Its book is interested me as a BME teacher; I found its useful but some time very easy and containing some very DUMMY things such as quadratic equation solution; its best for the firest year BME students with medical background;

This book gathers together some half-dozen plays presented by Ireland's Abbey Theatre in the early 90s. The title is somewhat misleading, as all of the plays were presented at the Peacock, the Abbey's new writing stage. Its main purpose is to make the plays available to readers and potential producers, and in this it succeeds admirably, although there are a couple of notable plays from the period that didn't get included, presumably because they were already available elsewhere. (This makes the volume somewhat unrepresentative.) The plays themselves are of varying quality. Michael Harding's "Hubert Murray's Widow" is an interesting, darkly funny tragicomedy (or comitragedy) about a dead gunman and the events surrounding, and after, his death; Donal O'Kelly's "Asylum! Asylum!" is a characteristically angry piece about the treatment of an African refugee, written some time before the number of refugees in Ireland skyrocketed, and thus anticipating a major current social issue. Tom MacIntyre's "Sheep's Milk on the Boil" is an impenetrable scrap of whimsy, and Niall Williams' "A Little Like Paradise" is a sentimental mood piece about the West, the kind of play that has since been stamped into a bloody pulp by the erratic genius of Martin McDonagh. Neil Donnelly's "The Duty Master" is dull but worthy, a portrait of an Irishman teaching in an English public school, and about as exciting as it sounds. There are some excellent production shots, but one is not told which actor played which role and thus identifying what scene is being depicted is not easy. Plus, the American editor suffers from a too-misty-eyed appreciation of Irish drama and the respective qualities of the plays, and tries to hard to fit them into the familiar canon. But a useful book, especially for those that want to put the plays on.

This book is very hard to read because of its dullness.

As I read it, I was thinking that the book read as if written by an undergraduate: A compilation of a bunch of facts from many sources (usually without a reference) and with some remarks that lack any analysis (like blaming on neo-liberal policies the increase in Smog in the city of Santiago (!)) -if only we had followed the soviet union, we would have clean air-.

This doesn't look like the work of a scholar (or of someone with a talent for writing for that matter), but rather of a couple of foreigners with an interest in Chile who said, "hey, we could write a book about this country".

The real problem with the book is not its bias (or lack of it) but rather that it is just very hard to get oneself to read through it because it lacks insights, parallels with other situations in the world, witty remarks, etc. (i.e. what makes good books good).

It reminded me of why I hated history in high school.

It is very important that foreigners study the history of Chile. But sometimes it is better to know the reality of the country and have an impartial view towards recent historical facts. For instance, the book does not tell how Alende's regime was driving the country to become a communist state, and how the extremist forces of the "Unidad Popular" were preparing a civil war against the bourgeois institutions. The military uprising of September 1973 was invoked by the Chilean Supreme Court and the Chilean parliament, as the only way to avoid that my country would be turned into a second Cuba. That is the real fact, and the origin of the military government. Said government commited some abuses, but restored Chile's economy and by its own will reestablished democracy. And we, Chileans, will always remember that were saved from a communist-started civil war, which would have brought not 3.000 (the total number of victims of represion) but millions of deads. So, when foreign historians write regarding Chile, they should be more careful when taking into consideration the true realities which we lived in the sixties and seventies.

I only want to inform you that this book was translated to spanish by Milena Grass K. and published in 1998 by Cambridge University Press in 1998. ISBN 84 8323 033 X rústica

Readers looking for a comprehensive introduction to or reference work about Continental philosophy will be disappointed. The essays collected here were, in most cases, obviously not written with inclusion in this volume in mind. One suspects that most of the writers fished their "contributions" from the drawer to which they had consigned otherwise unpublishable work. Most of the articles deal only with a single arcane interpretive point, belying their sweeping titles ("Kant," "Schelling," etc.) Many, the non-initiate suspects, are in fact byzantinely-phrased polemics against rival scholars. For a clearly-written, synoptically interpretive, and unpretentiously thoughtful overview of the topics purportedly addressed in the Critchley-Schroeder volume, see David West's Introduction to Continental Philosophy.