Book Description
Mommy, Please Don't Cry is a book of love and comfort for mothers who have experienced the deep sorrow of losing a child. Serene illustrations frame gentle words that describe heaven from a child's perspective. With room for the reader's personal reflections at the end of the book, every page is a poignant gift of hope and healing. "Our stories are all different, but our pain is the same," writes Linda. "We are mothers who will forever grieve the loss of our children. And yet, there is hope for our troubled souls."
Customer Reviews:
strongly recommended.......2007-08-20
every time i open this book, i cry. i feel like my little girl is talking to me from heaven. i highly recommend this book to any grieving mother that has lost a little one. it was so good i even bought one for my own mother!!!
This helps.......2007-07-13
I lost my son earlier this year and bought this book to give me some idea of what heaven must be like from a childrens view. When I am low or sad I read this and it makes it just a little bit easier, reading that he is in a magical place as described. It is beautifully done and a wonderfull tool to help you through the grieveing process.
Great book..........2007-07-09
I bought this book for myself after loosing our first baby, Cameron at the end of my first trimester, just 3 weeks ago today. And, I must say that I did indeed cry while reading it, but the simple words of this book have already started healing the deep wounds in my heart. The illustrations are beautiful, and I would recommend this to anyone who has lost an infant.
This book brought me Peace and Hope After my Miscarriage.......2007-05-15
Mommy Please Don't Cry
By Linda DeYmaz
Illustrations by Sabrina Smith
After giving three kids, and three great pregnancies, it was a shock to me when I showed up for a normal second trimester checkup only to discover that my baby might be dead.
I had no signs of miscarriage at all. No bleeding, no cramping. My OB only did the ultrasound to see if there might be twins (since I was getting up there in age.)
When he turned the screen away from my view, my heart sank. There was no heart beat.
What followed were two weeks of more tests and ultrasounds, and eventually a D & C. We had lost our precious baby.
That was probably one of the darkest times in my life, and it was difficult to get out of bed and tale care of my three children. I cried a lot, and I wasn't sure how to get past the pain.
Though there is no easy way to recover from a miscarriage, one book that brought me hope was Mommy Please Don't Cry by Linda DeYmaz.
This book is written from the perspective of the lost baby speaking to their mother about the beauty and glory of heaven. It was so comforting to read and cry over the pages of Mommy Please Don't Cry time and time again. It helped heal my heart.
If you have had a miscarriage, or know someone who has, this book is very healing. I strongly encourage you to get a copy, and share the love of Christ with them.
Several years later, I did suffer a second miscarriage, and now have 2 glory babies in heaven waiting on me. And I know that someday, I will hold them, and "our hearts will again beat as one."
Mommy, Please Don't Cry: There Are No Tears In Heaven".......2006-10-29
I have ordered and given away close to a dozen of these. It's an amazing book and touches the heart of a woman at the point she needs it.
Customer Reviews:
Story of Men who Considered War the Greatest "Game".......2007-04-05
Farwell has chosen eight men who became national heroes in England during the reign of Queen Victoria (he has a subsequent book called "Queen Victoria's Little Wars). The first two men in whose stories are presented (Gough and Napier) made most of their early imprints during the Napoleonic Wars and later starred in India. Farwell's stories about them are straight forward chronologies of their careers.
The third man to be bio-ed is Charles "Chinese" Gordon who made a name for himself during the Opium Wars in China, but later lost his life in the Sudan at Khartoum. He is the first of the group to be seen with a more critical eye; including the one that intimates that his death was partially self-inflicted by his arrogance.
Roberts is one of those men who always seemed to be at the right place at the right time and knew not only what was due from him, but a smart and creative way of accomplishing it. He was a 'soldiers soldier' and was one of the most respected men of his time for his courage, coolness under fire and concern for the men (including those in the ranks) who served with and under him. He was also a devoted family man.
Garnet Wolseley (much like Kitchener) was famous for his "Ring" of officers who followed him around the English Empire. Unless you were one of his, your chance of finding help or work was minimal. This attitude is what set him against his contemporaries Roberts and Wood.
