This review is necesary for understand the History Teory, it's more importand for thaformation of de Historian

I can heartily recommend this book. Combining the romance of the desert with a mysterious key to the past, accidentally discovered by a French officer in the Napoleonic Army...and it's all true! A good example of how real life beats out pale fiction. As a bonus, good information about ancient Egyptian life is to be found here...

Collaboratively written by novelist and journalist Robert Sole and Egyptologist Dominique Valbelle (President of the French Egyptological Society), The Rosetta Stone: The Story Of The Decoding Of Hieroglyphics is the amazing and true story of the Rosetta Stone, from its discovery by Napoleon's army during their sojourn in Egypt, to how the Rosetta Stone became the key to deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics -- which had not been used as a written language for over fourteen centuries. An amazing saga about the reclamation of history itself, The Rosetta Stone is a highly recommended addition to both school and community library Archaeology and Egyptology reference collections.

The Rosetta Stone shares the history of the Rosetta stone that contained text written in early Greek, Egyptian and hieroglyphs enabling a link to a longlost language. From its discovery in 1799 to its theft from the French by the British army and the studies which have lead to earth shaking linguistic discoveries, The Rosetta Stone is filled with insights and a sense of action.

Sometimes I am simply proud that I have read a book. This slim volume falls into that category. The fourteen short chapters explode with new ideas, fresh perspectives, and tantalizing viewpoints. To summarize these riches is unlikely to do them justice, yet I will try.

De Certeau inverts social values and cultural hierarchies. His hero metaphor is not the exemplar, but rather the ant. Wisdom resides not in the pronouncement of expert or philosopher, but in the routine discourse between ordinary people. To De Certeau the definitional constraints imposed by the experts result in artificial distinctions. Only the discourse of ordinary people is firmly rooted in experience and embraces the varieties and logical complexities of living.

Among these complexities of life is the amazing adaptive capacity of the ordinary. Even the most oppressive and controlling of cultures cannot eradicate the subversive agency of the peasant. This subversive agency is expressed through mythic stories, common proverbs, and verbal tricks. De Certeau refers to the adaptive capacity of the ordinary as tactics of living, and these tactics may be best exemplified when the worker does the personal while on the clock.

The distinction between strategy and tactics is central to De Certeau's thought. Strategy refers to the top-down exercise of power to coerce compliance. Tactics refer to the opportunistic manipulations offered by circumstance. The conflict between strategies and tactics is ironic - as strategic forces expand to increase dominance, there is a corresponding increase in opportunity for tactical subversion.

De Certeau relates his ideas to the theoretical work of Foucault and Bourdieu, and continues his inverted perspective by looking anew at the concept of city, commuter travel by rail, story telling, writing, reading, and believing.

This book is more of a riddle than a narrative; de Certeau provides glimpses of his meaning from time to time, but deliberately avoids propositional clarity. This style requires that the reader take an unusual stance toward this book. Instead of expecting the author to communicate, the reader must content himself with hints and suggestions of meaning. I am convinced that these hints and suggestions are more than worth the reader's investment of time. Find a quiet place and enjoy!

Michel de Certeau's brilliant book is one of the primary nodes in the historical switchbox that eventually crossed the signals that led us through structuralism and practice theory to critical realism and Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. His classic exploration of everyday life will send flashes of light and pleasure through the mind on a constant basis - his dense, absolutely masterful, and witty expository quasi-poetry on economy, power, and practice is essentially an extended series of aphorisms, upon any one of which an entire essay could be based. And a good one, at that.

What we have here is a celebration of the everyday, the common, the mundane, and the wonderful capacity of life to resist systematization and classification via its organic flexibility and espirit de corps. It is a wonderful wake-up call: "A few individuals, after having long considered themselves experts speaking a scientific language, have finally awoken from their slumbers and suddenly realized that for the last few moments they have been walking on air, like Felix the Cat in the old cartoons, far from the scientific ground. Though legitimized by scientific knowledge, their discourse is seen to have been no more than the ordinary language of tactical games between economic powers and symbolic authorities."

Writing in the tradition of Lefevbre (more so than anyone else who comes to mind at the moment), his work touches upon contemporary Foucault and Bourdieu only briefly and then moves on to do much more. For example, in the way of analyses of strategic and tactical behavior, resistances, spatial practices, sublatern hermeneutics, and state/scientific ideologies of secrecy and knowledge. In de Certeau, we see not just a clearing of the intellectual path for towering figures such as Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Giddens, Lash, Appadurai, and Taussig (to name only a handful) - enabling them to come whistling along with their variously insightful ideas from A to Z - but we see it done with a panache and "Ich weiss es nicht" that is memorable in the persona it invokes.

