Book Description
A biography of Olympic and Grand Prix show jumping rider Margie Goldstein Engle.
Customer Reviews:
Read the Chronicle instead.......2005-10-06
Mom, who is rightfully proud of her daughter, is a retired schoolteacher, and boy does it show. To say the book was written on a third grade reading level, which another reviewer has claimed, is completely accurate. The corny, quoted dialogue that supposedly takes place between mother and daughter reads like an elementary school play: "How did the grand prix go?" "Very well, thank you. I got first, second and fourth." "That's wonderful. How do you feel about the Olympic outcome?" This would be a delightful read for a preteen that aspires to be a top rider, but it's merit ends there. If you want to follow Margie's career, but a subscription to the Chronicle of the Horse instead.
Not for adults.......2005-04-20
This would be interesting reading for a young rider. I expected explanations and descriptions about how Margie achieved her successes. Instead, it is more like her mother's walk down Memory Lane. It might be fine for a young fan of Margie's, but it is not for a mature, serious rider. I also do not understand why the Kelso family review was repeated and included twice in averaging the rating.
A determined young woman.......2002-03-20
I have read "No Hurdle Too High" and thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought that the author by choosing to write it from a third person, objective point of view, as a parent, as opposed to Margie-Engle Goldstein's first person, subjective, point of view
was the author's prerogative. And by using this approach, she made the book intriguing and heart-warming. Either approach, if used would have satisfied some people and left others unhappy.
The book conveys a good sense of the difficulties (hurdles0 that Margie faced and conquered. The purpose of the book, I believe, was to learn not about the technicalities of Horse Jumping, but to tell Margie's story it more personal and less technical.
I found it very inspiring and recommend it strongly.
Herb
Delightful Diversion.......2002-03-19
This is one of those unforgetable stories. In this world of terrorists and unrest, we found it a Delightful Diversion. We laughted and cried tears of joy at Margie's antics and accomplishments.We thought the book was well written, and easy to read. We highly recomend it.
Delightful Diversion.......2002-03-19
This is one of those unforgetable stories. In this world of terrorists and unrest, we found it a Delightful Diversion. We laughted and cried tears of joy at Margie's antics and accomplishments.We thought the book was well written, and easy to read. We highly recomend it.
Amazon.com
In this collection of biographical and historical sketches drawn from an unfinished manuscript discovered two decades after his death, Will Durant celebrates historical figures whose examples demonstrate that humans can, "when sufficiently inspired, rise to levels of greatness with the gods themselves."
Durant (1885-1981), the principal author of The Story of Civilization, saw history as a branch of philosophy, and he peppered his stories of great historical actors and events with moral lessons and observed patterns ("One of the most regular sequences in history is that a period of pagan license is followed by an age of puritan restraint and moral discipline"). These brief lectures, touching on leaders and innovators, such as Buddha, Marcus Aurelius, Leonardo da Vinci, and Martin Luther, afford him plenty of opportunity to reflect on the meaning of the past and to offer models for his readers to study and emulate.
Like Durant's other work, this book has an old-fashioned air about it: it is Eurocentric to the core, and it makes almost no mention of women, who surely contributed to the rise of civilizations. Still, fans of Durant's brand of sweeping narrative history will enjoy having these final words from the master. --Gregory McNamee
Book Description
In the tradition of his own bestselling masterpieces The Story of Civilization and The Lessons of History, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Will Durant here traces the lives and ideas of those who have helped to define civilization, from its dawn to the beginning of the modern world.
Four years before his death, Will Durant began work on an abbreviated version of his highly acclaimed eleven-volume series, The Story of Civilization. The project was conceived as a series of audio lectures, but Durant soon realized that the dialogues could be developed into a book that would serve as a wonderfully readable introduction to the subject of history.
Durant completed twenty-one of a proposed twenty-three chapters before his death in 1981, at the age of ninety-six. Those chapters span thousands of years of human history -- from Confucius to Shakespeare, from the Roman Empire to the Reformation, finally ending in the eighteenth century. The manuscript was recently found by Will Durant scholar John Little -- twenty years after Durant finished it -- and its discovery is a major event, not only for lovers of his prose, but for students of history and philosophy the world over.
