. overall a great book though!

This book is a collection of ten papers on the Washington Naval Limitation Conference in the early 1920's. The emphasis of each paper is on the position of each of the participants of the conference. Since the book is rather short ' 319 pages ' the papers are not very detailed. These papers primarily stress the political and strategic aspects as they affected each participant. There is little on the technical effects although these were rather important (see A. D. Baker III's 'Battlefleets and Diplomacy' at www.warships1.com/W-INRO/INRO_Battlefleet.htm). The coverage of the U. S. and British positions offers little that is new, but the material on those of France and Italy is not so well known. There is a tendency to interpret the arms control negotiations from the viewpoint of Cold War arms control negotiations which leads to rather anachronistic interpretations.

I'm very disappointed in this book. The author is wrong about basic facts on which she bases her theories. To wit:

Frodo does not, as the author claims, use the Ring "to test resistance to institutionalized power and the power of others within the community." He doesn't "use" the Ring at all; if anything, it uses him. Gandalf's Elven ring does not save Frodo from the Nazgul at the Ford on the way to Rivendell; at that point in the story, we don't know that Gandalf has one of the Elven rings. "Mordor" may mean"murder" in Anglo-Saxon, and that may have been in the back of Tolkien's mind; but "Mordor" mean "black-land" in Sindarin, and that's the meaning Tolkien wanted for the land. Durin's Bane is not mithril or greed (though that is an issue), but the Balrog.

Dr. Chance does makes several interesting points, and for that reason I might, albeit with much hesitation, recommend this book to those who are familiar enough with LotR to avoid the pitfalls.

Not really much insight here. Noteworthy and interesting points are scattered throughout, however they are certainly not helped by the general skimpiness of developed argument or sustained elaboration for a convincing case. All in all, the ideas are never explored to their fullest extent, and the general tone is that of a graduate student's thesis. In part this may be due to the decision to retrace the entire plot-line, rather than to develop particular themes in depth. Also, the academic liberal arts jargon is just bad.
Prof. Chance approaches LOTR and its mythology of power by way of a purely political hermeneutics, applying the theories of (mostly) Foucault to mythopoetic material that rises beyond explanation via mere politics. This Foucault influence is central, but at no point is it seriously questioned or demonstrated how it is even relevant or useful to the topic at hand - rather than, say, the concepts Tolkien drank in from epic poetry, fairy stories, world mythology, the Bible, or a thousand different philosophers (for example, how is Foucault more revealing here than Augustine, or Hobbes, or Rousseau?).
Somehow, it all fails to grasp the very personal, psychological, and metaphysical aspects of Tolkien's masterpiece, which speaks to us not primarily through the rationalism of politics but via the art of wonder: the magic of the journey, the crucible of morality and fellowship, innocence and experience, and the passages of life in relation to its underpinning wholeness.
It's disappointing and at times hilarious, though, when Prof. Chance sees LOTR as rather more concerned with "the political problem of the intellectual (22)" and "liberation from hegemony... A novel that mythologizes power and the problem of individual difference... the problem of individual and class difference within the social body or construct, the heroic power of knowledge and language in the political power struggle, and the ideal of kingship as healing and service, in a unique inversion of master-servant roles (23)". One gets the sense that it all boils down to "the role of understanding and tolerating differences within the community (24)", to "giving voice to the dispossessed of the twentieth century (25)". But interpreted this way, squintingly, the tale only seems to diminish into triviality. It becomes merely "a drama of the symbolic value of language (45)", wherein the Ring is a "challenge to [Frodo's] civic and political education (48)", and where "name-calling and hostile language...wound more than the...voice of an enemy like the Black Riders or Sauron (58)".
Admittedly, such platitudes are more than the pure baloney evoked here, and may well contain very important ideas, but they are, in the end, only tangents to the tale that Tolkien set down.

Jane Chance's discussion includes some valuable insights and a useful review of research, however it suffers from three main problems:

a. The discussion of power is one-sided and focuses too much on the power of language, while neglecting issues such as the power of vision and the gaze, which are just as prominent. This makes the application of Foucault's theories - a good idea in itself -superficial (The author refers to one book of his out of a vast corpus).
b. Any discussion of the structure of The Lord of the Rings cannot disregard the vast work that Christopher Tolkein has done on the various layers and stages of the volumes of the book.
c. Chance's book is marred by many errors: for example, how can Germany have blockaded England in 1946, a year after the end of the war? In this context, the author should have mentioned Tolkein's own discussion of the relationship between his work and the Second World War.