Woods could be described as a plugger, and the longer he hung around the better he seemed to be. He doesn't really have much of a claim to fame but did a lot of the 'scut' work that was necessary in building the "Empire" in India and Africa. His career was unusual in that he originally was in the Navy and through some strange happenstance ended up as an Army Field Marshall
Macdonald was a man who was driven in so many ways by his personal demons. He was one of the few men of his day to rise through the ranks from private to general. This may have led him to always feel that he was under a microscope and had to do better than everyone else. Those he had a reasonable early and middle career, he was destroyed by ascersions of homosexuality and pedophilia, that drove him to eventual suicide.
The last to be bio-ed was Lord Kitchener who was an irrascible and taciturn man who also had his little coterie of officers whom he refered to as his "boys". There were only some hints at strangeness in him, he usually kept a young officer as his aide-de-camp but no improprieties were ever leveled at him. His greatest claim to fame was the conquest of the Sudan and the rebuilding of Khartoum. During WWI he served as Secretary of War and helped raise a Volunteer Army for the early fight in France. He was successful by raising a "Pals" Army that promised to keep groups of men together if they joined at the same time. The problem with this idea was that, men were place in the trenches with their friends and in many cases, the entire young male population of an area or town were wiped out in a single battle. Kitchener died while on a military visit to Russia.
All in all these are interesting stories for what they tell us about politics in the Victorian era (or error) and much about how things were run during the "Scramble for Africa" and the "Great Game" in Asia.
A little gem of biography.......2005-10-10
The stories are interesting, the writing is engaging, but the genius of this book is to compress a set of biographies into a single book rather than the current trend of writing definitive 1000 page biographies of even minor figures. In bite sized chunks you can survey the human condition, learn something about the history of a time, and get a great set of stories in a fraction of the time.
I wish there were more books like this. I'd like to write a book like this. The subject matter itself is an acquired taste...but read the book anyway.
Be Careful!.......2005-08-03
If you read anything by Farwell make sure that you reference other sources as he tends to rewrite history to his own liking. This is especially obvious in his biography of Stonewall Jackson. Time after time, he chooses to portray Jackson in a bad light; giving deference to accounts by people with an "axe to grind" while dismissing favorable accounts by those closest to Jackson.
A Bully of a Book !.......2005-01-15
I have found this book to become a permanent part of my humble library. If one was to have only one book about the British Empire, one could do a whole lot worse than this little tome.
It is not for the faint hearted PC historian but a real nuts ands bolts book about the Men who went out with amazingly small but highly effective Armies and made a huge chunk of the map pink. (For those not in the Know, the Old Empire was always coloured Pink on the maps) I can only hope that our Army would do so well in Iraq. I can recommended it most highly as it is with Mr. Farwell's other books
The Victorian Empire Builders.......2002-06-23
This compendium biography presents a fine sketch of the eight prominent Victorian generals who commanded during the Little Wars of Queen Victoria. The often respressed and somewhat bizarre characteristics of these men seems typical of the Victorian mind-set. While they were certainly eccentric, these men personified the times they lived in and in their actions pursued the notion of the White Man's burden to civilize the dark regions of the world.
In the politcially correct times that we live in today perhaps some of these notions will appear offensive, but in order to appreciate these man we must understand the times they lived in and try not to impose our own values upon them. Indeed, many Victorians would find our social values today strange to comprehend as well. Byron Farwell specializes in the Victorian military experience and his writtings on this topic are always witty and informative.
The reader may find it surprising that homosexuality was present in several of these gentlemen, namely Charles Gordon and Hector Macdonald. Again, we can attribute this to the oddities of the age which repressed such feelings on the surface, thereby encouraging their lurkings behind the scenes. It is doubtful that any of them would have preferred to advertise their inclinations as seems to be the norm today. Homosexuality was more discreet then, and perhaps that was a good thing in a way.
The military life that these men pursued perhaps inclined them toward a different lifestyle as the compnay of women was often infrequent in far outposts.
The talents of these generals certainly expanded the British Empire and made it one of the great epochs of its day. Farwell has provided a worthy addition to Lytton Strachey's earlier work, "Eminent Victorians". The reader will find all sorts of interesting and amusing aspects of these Eminent Victorian Generals.
