... This is a [great] book and why it is not in single digits on Amazon sales is, well, beyond me. This book is an amazing romp: part sci-fi part techno thriller part Richard Farina. Hell, the fact that he reminds us how truly great Fred Neil was is worth the price of admission. It is tight, funny, and sexy-like Eileen Gray furniture. It's great and was published outside of main-stream publishing: isn't that another reason to think it might be above average. In short, if you buy this book, you may well empty out the author's basement. More importantly, you'll have great time reading it.

Obviously you enjoy architecture or you wouldn't be thinking of reading a review of this book. Think no further, buy the book. Frank Furness has been overlooked way too long and this book shows why in pictures and a nice overview of text why this mans work, and what is left of it, should be escalated to the heights of the finest.

I've been visiting New Orleans for over thirty years and these two guys found some joints I've never even heard of.

I have read all Jane Austens books. They are funny and colourless. Most of all I liked the book: Pride and Prejudice.But Emma is funnier. I have seen the movie:Emma,and the movie: Pride and Prejudice.They were very funny!

From mentor Rene Francois Gignoux, GEORGE INNESS knew to paint "Sunshine and clouds" with a classic Dutch 17th-century straight horizon. As one of the greatest 19th-century landscape colorists, he preferred civilized nature to wilderness: "The Lackawanna valley" met nature and train, with the informally simple composition and lighter coloring influences of Barbizon school artists Corot, Daubigny, Diaz, Dupre, Jacque, Rousseau and Troyon. He colored emotions and ideas with the depth and richness earlier seen in Titian and with the arbitrariness later seen in Mark Rothko: popular and widely known "Autumn oaks"; "Lake Nemi," with 2 white birds above accenting the crater depth below; "Off the coast of Cornwall," as one of his rare coast and sea scapes. His style included organizing horizontal and vertical elements: "The brush burners" had the perfect balance later seen in Piet Mondrian; "The monk" showed Japanese-style flatness and occult balance; and architecturally detailed "St Peter's" contrasted darkly solid foreground with lighter distance. He started out faithfully finishing in the studio what he sketched in the field: "Landscape with fishermen" was an early exception, with a made-up water body near the very real Sharp Mountains rocks and trees. He ended making up his own landscapes: "October" was one of the clearest examples of this Synthetic style. Thanks to Harvard's Fogg art museum having "October noon" on a back stariway, Nicolai Cikovsky Jr went on to become recognized for his authoritative knowledge of the painter's work and to organize this book with fellow art curator Michael Quick. Readers might want to go on to James EB Breslin's MARK ROTHKO, Rudolf Herman Fuchs' DUTCH PAINTING, Hans Ludwig C. Jaffe's PIET MONDRIAN, and Filippo Pedrocco's TITIAN.

I began reading this book after I had read many of George MacDonald's books that were edited by Michael Phillips. The book does an excellent job of explaining life events that influenced MacDonald's writings and relating those life events to the books George MacDonald wrote during those times. Familiarity with the books has helped me relate more to his life. Having read this book, I have a MUCH better understanding of George MacDonald, his relationships with family members and his faith in God. It makes me appreciate his books even more.

Horst Altaus has done here an excellent job. We are curious about philosophers as men and women because philosophy is somewhat more intimate than science, and Hegel was present at a time of rapid change: during the Napoleonic wars, he saw first hand his "dialectic" in which the German states were turned topsy-turvy by world souls on horseback.

Altaus intersperses his chapters with readable digests of Hegel's major works.

There is the obligatory comment about Hegel's complex style, combined with rather patronizing praise of the simplicity and elegance of a minor work on the Württemburg constitution: for we often find that to ascribe the label "difficult" to the style or the man committs what psychologists call a fundamental attribution error.

For we find that Hegel could use, in his minor work, a style appropriate to the theme. It is said that the style should be appropriate to the audience as if that was something we could control, but Hegel's troubles with getting enough students to attend his lectures, documented by Altaus, show both that operationalism of this sort was not his cup of tea, and that it is less fundamental than the duty of the author towards reality.

People are difficult and their style is difficult when they try to impress (although anyone who today uses a difficult style merely to impress aliterate administrators and deans needs his head examined), but perhaps more often when they find themselves wrestling, like Jacob, with angels.

Hegel wrote simply when writing on mere constitutions, as did John Adams. But his larger theme required on his part a couple of barrels of books, dragged about Germany by primitive transportation, and while his ethnocentrism is obvious, Hegel's philosophy of history remains in some ways up to date.