Heroes of History is a book of life-enhancing wisdom and optimism, complete with Durant's wit, knowledge, and unique ability to explain events and ideas in simple, exciting terms. It is the lessons of our heritage passed on for the edification and benefit of future generations -- a fitting legacy from America's most beloved historian and philosopher.
Will Durant's popularity as America's favorite teacher of history and philosophy remains undiminished by time. His books are accessible to readers of every kind, and his unique ability to compress complicated ideas and events into a few pages without ever "talking down" to the reader, enhanced by his memorable wit and a razor-sharp judgment about men and their motives, made all of his books huge bestsellers. Heroes of History carries on this tradition of making scholarship and philosophy understandable to the general reader, and making them good reading, as well.
At the dawn of a new millennium and the beginning of a new century, nothing could be more appropriate than this brilliant book that examines the meaning of human civilization and history and draws from the experience of the past the lessons we need to know to put the future into context and live in confidence, rather than fear and ignorance.
Will Durant's work is marked by his own special quality as a writer -- he is tough-minded, optimistic, courageous, and convinced that without a knowledge of the past there is no wisdom to guide us to the future. Heroes of History was his last word on the subject, and much of it has been aimed directly at the doubts and fears of people today. It is a major, and unexpected, literary and historical event.
This book is also available on audio tape and CD format, read by Will and Ariel Durant. If you would like more information on this and other products featuring Will Durant's life-enhancing philosophy, we encourage you to visit the web site at www.willdurant.com.
Download Description
"In the tradition of his own bestselling masterpieces The Story of Civilization and The Lessons of History, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Will Durant here traces the lives and ideas of those who have helped to define civilization, from its dawn to the beginning of the modern world. Four years before his death, Will Durant began work on an abbreviated version of his highly acclaimed eleven-volume series, The Story of Civilization. The project was conceived as a series of audio lectures, but Durant soon realized that the dialogues could be developed into a book that would serve as a wonderfully readable introduction to the subject of history. Durant completed twenty-one of a proposed twenty-three chapters before his death in 1981, at the age of ninety-six. Those chapters span thousands of years of human history -- from Confucius to Shakespeare, from the Roman Empire to the Reformation, finally ending in the eighteenth century. The manuscript was recently found by Will Durant scholar John Little -- twenty years after Durant finished it -- and its discovery is a major event, not only for lovers of his prose, but for students of history and philosophy the world over. Heroes of History is a book of life-enhancing wisdom and optimism, complete with Durant's wit, knowledge, and unique ability to explain events and ideas in simple, exciting terms. It is the lessons of our heritage passed on for the edification and benefit of future generations -- a fitting legacy from America's most beloved historian and philosopher.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent introduction to Will Durant.......2007-07-14
I have never read his acclaimed Story of Civilization series in its entirety. I have however glanced through them from time to time to look up information. The book entitled "Rosseau & Revolution" was instrumental for me when I wrote my final paper for my B.A. in History. I decided to pick this up because I was not yet ready to commit myself to the 11 volume set. I figured this was a good starting point to get an idea of whether or not I would enjoy the larger work.
What needs to be understood is that this is NOT a condensed version of the Story of Civilization. It does follow the time arc of the Story of Civilization. It has a completely different aim. This book focuses on the individuals of civilization. He starts off with the Eastern Philosophers such as in his words "the boy called Siddartha Gautama" and finishes with the great Shakespeare. Now, don't get me wrong, a book of this size can never do justice to the individuals written about here whether it is Virgil or Leonardo and so forth. But this book was not intended to be for anyone but the general reader. He paints a wonderful picture of the achievements of the various individuals he discusses. His love for history is abundantly clear in his writing.
The only thing that kept me from giving it a perfect 5 star rating is that the book is not finished, nor will it ever be. Durant was unable to finish the final 2 chapters before his death. Second, while his literary style is unparalleled among writers of history, the writing feels a bit more disjointed as the book moves towards the later chapters. I suspect he probably was planning to polish the writing a bit more until he ran out of time. But the overall quality of the information presented here does not lose its importance. It's more of a personal criticism on my part.
For anyone with an interest in world history or curiosity about Will Durant, this is a highly recommended book. There was no one who could paint such a vivid picture of history like Will could.
