Of all the stories my father read to me as a child, this was my favorite. Its endearing story of self-discovery is timeless, and not to mention quite humorous for a six year old boy. It reminds me of a time far less complicated and will thus always hold a special place of affection for me. This was the Catcher in the Rye of my Elementary years. I would highly recommend this to anyone with children looking for quite simply a flat out good story to read them that they will enjoy.

The Breman Town Musicians is a simple story that involves setting goals and team work. It has two things that children love, music and animals. What a combination!

As a 17 year childcare veteran, I highly recommmend this book. Kids today can use all the inspiration they can get. A great way to learn is to read. I read this book to my daughter when she was a child. Now I am getting a new copy for my grand daughter.

The illustrations in this book are wonderful. A true artist. Very cleverly hides the elves in each page and its much fun for a 3 year old to find them and the mice and birds too.

Sidney Hook analyzes the two philosophers utilizing opposition among Hegelian and Marxist theory: ethical idealism, dialectics, and continuity. This allows the reader to adopt the differences between the two influential authors,thereby introducing major theories written by Marx and Hegel. The remaining chapters interject comparisons between Karl Marx and esteemed German philosophers who studied Hegel, contributed or correlated with Marxist philosophy. Overall, the text forms an essential basis to the understanding and development of Marxist philosophy, and the struggles of a young-Hegelian in the nineteenth century.

A perfect story to read aloud to young children! With beautiful illustrations and a wonderful moral, The Golden Goose has the ability to captivate a young audience. Would recommend it to any storyteller!

This is a vey unusual study with a neat research task and a fascinating twist, as it takes up the story of a factory inspector mentioned in Marx's Capital and examines the little know world of these inspectors as they struggled heroically with the British Industrial system of the nineteenth century in all its grotesque and almost endless resistance to even the simplest reform. A picture is worth a thousand words, and this portrait of the collision of the industrial class, from child labor to the plight of chimney sweeps, in the saga of exploitation makes crystal clear, where more ideological harangues fail, the issues that drove the industrial civilization into its twentieth century crisis. In the process the author uncovers an invisible Hegelian strain in Marx's later work and takes up the unusual and very enlightening task of delving into Hegel's views on the 'universal class' and their influence on Marx. This side of Hegel is seldom seen for what it is, and, agree or not, beggars the usual view of Hegel as an easy apologist for classical liberalism.

This is a large, 428 page hardcover book with over 500 images. It is, unfortunately, only in German. The printing, paper and binding are first rate. Treue and Zima have done their usual fine research on Karl Maybach, son of Wilhelm Maybach who, with Gottlieb Daimler, built the Mercedes. Karl went on to design engines for Zeppelins, Tiger tanks, locomotives and a variety of cars. He is most famous for the Maybach Zeppelin, certainly in a class with Mercedes 770 types in the 1930s. The book is not just about machinery but covers Maybach's family life as well.

Lowith was a brilliant German-Jewish scholar whose work was published in Berlin at the onset of National Socialism. However, he could not teach due to the racial Laws of the regime. Lowith's book is clearly and beautifully written, and is a superb analysis of the centrality of the Eternal Recurrence and the Superman idea to Nietzsche studies. Highly recommended to advanced students of Nietzsche.

Jasper's book is one of those books that you are so impressed by you work to memorize and apply in all thinking processes. His discription of existentialism in one's chaotic center of concealed knowledge with how we perceive reality is essential and the foundation behind all thinking in philosophy, science and religion.

Jasper speaks of all thinking within a horizon that can be transcended. All horizons being within a horizon he names "the encompassing," which can be seen in two modes, as all Being in itself, or as all Being within which we are. It is here within which we are, we perceive reality in three ways: by empirical existence, consciousness and spirit. In turn we use reason to formulate, objectify and create absolutes, yet at the same time we need to use our irrational concealed knowledge, that is, the dark ground and center, of all modes, the existenz, to allow our reason to be open and apart from mere intellectual indifference. All demarcations are relative, yet existenz without reason is unrelated to Transcendence. Each without the other loses the genuine continuity of Being, and therefore, the reliability ceases to be authentic.

Reason clarifies our existenz, while our existenz gives content to our reason. Jaspers also goes into the idea of communicating truth, the prioity and limits of ratonal thought and compares the ideas of Nietzsche and Kiergaard. The book is brilliant.

This is a good introduction if you have some background in philosophy. Otherwise, it is likely to be over your head. Jaspers' look at Nietzsche is philosophically creative and sometimes complex. It is not just a guide to Nietzsche's thinking but a rather detailed reading of his philosophy. If you are looking for a guidebook of sorts, a good one is Kaufmann's 'Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist'.

