The book covers the effect of Minamata disease upon those who suffered organic mercury poisoning as a result of eating fish form Minamata Bay in great detail. Similarly it goes into detail about how the Chisso Coperation (which was responsible for the polluting of the bay) consistently tired to first to cover up its responsibility for polluting the bay, and later its efforts to intimidate and discredit the victims of Minamata disease and their supporters. In this area the book does a very thorough job. The book however covers the cause of Minamata disease, organic mercury poisoning only periferally. I found this to be a flaw in the book. Although met as a "human history" of the effects of the organic mercury poisoning of Minamata Bay, the book still needed to cover several things. For example, how the mercury moved through the food chain, and how it finally caused severe disease and deaths in humans should have been covered. Adding this information would have greatly improved the reader's understanding of Minamata disease and made the book much more powerful. Still the book is very good and largely does what the author intended - to show both the suffering of the Minamata disease victims, as well as the extreme corperate irresponsiblity that led to so much human suffering and destruction of the environment. For those interested in a historical event which had a great effect on the environmental movement, as well as our understanding of how pollutnants can move through the foodchain the ultamately effect human health, I recommend the book.

A very useful undergraduate level reader in environmental ethics. I use it in the course I teach in the UK. It would also make a good tool for self-teaching or for self-led small group study. For each chapter of readings there are discussion topics, an exercise, suggestions for a debate and a selection of further reading. The wide-ranging readings are carefully chosen, edited and arranged into key themes such as morality, aesthetics, ecofeminism and environmetnal ethics in society. The only other book to cover similar material in a similar manner is Louis Pojman's 'Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Practice'. In my opinion they are equally valuable, making it difficult (should it be neccessary) to choose between them. From a British perspective they both lack historical depth. Botzler and Armstrong's book has only two readings from the eighteenth century or earlier (St Francis and Kant) but this can be supplied from elsewhere if needed.

I have used the Interchange series, as well as others. Interchange format encourages diologue between instructor and students. Interchange 3 is only for very advanced ESL students.

As a teacher in women's studies I was hoping that this might make a good primer for my students. While it does a pretty good job as a history text, it really doesn't do a good job at introducing key concepts. This is especially true once it reaches the 1980s. I might also add that this text treats feminism as something that ended after the 80s. The book needs a good updating.

In short, if you are already familiar with the feminist movement, then this book makes a nice pocket guide and reminder. If you are new to the concepts, I would start somewhere else rather than here.

This book really is a crack up. For anyone's who has ever known a man, this is funny stuff.

Michel Leiris-- a French ethnographer who also was affiliated with the surrealist literary movement-- penned this often morbidly self-castigating memoir in the proclaimed hope that he might confront and largely master the many deep-seated fears and obsessions that contributed to his "growth" into manhood. Of course, like a number of works within such a genre-- Rousseau's Confessions would provide a paradigm of this-- one often feels suspended between such a cathartic motive and the manner in which the narrative betrays a strange masochistic pleasure as well: a phenomenon that Leiris perceives himself, and which often serves to amplify his self-criticism even further. In accounting for his motives, Leiris proposes an analogy between his own activity and that of a bullfighter whose ritualistic behavior must to some extent mimic the very violent or threatening forces that it wishes to subdue. If in a writer like Hemingway this narrative attempt to regain some sense of virility or manhood sometimes betrays an underlying fear of castrating women, Leiris clearly indulges in this fear in a much more overt and graphic fashion, even as he acknowledges the bizarre mixture of desire that transforms such fear into its eroticized counterpart. Thus we see so many of his early experiences organized around the symbolic figures of Lucrece and Judith, two female figures from ancient myth who in their own ways serve to highlight the ambivalent significance of violent feminine sexuality in the male imagination. As Leiris connects these figures with his own childhood fears and fantasies, as well as with their many counterparts in the opera or musical drama of the author's youth, we not only get an interesting intertwining of psycho-auto-biography and literary criticism, but an illuminating cross-section of the many masculine sexual hang-ups which seem to linger within such cultural images. Or do such neuroses reside primarily within Leiris's own fevered imagination? In any case, this book allows the reader to consider this question in a very rich manner, with only a few slow passages here and there. If such a form of writing can degenerate into egomaniacal farce in the case of Norman Mailer, Leiris seems to avoid this for the most part-- he allows himself much more vulnerability in our evaluation of him, and in the process appears much more complex of a person. As the current enthusiasm for memoirs looks like it's still in full swing, Leiris is worth checking out.

I teach English in South America, and our students achieve a basic mastery of English from working in their classes, in a multi-media laboratory, and in the three volumes of the New Interchange series. Those who pass through all sixteen levels of classes -- corresponding to three or four units of New Interchange -- master basic English in a little over a year. I am amazed everyday by the reflection of the New Interchange in my students' abilities. The NI program's organization has students ready for rudimentary social conversation in only a week or so, and by the time they reach the end of the series they can talk about most any quotidian thing and many abstractions fluently.