Must Read.......2007-04-12
Profound and thought-provoking. A really wonderful read, particularly for those who are well-read in the underlying topics he covers. Immersing yourself in his thought process is more important than accepting his conclusions.
Good, but not exactly what I though it was.......2006-05-27
When I was a boy I remember my father receiving the complete Story of Civilization series by Will Durant and his enthusiasm for them, and for the man. To my impressionable young self the books became tinged with a sense of awe and power until they seemed like religious icons. It was like we had a piece of the Shroud of Turin or something equivalent. In these books was....everything. The entire history of the world. That was so amazing. Yet even more amazing to my eight year-old mind was the fact that ONE man knew everything. And he wrote it down! How can one man know everything? The entire and complete history of the world? That was pretty impressive to my young self and it is still pretty impressive to my middle-aged self. I was a little young at 8 years old to tackle the Story of Civilization, and my dad wasn't too keen on me thumbing through his treasures, but I decided that someday I would read those books. I recalled that resolve a few months ago and decided to order the Story of Civilization from Amazon. I was disappointed to find that I can't get hardback versions right now, and I don't see how they could ever work as paperbacks, so I'll have to keep haunting garage sales and used bookstores for now.
I have always thought that I should someday like to write a book about heroes through history, those men and women who through their wisdom, compassion, character and their heroic actions or nature have influenced the world for the better. I was somewhat disappointed when I was looking for the History of Civilization hardbacks to discover that Will Durant had already written Heroes of History. Darn it. But I will probably never get around to it and I was sure Mr. Durant could do a better job anyway so I just ordered his version.
Apparently Mr. Durant made a number of audio essays in the seventies in a prescient anticipation of books on tape. These audio tapes were condensed lectures meant to inform, educate, and entertain the public and to be more accessible to the general public than the Story of Civilization books which are somewhat formidable and daunting to your average American and to my 8 year old self. Mr. Durant adapted those audio tapes later into what amounts to a very condensed and abridged version of his larger work. Essentially he cut the complete version of his Story of Civilization from what must be about 20,000 pages down to 300. That is this book. It is not what I thought it was though. I was hoping that he had picked what he considered the 100 most heroic figures in history and written their stories.
Despite this book not being what I thought it was, I did sit down and read most of it today. I am of mixed minds on this book. On the one hand the man is a genius, writes extremely well (particularly so since he was over ninety when he drafted this book), and he is easily readable, clear, and thought-provoking. I did not intend to read the whole book today, but I kind of just kept going, even when I didn't mean to do so, which is a testament both to his skill and the fact that his writing is interesting as well as informative.
On the other hand, you can't really condense the Story of Civilization to 300 pages and when you try you run the risk of having to leave out whole swathes of history and even critical information about the periods you do talk about. I understand the problem though. He is trying to teach as much as he can to someone in 300 pages before that someone loses interest and wanders away. The book is also a little choppy because the chapters are actually adapted from the audiotapes and there are segues which, while they may work fine in a fireside chat context, are more than a little jarring in book format.
So, in my humble opinion, Durant is a genius and a pleasure to read, even compellingly readable, but this book is not what I thought it was (that's assuredly my fault for not reading the description and just leaping to a conclusion from the title) and I am not sure how well this book actually works. I actually want to read his entire work and always have, and reading this kind of choppy overview just confirmed that desire even more. Durant is great, I am going to read the whole history (my dad didn't, hah!), and I am going to love it. But since I am going to do the whole thing I really don't need the condensed version which, through no real fault of Durant's, just doesn't work that well. There is just no way to put the whole history of the world in 300 pages, so you have to leave things out, and as soon as you do that people are going to start second-guessing you about your editorial decisions. For example, I can't figure out why 12th century troubadors are worthy of making the cut but Leonidas and the Byzantine and Ottoman empires do not.
My advice: buy the whole history not the condensed version. If you don't want to do the entire Story of Civilization with me then this is a fine and compelling introduction to Durant. Just be warned that it isn't really about heroes, and that at 300 pages you are going to miss out on a lot of history but what you do get is fascinating and very readable.
another volume from gram and grams.......2005-08-10
a wonderful non text book for young people to begin to realize that they aren't the firsts to experience so many things in the world and that history can repeat itself.