Average customer rating:
- reading the other ranks' letters
|
The Victorian Soldier in Africa (Studies in Imperialism)
Edward Spiers
Manufacturer: Manchester University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
 General
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Africa
| History
| Subjects
| Books
General
| World
| History
| Subjects
| Books
General
| England
| Europe
| History
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0719061210
Release Date: 2005-02-10 |
Book Description
This book re-examines the campaign experience of British soldiers in Africa during the period, 1874-1902--the zenith of the Victorian imperial expansion--and does so from the perspective of the regimental soldier. The book utilizes an unprecedented number of letters and diaries, written by regimental officers and other ranks, to allow soldiers to speak for themselves about their experience of colonial warfare. The book provides commentary on soldiers' views of commanding officers and politicians alongside assessment of war correspondents, colonial auxiliaries and African natives in their roles as bearers, allies and enemies.
Customer Reviews:
reading the other ranks' letters.......2006-08-04
spiers is an excellent writer and historian. Unfortunately this is not one of his best. He culls soldiers' letters and newspaper articles written during the British colonial wars in the late
l9th century. Most of the new letters/articles parallel what
other soldiers/observers/columnists have said before. The Zulu
campaign is interesting; the Sedan and the 2nd South African wars are not particularly helpful.
Way too expensive- get it from the
interlibrary loan if you need it.
Book Description
The men and events that turned the map 'red' for the Queen Empress This is an excellent and readable account of the British and Imperial Armies at war during the great years of Empire. Accessible and entertaining it will satisfy the casual reader and the more serious student of military history alike. The author presents a comprehensive overview of the conflicts of the era, but has also imaginatively complimented these with anecdotes of the participants. These illuminate the history with vignettes of action and courage which bring the regiments and their men, their various exotic enemies and the battlefields of many lands vividly to life. These include the final battles for the British dominance of the Indian sub-continent including the First Afghan War 1839-42, the conquest of Scinde 1843, the Gwalior War 1843 and the First and Second Sikh Wars 1845-49. The 1850's brought conflict with Russia in the Crimea, a mutiny in the Indian Army, a campaign in Persia and collision with the ancient empire of China. Ferocious battles with the Maoris as New Zealand was settled by Europeans followed in 1863 before the race to claim Africa pitted British troops against an unbalanced Emperor in Abyssinia, a despot in West Africa, the mighty martial tribe of the Zulus and pitched battles in the sands of the north against the Mahdi and his army of religious zealots. In Afghanistan the tribes of the burning Northwest Frontier remained in turmoil as the Great Game was played out. The book concludes-as the 19th century itself drew to a close-with the epic account of how a British Army marched along the banks of the Nile to revenge the death of Gordon and re-conquer the Sudan.
Average customer rating:
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Farwell Eminent Victorian Soldiers
B. Farwell
Manufacturer: W W Norton & Co Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
England
| Europe
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| 18th Century
| 19th Century
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| London
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ASIN: 0393018849 |
Average customer rating:
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Our soldier boy (Victorian fiction)
George Manville Fenn
Manufacturer: Library of Congress Photoduplication Service
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
British
| World Literature
| Literature & Fiction
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| Books
| 18th Century
| 19th Century
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| Letters & Correspondence
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| Poetry
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| Short Stories
ASIN: B0007289CM |
Average customer rating:
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Soldier's Son (Flashbacks: Victorian)
Garry Kilworth
Manufacturer: A & C Black (Publishers) Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
History & Historical Fiction
| Children's Books
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| Books
| Africa
| Ancient
| Asia
| Australia & Oceania
| Biographical
| Canada
| Central & South America
| Europe
| Exploration & Discovery
| Fiction
| General
| Holocaust
| Medieval
| Mexico
| Middle East
| Military & Wars
| Modern
| Prehistoric
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ASIN: 0713660880 |
Average customer rating:
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Soldiers Of The Victorian Age V1
Charles Rathbone Low
Manufacturer: Kessinger Publishing, LLC
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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Military & Spies
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ASIN: 1432524895 |
Book Description
In Two Volumes. This scarce antiquarian book is included in our special Legacy Reprint Series. In the interest of creating a more extensive selection of rare historical book reprints, we have chosen to reproduce this title even though it may possibly have occasional imperfections such as missing and blurred pages, missing text, poor pictures, markings, dark backgrounds and other reproduction issues beyond our control. Because this work is culturally important, we have made it available as a part of our commitment to protecting, preserving and promoting the world's literature.