And as long as you're sitting on the Paris-Munchen ICE, scratching your chin and contemplating the axiological implications of beer or coffee at 9am, I can't think of anything better to read than de Certeau's comments on the rite of passage of Railway Incarceration and Navigation (Chapter VIII), in which a whole series of transformations is extracted from the mundane in a suprahumane and very-French manner. Bon voyage!

This is one of the great books of French post-structuralist thought. I realize that to some people that might be like saying "one of the nicest Nazis I know." But for those who don't immediately dismiss the entire genre, there is much to be gained from reading, and rereading, this book.

In essence, Certeau is challenging the rather despairing vision of Foucault's The Order of Things, with its image of the panopticon from which no one can escape. Certeau focuses on everyday practices to see how people do in fact escape the all-seeing gaze of the panopticon. In particular his distinction between "strategy" and "tactics" is useful and intriguing.

The language is highly poetic and at times difficult going, but *how* Certeau says what he says is in some ways as important as *what* he says. He wants to write in a way that at the same time uses and escapes the constraints of ordinary language. It takes some getting used to, but it is worth it.

Verner notes that the name "sphinx" is our transliteration of the Greek transliteration of shesep-ankh or "living image". He also recounts how "[t]he ship Beatrice... in 1838, shipwrecked and sank between Malta and Spain." (p 246) Aboard was the sarcophagus from the Menkaure / Mycerinus pyramid (the smallest of the three large pyramids at Giza). That would be a salvage job for the ages, and a great way for a museum to add to its collection. I do however wonder if that's really where the ship went down. Some even dispute that the ship ever existed per se, or that it went down, or that it went down in that year, or that it had the sarcophagus onboard.

The author rejects the high age of the Great Sphinx that was proved by the water erosion -- a point on which most geologists (the overwhelming majority) who have studied the evidence agree. His rejection is on the flimsiest basis, especially since the Sphinx itself is not aligned with the so called cardinal points while most stuff at Giza is -- but that the also predynastic temple near the Sphinx has the same alignment. Verner insists that the consensus is that Khafre carved the Sphinx, but later writes "(Khufu?)" and nowhere that I saw mentions Stadelman's establishment that the Sphinx was probably carved by Khufu.

I read chunks of this book last night, and recommend it as a pretty good overview of the known pyramids, including those which barely survive (foundations only, or literary references with little else). The author also gives brief information about the pharaohs and others for whom many of these (surviving or not) were built.

It's the definitive book on the subject.Great text,clear illustrations.

That the author was born into a privileged family makes her courageous life all the more astonishing. I visited Colombia during this past year, and I know how extremely dangerous the country is for everyone--but Colombian Senator Ingrid Betancourt has really pushed the envelope in order to fight political corruption in her country.

What a remarkable woman, and what sacrifices she has made to remain an honest, outspoken legislator! She has risked not just her personal safety, but also missed watching her children grow up; since it is too dangerous for them to remain in Colombia with her, they must live in another country with their father.

The book tells a truly riveting story about Colombian politics from the late 1980s to the present. Its account of governmental corruption at the highest levels does a great service to U.S. readers--many of us are familiar with the Cali and Medellin drug cartel mayhem, and a few of us know about the guerrilla war going on at this moment, but most of us have no idea of the extent of political corruption that has been going on in Colombia. So thank you for this story, Ingrid Betancourt, but thank you especially for your stubborn courage--you are a true role model and what I would call a hero.

Having said that, I have two quibbles with the book regarding style and content. First, it looks as though the book was produced in such a hurry there was not sufficent time for editing in English, resulting in some typos and grammatical errors. Before a second printing takes place, I hope a good editor reviews the manuscript.

I also think a big problem with the book is that the most central issues in Colombia today are barely mentioned. I am referring to the guerrilla-paramilitary-Colombian military war, which is only mentioned hurriedly in the last two chapters, though this war has been going on during all the years described in the book. It is like ignoring the elephant in the living room to wait until the book is nearly over before mentioning this war--something a good editor should have addressed. Further, unless I missed it, and I don't think I did, there was no mention about Plan Colombia (the U.S. involvement in the war) accompanied by the current, poisonous spraying of Colombia's coca and poppy fields--the "chemical warfare on the poor" as a Colombian archbishop has termed it. We have no idea how the author feels about this horror, or the U.S. support of the corrupt Colombian military.

So read this book, but do educate yourself on the missing issues.[...]

For anyone who cares about justice and democracy for our brothers and sisters to the south, read this book. For anyone who is cynical about our own democracy, and is disturbed by the beating our civil liberties are taking these days, read this book. For anyone who wants to understand the love of a mother for her children, read this book.

