Being a Grand Nephew of ray and never actually getting to meet him, (he passed away before I was born) it was great to read about the stories that were told at the dinner table by my father and his brothers. It seems that the VanNeste family loves to talk about the old days. My Grand Mother was Ray's sister Gunhild(Gunny).
When I was a child Aunt Ackey use to go through her old photo's of ray and tell us the stories.
Ackey recentley passed away earlier this year in her 90's and every one should know what a pistol she was. Thank you Russ and Bev for the wonderful job. Jim

Daredevil Cameraman was an entertaining and enjoyable book to read. Swede was a pioneer in the movie business and spent his life chasing the best stories and ways to shoot them. From the decks of a luxury liner to the wings of a stunt plane, Swede set the standards for future cineography. I enjoyed reading the book both for the historical value and the insight into the life of a pioneer.

No one in the latter half of this century has mastered the Gothic Horror form better than Ray Russell. This collection of his best is headed by his masterpiece novella "Sardonicus" which no less a writer than Stephen King calls the greatest modern gothic horror story ever written. Step back a century or more (or into the future!) and enjoy the modern master of this form at his best.

EXCELLENT HORROR FROM A NOT-TOO-PROLIFIC AUTHOR[WHICH IS A SHAME,BECAUSE THIS BOOK IS VERY GOOD]. I READ THIS WHEN IT WAS FIRST RELEASED IN THE MID-SEVENTIES,AND IT WAS AHEAD OF ITS TIME IN ITS GRAPHIC CONTENT.IT HAS WELL DRAWN,SYMPATHETIC CHARACTERS,AND ITS MONSTER,THE INCUBUS, PROBABLY MAKES THE TRANSITION FROM FOLKLORE TO FICTION IN THIS BOOK.......THIS WAS MADE INTO A MEDIOCRE MOVIE IN THE EARLY EIGHTIES.....BUT THIS BOOK IS GREAT......I WOULD PLACE IT IN THE TOP TEN HORROR NOVELS OF THE SEVENTIES.......READ IT!

Writing with some of the clarity of her father and a perhaps a bit more emotional realism, Katharine Tait gives readers a nuanced and intimate look into the personal life of the great philosopher. Despite her anger, ambivalence, and frustrations, she clearly loved her father immensely. Anyone interested in Russell the man will find this book utterly absorbing.

Strange as it may seem, I began to read this book after reading its sequel, but got the same good impression of it all, because what counts most is both the stature of Bertrand Russel and the way it is portrayed by Ray Monk.
"The Spirit of Solitude" is simply fascinating, covering the years Russell dedicated to the philosophy of Mathematics, a subject that is so complex, that completely absorved him, causing his first marriage to collapse amidst great personnal pain to his wife, making Russell to seek love comfort with women who could fulfill the maternal absence to a man who lost both his parents when a child. The pressure exerted upon him by his grandmother is also elucidative on the ways he chose to mantain his personall life amid a curtain of secrecy, something instrumental in his future evolution as a philosopher.
The apex of his career was hit when he published, along with Whithehead, the voluminous Principia Mathematica, a 4.500 pages book, which took some 10 years of his best efforts, and which was dedicated to the foundations of philosophical thinking in Mathematics. It was such a difficult book to read that even Russell expected that no more than a handfull of great mathematicians could read and understand what was there meant.
This book is a must for everyone interested in Philosophy and the philosophy of mathematical thinking.

Question: How would Ray Monk follow his wildly successful biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein? Answer: He takes on the life of Wittgenstein's teacher, and the most public philosopher of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell.

There are a myriad of biographies of Russell in and out of print; even the most ardent Russell admirer could easily admit burnout on this score. Russell himself penned an autobiography that lends itself more to literature than fact. Why should one spend money and time on yet another biography?

Two reasons should suffice, I hope. Monk is a thorough biographer, but not an adoring one. Although some others have also been critical, none brings to the subject the background in analytical philosophy that Monk does, and this is an important factor when discussing the life and thought of a philosopher, for both are obviously and subtly interwined in the subject.

Secondly, Russell was more than an academic philosopher, he was a public figure who was more well known than his philosophy. His life was lived in the pages of the press and made great fodder for the newshounds. Whether it was his many love affairs (including a disastrous one with poet T.S. Eliot's unstable wife Vivian) or his peace campaign during the first World War that led to his jailing by the English government, Russell always made good copy. Monk takes the reader behind the headlines to the events and forces that shaped the young Russell's life and philosophy. His partnership with Alfred North Whitehead in the co-authorship of Principia Mathematica is expertly handled, as is Russell's later dalliance with the Bloomsbury Group.

This is the first of two projected volumes and I can't wait to read Part Two.

Ray Monk makes it clear in this book that he dislikes Russell.

As a hitherto ardent Russophile, this ought to have given me cause for concern that I would find problems with this book.

I nonetheless recommend it to even those of a similar disposition to myself, it is probably the best biography (of any subject) that I have ever read.

It attempts to be more probing and insightful (and thus results in being more contentious) than anything I have ever read concerning Russell's motivations, both conscious and otherwise.