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- "Europe Upside Down: Fallacies of the new Afrocentrism."
|
Behind the Eurocentric Veils: The Search for African Realities
Clinton M. Jean
Manufacturer: Univ of Massachusetts Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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| Africa
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ASIN: 0870237578 |
Customer Reviews:
"Europe Upside Down: Fallacies of the new Afrocentrism." .......2006-01-20
"Europe Upside Down: Fallacies of the new Afrocentrism."
Anthony Kwameh Appiah
Rev: Behind the Eurocentric Veils: The Search for African Realities by Clinton Jean Times Literary Supplement February 12 1993 p. 24-25.
In the last few years there has been a stream of publications, especially in the United States, aimed at establishing a new basis for the study and teaching of African and African-American culture. Whether or not they actually use the word "Afrocentric" on their packaging, these books-which differ enormously in the quality of their thought and writing, as well as in their factual reliability-have a certain common set of preoccupations, whose persistence entitles one now to speak of a broadly Afrocentric paradigm.
The consensus about which these works are organized has two basic elements, one critical, and the other positive, which are either argued or taken for granted in them all. The negative thesis is that modern Western scholarship on cultural matters, high and low, is hopelessly Eurocentric. This means, to begin with, that Western scholarship understands European history, intellectual life and social institutions as a sort of ideal type, both normatively and descriptively. But Eurocentric work also displays an inability, rooted in prejudice, to enter sympathetically into the forms of life of non-Europeans, and, especially, of black people of African descent. As a consequence of this Eurocentrism, Western scholarship presupposes, so the story goes, that Africans have produced little of much cultural worth and that cultural works of sophistication or value (like the architecture of Great Zimbabwe or the Pyramids), even when they are in Africa, are unlikely to have been produced by black people.
In support of this Eurocentricity thesis some (and occasionally a great deal of) work goes into showing that European scholars at least since the Enlightenment have set about to conceal facts about the African origins of certain central elements of Western civilization: notably, both the Egyptian origins of the Greek "miracle" and the black African origins of the Egyptian "miracle."
This negative thesis is argued as the prolegomenon to an alternative, positive, "Afrocentric" view, in which African cultural creativity is discovered to have been at the origin of Western civilization, and Western civilization, especially in modernity, is either asserted or implied to be intrinsically morally depraved; incapable, in particular, of living peacefully with Others. We (sometimes all of us, sometimes just those of us who are black) are urged, then, to center on African history (and, particularly the history of the Egypt of the pharaohs) and return to African values.
The Afrocentric paradigm is not just the source of a lively body of writing: it is the basis, too, of a movement in the United States to revise the teaching of African-American children, to provide them with an Afrocentric education. Here the argument is that the Eurocentricity of what is taught in American schools, at best, fails to nurture, and, at worst, actively damages the self-esteem of black children, and that what these children need instead is a diet of celebratory African history (also beginning in Egypt and insisting that its civilization was black) and the transmission of African values.
These values are often taught now in the version developed by Dr. Maulana Karenga and associated with the invention of a feast called "Kwanzaa," designed to provide an African celebration to go with Christmas and Hanukkah. (American children are taught Swahili words, naming various allegedly African virtues, as their proper inheritance. There is something of an irony in the use of Swahili as an Afrocentric language, since hardly any of the slaves brought to the New World can have known the language, while it was in fact being used in a culture in which slave trading to the Arabian peninsula was a major element of the economy.) This particular brand of Afrocentrism goes under the label of "Kemetism" ("Kemet" being a name for ancient Egypt): and the whole package can be found in a recent work by Molefi Kete Asante, one of the intellectual leaders of the movement, entitled Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge.
At least as important as published work is a body of Afrocentric lore transmitted in public lectures and in discussion groups by figures who have tended in recent years to combine the Afrocentric paradigm with a peculiar anti-Semitism, which seems preoccupied with placing especial responsibility for the ills of the black world on a Jewish conspiracy. Many of the leading rap stars seem to subscribe to this package of views, combining it with their well-known misogyny and homophobia, to produce a cultural brew as noxious as any currently available in popular culture. The diagnosis of this particular cultural pathology is the subject of much current speculation among observers of the African-American cultural scene.