Ingrid Betancourt chose to insert herself into a political climate in Columbia that is rife with corruption, blackmail, intimidation, and sometimes, murder.

On February 23, 2002, Ingrid was kidnapped by the Marxist rebels operating in the jungles of Columbia as she attempted to bring her message of justice and peace to the disenfranchised Columbian people living in the rural and desperately poor areas of the country.

Only the most cynical person would fail to see the sincerity of Betancourt's belief that one day Columbia can be a democracy that its people can be truly proud.

Her story isn't just a good read. Its necessary reading for anyone who doubts the world lacks people of conscience and courage.

Vaya con dios, Ingrid

Don't miss this book! This is a great book and she is an amazing woman. Mother of 2 young children, she sacrificed her quiet comfortable life abroad to return to Colombia and fight for her people. Against all odds, she was elected twice and her challenge, as she put it last december, was to stay alive until the Presidential elections on May 26, 2002.

As you may know Ingrid was abducted Feb 23, 2002 by FARC, a marxist guerilla group in Colombia. She is still a candidate (there are 3000 persons held hostages in Colombia and the Parliament passed a law allowing anyone held hostage to run for office...) but there is little chance she'll be released soon.

This is really an opportunity to get to know Ingrid, one of the Great of this world and to learn about her incredible determination. You'll be amazed at what this woman, with little support and barely no money, did in the last 12 years to denounce corruption, fight drug trafickers and violence.

The comedy of Bénabou's book about reading, Dump This Book While You Still Can!_, is more arcane and the regret more conventionally the loss of a nubile by very elusive female (Sophie) than his (briefer) black comedy about not writing, _Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books_ (also published by Nebraska) The quotations from a wide array of western literature are less amusingly apt and less numerous than those in _Why_.

The attempts to find hidden meaning in the manuscript goes on too long. Still there is some entertainment of Nabokovian/Borgian kind. (Canetti's _Auto da Fé_ popped into my mind often in reading both books, though _Auto da Fé_ has a sustained narrative rather than the many startings over of the Bénabou metafictions on writing and reading have.)

The typeface is unusually and uncomfortably small in both of these books, which are not very long and have fairly large margins. Both have useful introductions explaining who Bénabou is--a task he has taken up more directly in a sort of autobiography also available in English from the University of Nebraska Press.

For those interested in a major philosopher's take on some major social and political issues this would appear to be a good book to start with. Drawing from essays, interviews and letters written in 1993 and 1994, Habermas presents his views about current hot topics in Germany. He touches upon quotas, immigration and the role of both the GDR and the Third Reich in current German national identity; he also continues to critize the way in which Germany was unified in 1990. The interviews - originally in Le Monde, Die Zeit and others - are easy to read, especially in comparison to Habermas's other writings. Furthermore, his belief in a radical democracy formed through a public sphere in opposition to the state is a truly great and courageous idea.

However, in many ways Habermas is idealistic and even naive when it comes to his views on national identity. On one hand he recognizes the importance of nationhood and its components of 'a common origin, language and history'; he nevertheless puts too much emphasis on his concept of 'constitutional patriotism', or the patriotic feelings towards the members of a republic no matter their racial/cultural/religious membership. He seems to think that the U.S. is a great example of constitutional patriotism in action, claiming that 'there, everyone can live with two identities, simultaneously belonging to the country and being a foreigner in it'. What he bases this statement on is unknown to me: not only does this statement show how ignorant Habermas is of the U.S. but also how idealistic constitutional patriotism really is. He does not really attempt to delve into the serious question of how a political community just based on patriotism and not nationalism would hang together.

In the end I guess I would only really recommend this book to diehard Habermas fans.

This book is an attractive introduction to its subject, and features some excellent articles. I especially liked the sections describing how working with the environment (including the local people) can be more profitable than destructive methods now in use. (For example, big game hunting parks versus poaching.)

However, there are a large number of obvious errors, and who knows how many non-obvious ones. In my initial reading, I was struck by several: 1) the cost of remote sensing satellites is not $50 billion and up, as even the US wouldn't build them at that cost; $50 million makes sense [this translation was published in NY, not London]; 2) Gen. Philip Sheridan was not a Confederate general; right war, but he was Union; 3) the solar influx is not 1.35 KW/minute/square meter; the units are clearly wrong, it is ~1.35KW/square meter (measured outside the atmosphere, normal to the radiation). A ten or fifteen minute scan in review prior to returning this book revealed several other questionable to ridiculous numbers.

The compilers of this book are 3 journalists and a graphics specialist, not specialists in the subject. However, between the compilers, the original Deutsch editors, and the editors of the ENglish translation, it would be nice if at least one competent fact checker was employed.