For someone who has taken us so far towards appreciating the tragic explanations for their subject's weaknesses, Ray Monk himself perhaps needs to explain why dislike has emerged rather than sysmpathy.

Or perhaps answering this question is ultimately a job for this biographer's biographer?

This tiny book amazes me. Rather than attempt a biography, Monk focuses on one theme of Russell's life: his adventure with mathematics and the drive to reduce all of mathematics to logic, crystallized as a pristine whole of pure beauty -- the ultimate achievement of rational thought. Retracing the inspiration, successes, and ultimate defeat of that program, interpolating through the stages of Russell's own writings, Monk provides us with a glimpse of the integrity of a life committed to taking a major philosophical inquiry to an honest but unwanted and discouraging conclusion. In retracing the path of Russell's mathematical passion, Monk provides brief thumbnails of the major concepts that illuminated the route to today's mathematical logic and its foundational construction: one that in itself demonstrates the impossibility of a purely logical system that resolves all of mathematics as a wonder of deductive reasoning.

Ray Monk's biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and his first volume of Bertrand Russell, are two of the finest biographies of the twentieth century. While this second volume of Bertrand Russell's life covers the period after his great work in logic and mathematics (and may thus be less fascinating to readers primarily interested in this work), it still has much to offer. This is the fullest treatment to date of Russell's complicated and tragic family life: of the impact which his life had on those around him.

Russell is often thought of as a great campaigner for peace: Ray Monk shows what was left aside when Russell devoted himself to that campaign. The biography, though, is not merely an exposure of the private flaws of a great public figure: there are moments of charm and comedy within the family life too, as when Katherine describes her father on the beach looking "a little like a cockatoo", with his big red sunburned nose, twinkling eyes, crest of white hair and abrupt laughter. There is also a comic side to a hysterical campaign against Russell in America in 1940, when he was denied a lecturing position (in mathematics and logic) because he was alleged to be " lecherous, salacious, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, atheistic, irreverent, narrow-minded, bigoted and untruthful", a description more remarkable for its love of adjectives than for its acuity.

Much of the book, however, is harrowing reading: all the more so because some of Russell's best intended initiatives (his conviction that he must not let his baby son see that he adored him) had predictably disastrous results. The most tragic life in the Russell family, and the one which Ray Monk is the first to do full justice to, though, is that of Lucy Russell, Russell's granddaughter. Reading the last pages of this book, it is difficult not to agree with Monk that Russell (and his entire family) was, indeed, haunted by the ghosts of madness.

This exceptional book is a sequel to The Spirit of Solitude, written by Ray Amok, which covers the first 50 years of Russell's life, and which could be summarized by achieving world fame and academic glory by means of his early work as a philosophical mathematician, specially trough his "Principia Matematica",a monumental theoretical work, with the co-authorship of Whitehead.

Ray Monk magistrally portrays Russell as facing now the challenge of taking a new direction to his life, trying to achieve the same level of academical glory when entering into new fields of knowledge. The story is of a genius who had to prove to himself that he had not lost his intelectual vigour in the ageing proccess and at the same time , balancing his mundane needs trough popular texts written to readers not specialized in philosophy and mathematics, and many other areas where he was proficient.

He marriages now for the second time in his life, with Dora, with he would generate a son (John) and a daughter (Kate), began for him a new era as an educator and as a mass-comunicator, where he approached all the available means (newspapers, magazines, radio panels and lectures) in order to make money thus providing the material means for his special ideas on how to educate his children. He wrote many books on the subject and even inaugurated a special school where his two children where educated along with the children of some upper-class Englishmen and Americans.

He was two be married again twice and to have more children with Peter (yes, a very special nickname of his third wive). In terms of the outcome he got, it was nothing anyone could foresee at the beginning.

To sum it up, the book is a faithful portrait of a tormented man, surrounded by all kinds of people who loved/hated him, and who seems to destroy every inch of happiness one could have before getting to know him. Strange as it seems, the man who was trying to save the world with his pacifist stand against nazism, and later comunism, and all forms of totalitarianism, was incapable of understand the human nature of all people who lived with him.

This is a good book to read to everyone interested in philosophy and in the life of the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.

Make sure your expectations are set right for this valuable book. Like Monson's "Annotated Guide to the Birds of Arizona" -- this book focusses on the occurence and location of bird sightings in Sonora. Valuable for determining the frequency and location of birds in Sonora, but no details on actual sites. NOT a Lane guide to Sonora by any means. Nor does it have any photos, descriptions, etc. My interest is the 'south of the border' occurence of Arizona vagrants, casuals, etc.

It's a good book on main battle tanks, but the title has nothing to do to what's inside.Actually there is only main battle tanks, and not even one support vehicle described inside.Each entry is accompanied by some black&white pics and front/side views(don't know where the top one has gone).There is only an overview of each tank's capabilties and a long list of all the variants.It kind of ressemble the Jane's recognition guide but lacks all other armoured fighting vehicles.A good book, but certainly not a bible on the subject.