The Afrocentric paradigm-the scholarly end of the movement-has one major hero: Cheikh Anta Diop, the Senegalese man-of-letters, after whom the university in Dakar, Senegal is now named. Diop argued over many years (beginning in the 1950s) for the thesis of the African origins of Greek civilization. In such works as L'unité culturelle de l'Afrique noire, Anteriorité des civilisations nègres, Nations nègres et culture, Fondements économiques et culturels d'un état federal d'Afrique noir and Parenté génétique de l'egyptien pharaonique et des langues negro-Africaines, he pursued a complex agenda, in which the splendors of Egypt were a basis for contemporary African pride and the cultural unity derived from a common African source could be the basis for modern African political unity.
Like most cultural movements at full flood, this Afrocentric turn is a composite of truth and error, insight and illusion, moral generosity and meanness. But if there is one thing that strikes me more about it than any other it is how thoroughly at home it is in the frameworks of nineteenth century European thought. (One of the symptomatic features of much Afrocentric writing is that the antagonists it identifies are largely dead.) Afrocentrism, in short, seems very much to share the presuppositions of the Victorian ideologies against which it is reacting.
Take, for example, the preoccupation with the ancient world. The academic curriculum of the nineteenth century traced Western civilization to roots in ancient Greece, following a history of progress from the excellent beginnings mapped out by the heirs of Homer. Our Afrocentrists have bought into this way of doing cultural history, and have only challenged the priority of the (white) Greeks replacing it with the priority of the (black) Egyptians. There are, of course, genuine issues for discussion here about the relations between different parts of the ancient Mediterranean and the Greek "miracle." Martin Bernal (not, by my accounts an Afrocentrist, because he doesn't support the positive agenda of the movement) is a hero for Afrocentrists because he has taken on, in Black Athena, the challenge of refuting the modern view that the Greeks owed nothing of importance to Egypt. So far as I can see, there seems to be a consensus, now, that Bernal convincingly demonstrates the role of prejudice against blacks and Jews in classical scholarship in the Enlightenment and since, while not establishing decisively his own positive account of ancient history.
But it is not this perfectly interesting and potentially genteel academic debate that has drawn Bernal to the Afrocentrists' attention. For their purposes it is essential not only to agree with Bernal's account of ancient intellectual history but also to insist, in Diop's words, that "Ancient Egypt was a Negro civilization [and]... the moral fruit of their civilization is to be counted among the assets of the Black world..." And on this matter Bernal has little to say. Fortunately he did not have to argue for this secondary thesis, since it is taken to be implicit in his title. African Athena or Egyptian Athena would have left the racial issue open: Black Athena does not.
It is this preoccupation with racial matters that is so much a response to the nineteenth-century framing of the issues. What was added in the nineteenth century to the classicism of the Enlightenment was the thought that the Western heritage was a racial possession. This story neglects not only Egyptian influences on the Greeks but such minor embarrassments as the centrality of Jewish contributions to Western high culture, and the key role of the Arabs in maintaining the intellectual tradition that linked Plato to the Renaissance. And it depends on a way of thinking of culture and biology which is bound to be discomfited by those scholars, black, brown and yellow, who have taken possession of Western culture in the twentieth century and mastered it, at the very same time as many of the supposed racial heirs of the West have been immersed in a popular culture "contaminated" with African rhythms.
But in our day racialism surely does not need arguing against in serious company. Do we not all know that there is biology and there is culture; that their interconnections and interdependencies are complex and multiply mediated; that the old simplicities of racialism have not stood the test of exposure to the evidence? Perhaps, but, then again, perhaps not. After all, the Afrocentrist interest in the color of the ancient Egyptians presumably derives from the thought that if they were black then they were of the same race as contemporary black Africans and their New World cousins. (It is, indeed, a standard feature of Afrocentric argument to go through a series of claims about the physical anthropological evidence for the priority in various domains of the African.) And why, if you do not conflate biology and culture, should that matter?