Hegel's texts have the curious property that they share with Kant that unlike mathematical or scientific works, one gets the impression that "if this stuff is true, not only could it not be otherwise, its-being-put-otherwise would not make any sense at all. On the other hand, however, if this stuff is false, it is not false, but without any sensible meaning, whatsoever."

IF the struggle for recognition is the motor of consciousness and of history, then any alternative story is gibberish, which is interesting, for Hegel's story is confusing enough.

And, it's gibberish precisely because of its proposed theme, which is everything.

Science considers the alternate worlds and chooses the true world, but the alternate worlds can be pictured. True philosophy on the other hand, is concerned with the only world, whether we interpret that as the set or join of all possible worlds, or a world in which all possibilities will come to pass.

This alone I think generates the "complex bad" style of Kant and of Hegel.

Hegel should be read by philosophers of consciousness, and Althaus is a good introduction: for contemporary theorists may be making fundamental mistakes.

IF our consciousness is formed by the Other from day one, then this would predict that fetal alcohol syndrome victims and children deprived of contact with their others have no consciousness as we experience it from the inside.

It means that "scientific" explanations of consciousness that hypostatize individual minds are doomed. No model of consciousness makes sense if it "works" in a world populated by only one consciousness. Just as mathematics requires existence assertions, consciousness requires a stronger assertion: in the beginning there is neither zero nor one but two (Madonna and child.)

Horst includes more patronizing material on Hegel's scientific views which he shared with Goethe. They may seem to Altaus to be a dead end but forms of them survive in deep ecology. They were replaced by reductionism which, paradoxically, points of Thomas Kuhn's Oedipal destruction of old paradigms and technical whizbang as its own ultimate ratio regium. It is a reductionism which is unable to master complexity because its gesture is a hand-wave, from simple initial conditions to complex results, that in an idealist gesture ignores labor.

It is clear that like many intellectuals, Hegel compromised himself later in life by becoming an ideologue for the Prussian state. But while the dialectic is not a license for easy self-contradiction (as Hegel's friend Goethe feared) there is a genuine dialectic between the hero of the chapter on lordship and bondage in the Phenomenology of Mind, and the apologist for a state church.

For all other things being equal, we would like to live in a society that reflected our deepest needs and one that did not demand principled retirement. But history, as I write, staggers on.

Althaus shows that Hegel, as many attackers have said, may have compromised himself by at the end of his life, identifying the World Spirit with the Prussian state.

This is, of course, ethnocentrism run amuck. But Hegel's views were not evaluative. As Altaus shows, he was concerned with description of a sort that would sensibly relate individual psychology to history.

Hegel's poltical philosophy gives no basis whatsoever for resistance to a state, or paradoxically it can be reread as revolutionary counsel.

For if one lives in the best state, or even one that merely is the state in which the world spirit has set up shop for good or ill, revolution is either evil or futile, or both. If the state is the home of a benign world spirit, Casper the Friendly Weltgeist, then resistance is evil.

But if (as commentators after Hegel have noted, especially Adorno) Hegel provides no reason why the world spirit may not be perceived as bad or evil in its effects on our lives, revolution is futile and evil, being futile, everything else being considered.

In short, reading the biography of the later Hegel illustrates how old age can be lethal for philosophy. The later Marx showed some of the same intellectual decay as his carbuncles got the better of him. As T. S. Eliot wrote, "do not tell us of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly."

Love of the homeland, insights into the clans relationships, Christian ethics lived in life, wonderful action and unexpected plot twists, FUN! and it made us feel like we wanted to be truer to the truth of Christ ourselves from reading of others experiences. You'll love it!

Hope Grows In Winter: Inspiring Real-life Stories Of How Hope Changes Lives deals with the issues of suffering and grief that are the inevitable experience of all men and women. Each of the contributors has endured a personal tragedy: a pastor diagnosed with full-blown AIDS, a young mother discovering she has breast cancer; an upstanding Christian father learning that his unmarried adolescent daughter is pregnant, another father who suddenly lost his beloved four year old son. Yet in spite of the their pain and hopeless feelings, each of these men and women reached the same conclusion -- hope does indeed grow in winter. This wonderful compendium of inspiration from a Christian perspective is highly recommended reading for anyone seeking to deal with unexpected tragedy in their lives or the lives of their loved ones.

I am so impressed with this book that I would not let any teachers be certified unless they had mastered the communication skills in this manual, regardless of the level of education they teach at.

I first learned about the book/manual when I took an inservice course at my school back in 1984. I have been using the communications tools ever since in all aspects of my life that require communications with others.