Consider Karl Jaspers a master of multiplicity, whose understanding of Nietzsche's thought is like the complexity of a physiologist's understanding of the peristaltic activity involved in swallowing anything. For Jaspers, an interest in Nietzsche is mainly meaningful if it is accompanied by a wish for intellectual growth (this may be a valid career goal for those who are lucky enough to pursue this kind of thing professionally). At least, such a view of Jaspers could be supported by what he wrote on the topic, "Ways of Criticizing Nietzsche" in this book. Anyone who does not accept and assume the full multiplicity of the topic being considered falls into the error described on page 420. "He is bound to consider as fixed and final formulae what to Nietzsche were only steps and to pervert these formulae by turning them into jargon, demogogic means of persuasion, or sensationalistic journalese." The world which offered Nietzsche such foolish models for demonstrating the recklessness of typical thinking does not receive due consideration here, this being a book on a lonely thinker. The self of Nietzsche can only emerge for readers who are able "to keep this depth in sight" while overcoming "the rationally onesided formulations of the understanding which he himself recognized in his own thinking but failed to check." Such a view of Nietzsche springs from the desire of those who need to consider themselves fully educated, but sensible. The kind of thought-check which is being suggested by Jaspers is supposed to thwart the kind of racing thoughts which are not productive. Don't forget that Karl Jaspers was also a doctor, an expert on General Psychopathology, a field in which facts are not as important as the emotional experiences of the kind of person who becomes the subject of such studies. In the field of philosophy, where Nietzsche's desire to learn the truth about the limitations which always prevent the full realization of this desire for truth, thereby setting a new standard for intellectual integrity, Jaspers felt that Nietzsche's sense of "knowing full well where to find exactly what I have to learn" (p. 421) when it came to matters fully covered by books "was of little consequence for his truly philosophical thinking." (p. 421) I must be over-simplifying this ~ this is only a review, and Jaspers's sympathy with Nietzsche's awareness of the limitations placed on his knowledge by the fact that "he was forced to content himself with the reading of books" (p. 421) must be true as well for people who are only reading reviews.

This wonderful introduction to Nietsche by Karl Jaspers was written in 1936 after Jaspers had been disgraced by the Nazis and forced out of his professorship. He had taken refuge in Bern. This work is his offering to help us see that Nietsche was critically important to 20th centruy philosophy, and was not the pop-philosopher the Nazis tried to make him out to be. Jasper's work is the first real undertaking to show Nietsche as he was, and to appreciate him for what he was and is.

This book is valuable because it compares Hegel and Marx better than Marx or any of his followers could have done. Professor David MacGregor is sympathetic to the Marxist project, but he is willing to suspend Marx's criticism of Hegel in an effort to harmonize the two thinkers.Professor MacGregor excels in his knowledge of both thinkers, and he quotes from Hegel literally hundreds of times in a superior scholarship. I have a few minor criticisms of this book: (1) the title is inappropriate because there simply is no 'communist ideal' in Hegel. Hegel advocated private property as the foundation for Law itself. Hegel was not a capitalist, though, and perhaps this is what is being stressed here -- Hegel advocated taxation in order to support a civil servant class, a universal class, which would regulate industry. (I believe the title was selected by the publisher, not the author); (b) Hegel did not say of Marx, 'only one person understood me, and even he has not,' rather, Fichte said that about Schelling.In all, my criticisms are few. Professor MacGregor's ability to harmonize the essential spirit of Hegel with the best ideas of Marx is challenged by his project, and he succeeds better than anybody else. His latest book, HEGEL AND MARX AFTER THE FALL OF COMMUNISM (1998) is a good sequel.

This publication, THE COMMUNIST IDEAL IN HEGEL AND MARX (University of Toronto, 1984, 295 pages) is a real surprise.

I say, 'surprise,' since the title of this book runs directly contrary to my reading of Hegel, but Professor MacGregor rightly insists that our debates about Hegel's politics be founded strictly upon our encounter with Hegel's texts.

1. Professor MacGregor may surprise many with his opening words,

"This study is an attempt to rescue Hegel's thought from the interpretation imposed on it by Marx." (D. MacGregor, CIHM, p. 11)

2. Professor MacGregor cites sources to irrevocably vindicate my own long-standing claim that Feuerbach's reading of Hegel is misleading,

"Unfortunately, even tragically, the ingenious transformative critique of Hegel pioneered by Feuerbach was simply wrong." (D. MacGregor, ibid, p. 21)

3. Professor MacGregor provides a rich body of quotations to contrast Marx's dualist portrait of class conflict between bourgeoisie and proletariat with Hegel's trinitarian portrait of class conflict between agribusiness, manufacture and civil service, citing Hegel's PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT, paragraphs 202-208. He writes:

"Hegel delineates three major class groupings in civil society: the *business* class of capitalists and workers, the *agricultural* class of nobles and peasants, and the *universal* class of civil servants." (D. MacGregor, ibid, p. 30)

This line of thought opens up a fruitful new domain of debate, until now unknown to all but the most academic.

4. Prof. David MacGregor's THE COMMUNIST IDEAL IN HEGEL AND MARX is extremely valuable because it is an extraordinary 20th century thesis that provides within 259 pages of text no less than 500 quotations by Hegel himself. Some quotations are footnoted with more citations, totaling more than 800 Hegel quotations and citations in all.

By focusing so strongly upon Hegel's texts, Professor MacGregor has established a new standard for Hegel/Marx studies. It seems to me that the appropriate way to revive G.W.F. Hegel, the sleeping giant, is to begin with the rigorous textual approach that Professor David MacGregor has provided in this important new study.

As one may imagine, my criticisms of his book are far from complete. For the present I will content myself with pointing out the positive aspects of his fine book. By focusing so strongly upon Hegel's texts, and by distancing himself from Feuerbach and Marx at the outset, Preofessor MacGregor has assured us that his revelation of Hegel's ideas will be fresh; different from nearly every other modern work.