It is hard to find in the Afrocentrist literature a clearer answer to this question than the passage from Diop I quoted earlier. Racial identity with the Egyptians makes their achievements one of the moral assets of contemporary blacks. (Of course, if Greece grew out of Egypt and "the West" grew out of Greece, then the West is one of the moral assets of contemporary blacks: and its legacy of ethnocentrism is presumably one of our moral liabilities. But I digress.) Perhaps this is why Black Athena and African Origins of Civilization-which contains translated selections from Diop's Anteriorité des civilisations nègres-sell so well on the streets of Harlem. And if it is, this is a reason that would have been entirely congenial to the nineteenth century Eurocentrists whom Afrocentricity aims to refute.
Once we see the essentially reactive structure of Afrocentrism-it is, to borrow Marx's account of his relation to Hegel, simply Eurocentrism turned upside down-we can understand where its intellectual weaknesses will lie. It is not surprising, for example, that in choosing to talk about Egypt and ignore the rest of Africa and African history, Afrocentrism shares the European prejudice against cultures without writing. Eurocentrism, finding a literate culture and significant architecture, set about claiming that Egypt could not be black. Afrocentrism chooses Egypt because Eurocentrism had already made a claim on it.
Similarly, we shall not be surprised at what is one of the most tiresome features of Afrocentrism, namely its persistence in what the Beninois philosopher (and current Minister of Culture) Paulin Hountondji has called "unanimism": the view that there is an African culture to which to appeal. It is surely prima facie preposterous to suppose that there is an African culture, shared by everyone from the civilizations of the upper Nile thousands of years ago to the thousand or so language-zones of contemporary Africa?
Here too, in aiming to identify some common core of African civilization, the Afrocentrists seem to be responding to earlier attempts to identify a common core of Western culture. Wandering, as I have, from Venice to Venice Beach, California, or from York to New York, one can be forgiven for wondering how unitary the West really is today. But it was always a strange idea that Alexander and Alfred and Frederick the Greats had something deeply in common with each other and with the least of their subjects that could be called Western culture. And in Africa, where whatever continuity there has been through all this time, has not been mediated by even the sort of broken textual tradition that in some sense unites something called Western culture, it is not only a strange idea but a silly one.
A final irony is worth pointing out: Afrocentrism, which is offered in the name of black solidarity, has, by and large, entirely ignored the work of African scholars other than Diop. (This fact tends to be concealed because African-American scholars like Asante and Karenga have adopted African names.) Thus, much play has been given to another major source book for the Afrocentric, Jahnheinz Jahn's Muntu-African cultures and the Western World, a work that first appeared in the United States with great éclat in the early nineteen sixties. The book revolves around the concept of NTU. (This is the stem of the Kinyaruanda-Bantu words "Muntu" (Person), "Kintu" (thing), "Hantu" (place and time) and "Kuntu" (modality) and it is a morpheme that does not occur unprefixed in Kinyaruanda.) "NTU" Jahn wrote with the gravitas of revelation, "is the universal force as such."
Reading this I found myself irresistibly drawn into a fantasy in which an African scholar returns to her home in Lagos or Nairobi, with the important news that she has uncovered the key to Western culture. Soon to be published, THING: Western Culture and the African World, a work that exposes the philosophy of ING, written so clearly on the face of the English language. For ING, in the Euro-American view, is the inner dynamic essence of the world. In the very structure of the terms doing and making and meaning, the English (and thus, by extension all Westerners) express their deep commitment to this conception: but the secret heart of the matter is captured in their primary ontological category of th-ing; every th-ing-or be-ing as their sages express the matter in the more specialized vocabulary of one of their secret societies-is not stable but ceaselessly changing. Here we see the fundamental explanation for the extraordinary neophilia of Western culture, its sense that reality is change.
The notion that there is something unitary called African culture that could be summarized in this sort of way has been subjected to devastating critique by a generation of African intellectuals. But little sign of African accounts of African culture appears in the writings of Afrocentricity. Molefi Asante has written whole books with Akan culture at the heart of them without referring to the major works of Akan philosophers such as J. B. Danquah, William Abrahams, Kwasi Wiredu, and Kwame Gyekye. And I am reliably informed that on one occasion not so long ago an African-American interlocutor told a distinguished Zairian intellectual "we do not need you educated Africans coming here to tell us about African culture."