Despite its proven finesse as a text, the series sometimes cries out for deconstruction, which is itself instructive to my students. The music on the accompanying tapes seems cheesy and repetitive, the characters in the conversation unrealistically squeaky (of the Donna Reed / Beaver Cleaver variety), and the text seems annoyingly politically correct on one hand and, on the other, particularly ethno- and geocentric in that peculiarly North American manner. It seems a little strange explaining in South America what a "tan" is or why college-aged youth are in such a hurry to leave their parents' home. It's as if the book assumes every college graduate secures his own apartment with his first paycheck and spends all his weekends at the beach.

Yet it is clear that the book works well and presents concepts from the foundation upward so that students master English conceptually rapidly and well. I recommend the New Interchange series as a textual foundation for any extended (a year or more) program in English.

The readership of fantasy has been said to be predominantly feminine (as opposed to the predominantly masculine readership of science fiction), so it is perhaps not much of a surprise that one of the best collections of fantasy writing would be one dedicated solely to the work of women authors. If one were looking for non-patriachal, original, stimulating fantasy generally uncluttered by the cliches of the genre one could do worse than one of the most important collections to come out of the field in the last few decades. The range of the book, which also traverses science-fictionesque territory, is impressive, from straightforward space opera (The Ship Who Sang, by Anne McCaffrey; the short story that birthed the famous novel of the same name), to revisionist visions of classic fairy tales (Red as Blood; a revisionist Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs story with a distinctly Stokerian--re: Vampiric--twist). Classy packaging and a beautiful cover illustation (Baby Giant) complete a pleasant reading experience. The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women is a welcome mainstay on the bookshelf of essential science-fiction and fantasy writing.

This is a nice overall book and is a good addition to any barbecue library. The book has a good combination of traditional barbecue, methods of cooking, and more unique non traditional recipes. There are many good illistrations for some of the methods that are not clear. This may not be the first barbecue book you should buy, but it gives some interesting and different perspectives.

Memetics is a good idea looking for real life research and practical applications that will free it from the realm of the philosopher kings. Susan Blackmore's book is another in a line of several that have tried to do so. While raising some interesting questions and making some interesting points, Meme Machines fails in this regard. Mostly it succeeds in rehashing the same controversies that plagued this subject, creating more unnecessary problems, and resolving none of them.

Despite the all-star cast of endorsements (Dennet and Dawkins) this book will mostly just succeed in making money for Blackmore, and perhaps spreading the idea of memes to new audiences that happen to think that Zen Buddhism is really groovey. In the mean time it may succeed in turning the idea of memes into the next new age fad - complete with prescriptions to free ourselves of the "tyranny" of the self - or as Blackmore the Zen guru might put it the "illusion of self".

The book gets off to a poor start by miscasting its basic philosophical questioning not in terms of memes, memetics, culture, or evolution, but by asking what is it that makes humans different from animals? Predictably asking poorly framed questions leads to conclusions that have even less to do with memes or memetics. Here I am referring to her incredible declarations which she makes central in the end of the book. We do not have selves, according to Blackmore. It's all a lie. Our memes have "tricked" us into thinking that we do - pesky li'l things. We should all become Zen Buddhists to save our non-selves from the memes!

I should hasten to add that along the way she makes many much less ridiculous and very good points. She provides some good behaviorist insight into true imitation, makes some interesting distinctions between that and social learning, and the roles that they play for memes. She provides some fertile ground for more applications of the genetic metaphor in her insightful distinctions between copying instructions vs. copying a product. She even makes some good cases for the role that such ideas like Platonic idealism play in memetic replication. All rich and worthwhile insights.

On the whole, I found her book to be very intelligent and entertaining, if deeply flawed in some fundamental respects. There were some useful insights definitely worth taking home, but there were other incredible flights of fantasy that I would have rather left behind. If you don't have your mind set on reading something in particular, this is an intriguingly good book - but it is far from being a seminal landmark in any scientific sense. If you are waiting for the book that will actually serve to make the case for the scientific legitimacy of memetics, save your money.

If you are interested in higher-quality peer-reviewed attempts at memetic theory without this irrelevant new-age fluff, I suggest you seek out a publication like the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transfer. There is better stuff out there even on the web other than the sources mentioned by Dawkins in his forward.

If you are interested in a good treatment of cultural evolution that does not deal in still- being-questioned words like "memes", and steers clear of new age fluff, I would recommend Gary Taylor's book "Cultural Selection" to balance Blackmore's more hype-ish approach.

-Jake

It is exciting that Oxford has come out with a book on memetics, and Blackmore does a nice job of fleshing out the basics. The Meme Machine follows through on Dawkins' (1976) fascinating suggestion that culture, like biology, evolves through the processes of variation, selection, and replication. It explores how viewing culture as a hereditary system can shed light on many aspects of the human experience, such as why we gossip, believe in alien abduction, and get enthusiastic about sex. (Though the chapter titled 'An orgasm saved my life' never gets around to explaining how an orgasm saved someone's life.)

