This is a must read for anyone interested in non-conventional medicine.

Medicine has taken a lot of turns turns away from effective treatments (and this is why the medical profession had to admit in June of 2000 doctors are the third leading cause of death in the U.S.) but there has never been any excuse for turning away from a safe, gentle treatment that even if it couldn't help some certainly couldn't hurt any. The stories in this book are amazing. It is a good, indeed wonderful thing are more and more doctors are turning toward "alternative" medicine (which actually is a bit of a misnomer--"modern" medicine is the alternative, mostly to good health). I guess many doctors consider it easier--and more profitable--to prescribe often dangerous drugs as bandaids rather than take the time and patience to learn treatments such as Fulford's. What a shame, and what a disgrace.

This book was written in the December year's of an accomplished osteopathic physician's life. It is his call for everyone to take responsibility for their life and their health. It starts out as an explanation of osteopathy and a retelling of his years as an osteopathic physician. Fulford had trained his hands to be such sensitive diagnostic and healing tools, that he could feel a single strand of hair hidden beneath 17 sheets of paper. He used this technique to train other osteopathic students to increase the sensitivity of their own hands.

This book is interwoven with touching stories of patients he's helped throughout his practice. As he aged, he found that he could only work with an increasingly younger population, as those patients fed his energy. Whereas adults seemed to be so entangled in their own web of stress and disease, that they seemed to zap his energy as he tried to treat them with his hands.

The book ends with a call to live healthier, more meaningful lives. I recommend this book for everyone, but particularly for osteopathic medical school applicants and their M.D. counterparts. It gives a good narrative explanation of the philosophical expectations of osteopathic medicine. But as a strong believer in osteopathic medicine, and as a future osteopathic medical student, I believe this book poignantly elicits the direction in which medical care should be heading.

"I have suggested elsewhere," writes Robert Conquest, "that a curious little volume might be made of the poems of Stalin, Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh, with illustrations by A. Hitler" (p. 208). That sounds like a good idea to me. I would suggest that a second volume be added, consisting of critical commentaries by Shaw, Neruda, Pound, Sartre, Heidegger, and other intellectual and artistic admirers of the twentieth century's collectivist monstrosities. For a slightly higher price, the publishers could supply a video of great moments from Sergei Eisenstein and Leni Riefenstahl.

Conquest's point is not that the works he mentions are bad art, though probably all of them are. It is that neither "art" nor "education" was sufficient, in the century just past, to prevent their devotees from ignoring, acclaiming, or collaborating in the murders of hundreds of millions of fellow human beings-sacrifices on the altar of political ideals.

Conquest will take his place in history as an intellectual who devoted himself to telling the simple truth about the vileness of those ideals and acts. His books about the horrors of Soviet history, most notably The Great Terror (1968) and The Harvest of Sorrow (1986), showed how wrong other intellectuals were to believe that there was some great moral difference between National Socialism and Soviet Socialism. Although those books have made a large impression on general readers, they have made a remarkably small one on the academics and other thinkers of high thoughts who continue to affirm that Marx was a great political philosopher, not to be judged by the apparent effects of his political theories, whereas such anti-Marxist thinkers as Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek were . . . well, who exactly were they, anyhow?

Every reviewer has a wish list. I wish that Conquest had not undertaken a joust with the absolute. I also wish that he had not preached decisively Hayekian doctrines about the dangers of state encroachment, while tossing softball speculations about "a sense of balance, between the proper rights of the individual and the necessary rights of the state" (p. 15). What principles will allow us to strike that balance? Not the idea that "state ownership or control" should remain smaller than "a proportion that is under debate but is usually held to be a maximum of some 30 percent of GNP" (201). Thirty percent is a very great deal. And which 30 percent do we have in mind? Incidentally, how is it that states have "rights" instead of delegated powers?

Surely, however, only the most politically correct reviewer would repine at Conquest's refusal to fulfill his every wish. The story of the twentieth century, so oversupplied with fascinating political theories and so undersupplied with political decency and honesty, would be unthinkably painful without the standard of independent thought maintained by a few people such as Robert Conquest.

Now that the Soviet parenthesis has closed, the historian Robert Conquest has been soundly vindicated. It was he, and a very few band of fellows, who _completely_ rejected the progresive aura that Soviet Communism inveigled so many other academics with. His books dealing with specific incidents and epochs of Soviet rule--sometimes for the first time in English--were resented by leftist professors as being "reactionary". Now, those books may be seen as bold testaments to the truth about Communism, published in times and places where that truth was most unwelcome, though undeniable. If you can find them, read some intellectual journals' reviews of the first edition of _The Great Terror_, to see the psychic indigestion Conquest's work caused them.