It is against this background that we should read Clinton Jean's Behind the Eurocentric Veils: The Search for African Realities, which is certainly among the best-written and -argued Afrocentric books I have read. Professor Jean begins with a two-part defense of the negative thesis. The first chapter shows by a careful reading of sociological writing and, especially, of Weber, that mainstream sociology is Eurocentric; the second demonstrates the same for radical theory, and especially for Marx and Marxism. (In the first chapter Professor Jean takes up a fascinating Weberian discussion of bureaucracy, that has a great deal of interest in its own right.)
These chapters strike me as controversial only in the detail. In their broad outlines, many contemporary scholars of all colors would surely accept them. The fact that this is so makes one wonder whether Professor Jean is right to think that "below the surface" of American liberal thought, "run the powerful currents of their ethnocentric hatreds of other cultures and peoples of color that bear them-none so virulent as the hatred of blacks and their history." Eurocentrism is surely seen, nowadays, as something to be rooted out: and ethnocentrism is busier in America's streets than in its universities.
Professor Jean's third chapter, whose somewhat polemical title is "For those who think that Black Studies can be too nationalistic," takes up some of Diop's ideas (especially from Unité culturelle de l'Afrique noire) to defend a view of African culture as centrally more humane than Western culture. Like too many Afrocentrists, Jean doesn't seem very interested in what African's other than Diop have had to say about the matter. But unlike many of them, he seems to be inviting everyone, not only those of us who are black, to draw on Africa's resources of humanism.
This, then, is a benevolent and generous Afrocentrism, and I wish I could agree with more of its substantial claims. But the fact is that unanimism seems to me both theoretically unlikely and quite incompatible with the evidence. And so, as I have already said, I reject the very idea that there is an African anything on which to draw. Professor Jean tells me nothing that quiets these doubts. And while any sane person must agree that some horrendous crimes, crimes almost incommensurable with the crimes of past civilizations, have been committed in our century in the West, it hardly seems right that African cultures have some intrinsic humanism: true, Africa did not develop the murder industry of the Holocaust, but cruelty and unkindness are not Western prerogatives, any more than are intelligence and creativity. (Even if something called "African culture" had all the features Professor Jean claimed for it, you'd need more than a few quotes from Diop and Basil Davidson and a passage from Meyer Fortes and Evans-Pritchard to prove it.)
Is not the proper response to Eurocentrism not a reactive Afrocentrism, but a new understanding that humanizes all of us by learning to think beyond race?
Average customer rating:
- A very enoyable and informative read!
- Very disappointed
- Brilliantly written for the curious average reader!!!!
|
America's Favorite Backyard Birds
George Harrison , and
Kit Harrison
Manufacturer: Fireside
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
General
| Nature & Ecology
| Science
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Birdwatching
| Outdoors & Nature
| Subjects
| Books
Reference
| Outdoors & Nature
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0671673416 |
Customer Reviews:
A very enoyable and informative read!.......2003-06-07
I've had this book for years, and enjoy it immensely. I love all the details given about some of the most common backyard birds. The pictures are great, although they are not in color. But this book shines in the written word. I highly recommend it. Especially for the beginning birder!
( I give it 4 stars because the pictures are not it color)
Very disappointed.......2000-10-03
I planned to send this book to a friend in Australia, as we were exchanging books on the most favorite birds of our area. There were only about 12 species listed and only 12 color photographs. Granted there was a lot of information about their habitat, but there were many birds that I would deem more favorite than those listed. What about the red polls and juncos? And they photographed a female blue jay, rather than the more brilliant male. I'd take a pass on this book.
Brilliantly written for the curious average reader!!!!.......1999-05-13
For those who are NOT avid bird watchers but fascinated and curious about the feathered residents in one's backyard, this book is enjoyable and easy reading. It has identified every bird commonly found in the backyard, explains theirs habits and reasons for behavior. I didn't want to put this book down. It really gave me insight to my feathered friends in our backyard. What fun to understand what they do and why!!!! I had no idea that one of my frequent birdhouse occupants builds "mock" nests all around the backyard not only to stake his area but to let the female choose the one she prefers. Highly recommend this book for those who enjoy sitting in their backyards, do gardening, listen to the birds sing, and watch them as they dart around and nest in the Spring!!!
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