Her central thesis is that what makes humans unique is their ability to imitate, and she takes the 'imitation is where it's at' thesis very seriously. The idea is: once humans became able to imitate, ideas could be transmitted, and cultural evolution took off. Unfortunately, there are deep problems with this proposal. First, the claim that animals don't imitate is highly controversial, and current consensus seems to sway in the opposite direction. (An article by Byrne & Russon in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21, 1998, and accompanying commentary, provide an insightful review.) Second, Blackmore correctly notes that the archeological record reveals a sudden INCREASE in tool variety. However, if imitation were the bottleneck, then prior to the origin of culture there would have been variation everywhere, and the onset of imitation would have funneled this variation in the most useful directions, i.e. variety would have DECREASED. The evidence is, in fact, consistent with the thesis that creativity, rather than imitation, was the bottleneck to culture.

The 'imitation drives culture' hypothesis leads Blackmore to restrict the definition of a meme to something that can be transmitted from one human to another by imitation. So, for example, if a child learns to peal a banana by watching her mother, a meme has replicated. But if the child learns this skill from a cartoon character on tv, no replication has taken place. By the end of the book (particularly in the chapter on the internet) she eases up on this a bit. Human-made artifacts now seem to play a role in her vision, though elements of the natural world still don't. Thus if a child gets the idea for how to peal a banana by watching the petals of a flower unfold, her flower-inspired 'how to peal a banana' meme is NOT transmittable. In the blink of an eye, Blackmore discards the possibility that any experience can be food for thought and thus food for culture, on the grounds that it is "extremely confusing" (p. 45). The worldview impled by the Shroedinger equation is extremely confusing too, but its batting average as a predictor of experimental outcomes is unsurpassed. 'Confusing' is not synonymous with 'wrong'.

Blackmore also claims that "perceptions and emotions are not memes because they are ours alone and we may never pass them on" (p. 15). It follows that the feeling evoked by a painting of a stormy night at sea has no relationship to what the artist was feeling at the time... that a teacher's attitude of compassion has no impact on the cultural dynamics of the classroom. Thus it is not clear how Blackmore's narrow definition of meme clears up the confusion.

Readers should be aware that, despite the Oxford label, the book the book does not reflect the current level of sophistocation in the field. It presents many ideas without referencing where they were first introduced, or mentioning influencial work in the area (e.g. memetic altruism, memetic explanations of the origin of culture, memes & language, memes & the internet, etc.). Blackmore does not delve deep into evolutionary theory, on the grounds that borrowing concepts from biology could lead cultural theorists astray. To my mind, this is like ignoring what we already know about snow skis when developing the first prototype for waterskis. In fact there is some disparity between the 'science rules' attitude and the lack of theory or data. If the title leads you to expect material on computer models, cognitive science, complexity, information theory, etc. you will be disappointed. There isn't much on the workings of the memetic machinery. But if you like examples of manipulative memes, you will find it interesting. And the potential significance of memetics should not be underestimated. It is not inconceivable that the next century will usher forth more books on cultural evolution than this century has on biological evolution.

Susan Blackmore's THE MEME MACHINE is a terrific and very accessible introduction to the nascent field of memetics. She tackles a complicated subject with remarkable precision and clarity, and avoids the insidious trap of creating new jargon to suit her needs. After reading a lot of books on linguists, brain science, and other peripheral fields, this was exactly the book I was looking for.

The term "memetics" sounds a lot like "genetics," and the similarity is not accidental. Working off ideas championed by Richard Dawkins in THE SELFISH GENE, memetics looks at the way ideas can spread and replicate in ways much like -- but not exactly like -- biological evolution. Dawkins urged readers to take a "gene's-eye view," where evolution is driven by genes competing to be copied. This theory will be familiar to anyone who has read Dawkins, or his contemporaries like Pinker or Gould. Blackmore skillfully summarizes the basic ideas, and Dawkins himself writes an introduction.

Just as genetics focuses on the gene, memetics centers around the "meme," which can be thought of as a unit of information. Examples of memes can include stone tool-making, language, the song "Happy Birthday," democracy, or last year's out-of-nowhere "all your base are belong to us." What matters is not the content of the meme per se, but how effectively the meme can get itself copied. Just like a gene can only survive by putting itself into a new generation, a meme can only prosper by squeezing itself in new brains. In that way, memes are like mental viruses, but without necessarily negative effects.

The exact means by which memes spread from brain to brain can vary: speech, writing, art, etc. The common thread is imitation, a uniquely human skill Blackmore and others argue can explain why humans have progressed so far beyond what could be expected through biological evolution alone. In fact, Blackmore asserts that memes can help answer one of the nagging questions in human development: how did our brains get to be so big? Her answer is that bigger brains can store more memes, which in turn allowed bigger-brained humans to outcompete their smaller-brained kin.

After setting up the basic theories of memetics, and addressing recurring criticisms, Blackmore investigates some of the common touchstones of sociobiology: sex, altruism, religion and consciousness. In every instance, her meme's-eye view provides a lot of insight, and her sense of humor makes the whole process more enjoyable.

Like a professor cramming too much into the final class of the semester, Blackmore stretches too far in the last chapter, aiming for closure and a sense of what-it-all-means that isn't really supported by the rest of the book. But by that point we're already mad about her, and ready to sign up for any other class she teaches.