Improvements welcome.......2005-07-25
This book was a disappointment. He begins by stating that women had a controlling role in the domestication of man, a politically correct notion that belies the fact that women were treated as property for most of history. Durant also uses a lot of filler. He quotes at length from ancient texts, poetry and the bible. We can find these sources if we have a desire to read them. What we want from him is his interpretation. The book would be shorter but more readable if these passages were removed.
Book Description
Deeply researched, World as Laboratory tells a secret history that’s not really a secret. The fruits of human engineering are all around us: advertising, polls, focus groups, the ubiquitous habit of “spin” practiced by marketers and politicians. What Rebecca Lemov cleverly traces for the first time is how the absurd, the practical, and the dangerous experiments of the human engineers of the first half of the twentieth century left their laboratories to become our day-to-day reality.
Customer Reviews:
Psychology Beyond Skinner.......2007-02-06
I greatly enjoyed and appreciated Ms. Lemov's review of the evolution of behavioral psychology and the analysis of its weaknesses. As a student of B.F. Skinner at Harvard in the 1950s, I have had a lifelong interest in this subject.
First, Ms. Lemov exposes the basic risks and dangers of "behavioral engineering" and "control" in democratic societies. She also reveals the inadequate appreciation by behaviorists of the distinctions between the nature of humans and that of other animals. This failure was a fatal flaw in the behavioral concepts. Most significantly, if one accepts the concept of the need for "social engineering," the behaviorists never provided a persuasive set of social goals that should be attained by such methods. What is the point of social engineering and control with no clearcut ends in mind?
For anyone interested in the history of psychology, this book is a "must read."
James M Gregg,
Potomac, Maryland
On Mind Manipulators.......2007-02-04
This book tells the fascinating history of experiments to control human behavior and follows the careers of the brilliant and often idiosyncratic scientists who ran the labs and the experiments, beginning at the turn of the 20th Century with the Milgram experiments. These demonstrated that ordinary, normal people could be successfully ordered to shock and torture others on command. She also describes the CIA programs of interrogation and brainwashing that led inexorably to Abu Ghraib. This is compelling--and troubling--stuff, and it raises a lot of questions.
While the human engineers never quite managed to program their human subjects totally, they were at least partially successful. Now we have evolved to massive advertising campaigns that drive our economy, focus groups that help produce political spin, and manufactured divisive wedge issues that manipulate our voting patterns.
All of this suggests that we are susceptible to the kinds of human engineering Lemov so aptly describes. Indeed, the book made me wonder whether some of this human engineering has embedded itself in those corporate cultures where a zealous pursuit of profit makes it ok to market products that needlessly injure, sicken and kill (think unsafe cars and drugs), or to lie, cheat and steal (think Enron). This is one of the many crucial issues that Lemov illuminates.
5 stars for the subject matter - but only 3 for the content.......2006-07-25
Considering the incendiary nature of the topic (social control, brainwashing, forcible interrogations, chemical coercion) the euphemistic title of this book says much about how the content is treated. Mice, mazes and men - sounds harmless, no outrage there. Yet the history of how American behaviorists extrapolating from the techniques of B.F. Skinner (who oddly receives little mention) & Joseph Mengele (whose failed sleep-coma experiments were copied in the CIA's MK-ULTRA program) receives no mention at all.
Reading along through all the chapters, the actual "what can I take with me" information is very light, although the lengthy descriptions of many of the behaviorists' personal histories are more than sufficient. For all the talk about rat maze experiments and their importance, few are actually discussed in detail and fewer still are the facts actually learned from these.
In Part Three, "Files: Out Of The Laboratory" much is made of how -large- the files on human cultures collected at Yale were, and how -exhaustively- they were cataloged - but few examples are given of the data itself, who the data-gatherers were, and what protocols these data gatherers followed in their world travels, if anything.
And what practical techniques, exactly, did the modern beneficiaries of all this Cold-War experimenting (public relations, advertising, pollsters, marketing, government, the State Department) get out all of this? Entire books have been written on the techniques of persuasion used by each of these groups yet in "World As Laboratory" the reader walks away with very little in terms of concrete, practical modern-day examples.
The "thriller" part of the book, of course is Chapter 10's "The Impossible Experiment" documenting the CIA's brainwashing and drug experiments which rank among the most putrid of shames ever perpitrated upon American citizens by their own government. Yet, while related subjects such as Stanley Milgram's experiments are given great coverage, the equally important (and horrifying) Stanford Prison experiments are glossed over in just a couple paragraphs.