This book is a fairly concise summary of his opinions about how so much evil came upon this century, why so many otherwise good and intelligent people were taken in, and What It All Means. Familiarity with his previous work is assumed, so if you are new to Conquest, read something like _The Great Terror_ first. The book is arranged in thematic chapters. Each chapter consists of brief, numbered essays--"reflections"--somewhat like a less aphoristic Eric Hoffer, though this book is very quotable. Conquest is very old, astonishingly widely read, multi-lingual, and is an altogether trustworthy and admirable figure. It is important to remember this, because much of the book is tough sledding for less well-educated readers. Because he hates cant and sweeping generalizations, his sentences are sometimes over-stuffed with qualifiers and conditional phrases, making them precise, but a bit hard to unpack on first reading. And he's not ashamed of the impressive vocabulary he's amassed, either. "Chiliastic," "accidie," "tergiviseration," and more will tax your pocket Websters. And is "fissiparous" really _that_ much more fitting than "divisive" in discussing how political and national unities are dissolved?

Style aside, the book is less a refutation of Communism and its Western towel boys, than it is a consideration of how it and they could have enjoyed so much power and prestige over the years. All the familiar famous dupes are brought out for more execration: Duranty, Shaw, Wells, the Webbs, and prominent Marxists like Eric Hobsbawm. They are not actively engaged and disproved--that was done long ago a dozen times over--so much as they are practically drummed out of the ranks of moral, or even sentient beings. Pretty harsh for people who only wanted to "make a better world". Yet they deserve it. As Conquest says, "Many whose allegiance went to the Soviet Union may well be seen as traitors to their countries, and to the democratic culture. But their profounder fault was more basic still. Seeing themselves as independent brains, making their own choices as thinking beings, they ignored their own criteria. They did not examine the multifarious evidence, already available in the 1930s, on the realities of the Communist regimes. That is to say, they were traitors to the human mind, to thought itself."

The closing chapters concern the current state of education, the European Union, nationalism, prospects for Russia and for the West, and such. Only time will tell, etc.; but Conquest richly deserves a hearing on these issues, by virtue of having been so resoundingly right about the most important issue of this century. He is, once and for all, a hero of the Western tradition of liberty and civilization. This book is a fitting capstone to possibly the noblest career in academia in the latter half of the 20th century. END

Far anyone interested more than casually in 20th Century history, Robert Conquest's reflection on the century will teach and illuminate. The most interesting part of this excellent book was Conquest's review of the history of Soviet Communism and his skewering of those who spent long and supposedly distinguished careers arguing that Marxism is a benign way to build a new and better world. As Conquest points out, the facts have always led to the opposite conclusion and these "fellow-travellers" knew it and ignored them. In fact, what Marxism has left behind in Russia is a devastated industrial base, the absence of individual iniative, and a population psychically damaged. In the guise of building a worker's state, communism built a monument to everything that is anti-human, anti-compassion, and anti-freedom.

Conquest has never shied from his views, even when they were unpopular. We owe him a lot for his unstinting criticism of one of mankind's worst historical aberrations.

His warnings about the future should be carefully considered by all of us.

Robert Weil's book is a welcome antidote to the usual Western accounts of China's current attempt to integrate w/ the globalized economy. In the author's view, Deng Xiaoping's "it doesn't matter if a cat is black or white" line is a surrender of socialist values by the Chinese ruling elite to the powerful capitalist gendarme. Mr. Weil, who has first hand experience in teaching China's new but confused youths, weaves a persuasive mural in which foreign investments and multinational

corporate hegemony are increasingly tearing away the traditional socialist fabric of job security, guranteed education & health care, and relative income equality for the masses of workers. Already the widening gap between rich & poor in China, plus a myriad of old vices like drug abuse and prostitution, is rivaling the Guomindang days of the '30s & '40s. Yet the Chinese leaders are calling this structural reform, "socialism with Chinese characteristics"! Unfortunately, Mr. Weil's account ends with a wishful proclamation that the Chinese working class will somehow find a new revolutionary way forward to reclaim a socialism under new conditions. This may still happen, but the author doesn't provide any convincing potential scenarios. Indeed, the challenge facing the working class in the coming "Pacific century" is, precisely, "How will we confront the seemingly invincible capitalist Goliath and find a true socialist economic altern ative to the global bourgeois penitentiary?"

This is an essential Weil book for the beginner. It's always useful to understand a philosopher's roots, and this book does not disappoint. Afterward I had much more appreciation for Weil's brilliance as well as her mental dysfunction. I came away with the sense that she was an unfinished work; that her philosophy up until her death was not yet mature. What insights she might have more completely developed had she lived! Re-reading her words now, I have a good sense of perspective on what influenced her thoughts and decisions.