If you're wondering how Rebecca wraps this all up in her Conclusions, one need only refer to title of the book again - ultimately, the author is sympathetic, and even slightly admiring, of the scientific amoralists portrayed in the book. And although she tries to reassure the reader that attempts to create a Manchurian Candidate were unreliable and inconsistent at best, one can't help but feel that Rebecca is (mildly) rooting for the wrong team.
Lessons from Questionable Experiments.......2006-03-30
You want people to do your bidding; it's only natural. And governments, of course, would like other governments to do their bidding, but they'd like to have their own people do their bidding, too. How can this sort of influence best be strengthened? Well, perhaps it would be best to go to the people who study stimuli, responses, drives, and so on, to see what makes people tick. And if the researchers have a good idea of what influences people, then surely they are the ones to consult about actually doing the influencing. It has already been done, of course, and historian and anthropologist Rebecca Lemov has documented the history of such research and attempts at control in World as Laboratory: Mice, Mazes, and Men (Hill and Wang). It is an extraordinary story about very smart guys doing experiments, some of which were quite stupid and some which caused a great deal of suffering (to both animals and humans) to see how subjects could be made to learn the right way to behave. Lemov demonstrates that this was not some ivory tower effort at great remove, but a movement whose results are still with us.
The book starts with rat experiments. Regardless of how you feel about putting rats through such trials, the astonishing fact is that rats were so wonderfully controllable that the researchers assumed that if they just knew the right conditions to administer to humans, they could, as Lemov writes, "... explain the full range of human behavior and make it predictable and therefore controllable." Scientists were sure that if they could make rats do something, they could make humans do it, too. Then they could explain such phenomena as love and union organizing, looking at internal states in an objective, perhaps mathematical way. Some of the most benign experiments on humans were the Hawthorne experiments, which found that just paying experimental attention to humans helped their morale. Other experiments were less benign. Psychiatric patients got LSD or induced comas, without their permission or knowledge. Some got a recorded message like "You killed your mother" piped into their ears thousands of times. However, turning people into ciphers might be easy, but it also isn't very useful. Despite the interest and funding of such organizations as the CIA, researchers kept coming up against a very real problem in getting people to do what the researchers (or government) wanted them to do, or reveal what they wanted them to reveal: a real change in behavior does not happen without full and willing cooperation. There is one mention in the book of Abu Ghraib, but no reader will be able to avoid thinking of it frequently.
The bizarre experiments thus had a hopeful lesson. Brainwashing can be simply done, but it is useless simply to brainwash a person if you expect to control that person. You could create a vegetable, but that was useless; when researchers tried to instill, rather than erase, behavior, as one veteran of the CIA's MK-ULTRA program wrote, they failed eventually because "...the subject jerked himself back for some reason or the subject got amnesiac or catatonic." In all these grand plans for controlling people for society's good, no one could overcome the great obstacle that not only are people not rats, they are individuals, and no one plan is going to accomplish change for them all. Lemov shows that besides this failure, there is a legacy of such scientific effort: focus groups, consumer research, political polling. It isn't nearly as close to control as the scientists described here wanted to get, and let's be glad of that.
fascinating insight into American intellectual/psychological history.......2005-12-16
Although I have no exerptise in the history of "human engineering" or the evolution of American psychological thought, I was intrigued by the cover (I admit it!) and the subtitle "Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men."
"World as Laboratory" turned out to be a fascinating look into how scientists have tried, over the last several decades, to categorize and shape human behavior. It's a substantial book, but not so technical that it makes no sense to the layman.
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Social Justice, published by Crime and Social Justice Associates on March 22, 2006. The length of the article is 4270 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: The American culture of torture: a review essay.(World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men)(A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror)(Book review)
Author: Robert P. Weiss
Publication:
Social Justice (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 22, 2006
Publisher: Crime and Social Justice Associates
Volume: 33
Issue: 1
Page: 132(6)
Article Type: Book review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
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Bending behavior.(World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men)(Book review): An article from: American Scientist
Sarah E. Igo
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Multifunctional Landscapes: Monitoring, Diversity and Management (Advances in Ecological Sciences, 15)
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