Book Description
As a young girl in a working-class neighborhood of Sydney, Australia, Geraldine Brooks longed to discover the places where history happens and culture comes from, so she enlisted pen pals who offered her a window on adolescence in the Middle East, Europe, and America. Twenty years later Brooks, an award-winning foreign correspondent, embarked on a human treasure hunt to find her pen friends. She found men and women whose lives had been shaped by war and hatred, by fame and notoriety, and by the ravages of mental illness. Intimate, moving, and often humorous, Foreign Correspondence speaks to the unquiet heart of every girl who has ever yearned to become a woman of the world.
Amazon.com
The leap between dreamy child living in a provincial Australian neighborhood and journalist hopscotching through war zones is massive. In Foreign Correspondence, Geraldine Brooks (Nine Parts of Desire) unravels the rope that pulled and tugged her toward adventure and away from "a very small world" where her family had no car and had never boarded a plane or placed an international phone call. "I'd never imagined myself as someone whose packing list would include a chador, much less a bulletproof vest," she says. Preserved in the cellar of her parents' home in Sydney were letters Brooks had received as a teenager from several international pen pals, around whom she spun a romantic view of the world. Wondering about the reality of their lives and the progression of her own, she tracks them down in France, Japan, the Middle East, and New York. En route, Brooks delivers a wonderful meditation on childhood and adolescence lashed with rich details and quirky humor. Speaking of a current pen pal, she notes: "Raed, from the West Bank, stoned my car in 1987; now he writes to tell me how he's faring in college."
Customer Reviews:
The Country I Wanted to know........2005-09-18
Geraldine Brooks has written a book that I can empathise with. I think of how I might have had that life in Australia had my parents not returned to England in the 1930's. I wanted, and still do, very much to talk to the author and ask her questions as she is such a good writer with a warm personality.
Not as wonderful as her other books.......2002-11-21
I have read several of Brooks' books (both her non-fiction and fiction) and I was excited to rec'e and read Foreign Correspondance. Unfortunately, I was deeply disappointed.
The book has an outstanding premise---as a child growing up in Australia during the 1960s, Brooks was eager to experience the outside world. An avid letter writer, she found pen-pals in the U.S., Israel and France. As an adult, Brooks set off to meet and re-discover these people. So far so good. But the book peters out---with the exception of the American pen-pal (to whom she was closest), the characters lack enough detail to be interesting.
Her meeting with her French pen-pal was especially disappointing. This was a girl who chose to remain in her native village (while Brooks became a world-traveler and global correspondant). I hoped for more insights and more discussion of the contrast and why they chose such radically different paths---despite coming from somewhat similar backgrounds (Brooks saw herself as living in a giant provincial village---the village of Australia). But there was little discussion and the meeting simply sounded painful. Her trip to Israel to meet her non-Jewish Israeli pen-pal would also have benefitted from a deeper discussion about one's choices and opportunities (there was some discussion of this but I wanted to know more).
Had I not read Brooks' other books, I probably would have thought this was a fairly good book. But I know she can write such a better book!
Great one for book clubs!.......2002-08-14
I bought this as an "airplane read" but couldn't put it down. Geraldine Brooks has done us a great favor by not only illuminating the process of finding one's long lost penpals, but also by educating many folks about Australia in the process. It's fascinating to see her perceptions of the world, and particularly America, based on the letters that come in her mailbox each month.
While I read this one on my own, I have since leant this book to several friends and we've engaged in some interesting discussions about our own penpal experiences, so I recommend it for book clubs.
A quest to discover the world as well as discover herself.......2001-09-17
Australian born Geraldine Brooks spent many years as a foreign correspondent covering the Middle East. I loved her book, "Nine Parts of Desire" which was about Muslim women, and I have followed her life somewhat as she is often mentioned by her husband, Tony Horwitz, in his books "Confederates in the Attic", "Baghdad Without a Map," and "One for the Road." I find her an excellent reporter and in this memoir, "Foreign Correspondence," she turns the spotlight on herself.
As a child growing up in a lower middle class neighborhood on a street actually called "Bland Street", she yearned for a larger world. And so she developed pen pals. There was a girl from New Jersey, another one from France, and even one from an upper class neighborhood just a few towns away. And then there were two Israeli boys, one an Arab and one a Jew. As an adult, she found these old letters in her father's basement and, now more than twenty years later, she decided to look up each of these people. What follows is the result of her quest and some wonderful insights into world events from a personal one-on-one perspective. It was fascinating.
As a teenager in the early seventies she was aware of the new consciousness developing, even reaching her in her protective Catholic school. She had an active imagination and the gift of using words well. It's not surprising that she developed pen pals and that they influenced her life so much. Her gift of words certainly reached me too. I shared her sense of wonder and enthusiasm as she looked forward to each letter. I felt her straining to break the bonds of her loving but restrictive world. I felt her hopes and dreams and frustrations. And then, later, I shared her discoveries as she searched out the people who had meant so much to her early life. She writes with a clear voice, painting a picture with details, taking me on her quest to discover the world and eventually to discover herself. The book is short, a mere 210 pages but she sure does pack a lot into it. It's a wonderful read. Highly recommended.
Great book.......2000-08-28
I read this book in one day - it is beautifully, intelligently written with well developed characters and a true story that reads like fiction. It is a rare gem of literature that provides insight into the dreams of a young girl that many people can identify with - male or female. I have read a lot of books lately, but this was one of the finest books I've come across in a while.
Book Description
Neither Christopher Columbus, nor his contemporaries, believed the earth was flat. Yet this curious illusion persists today, firmly established with the help of the media, textbooks, teachers--even noted historians. Inventing the Flat Earth is Jeffrey Burton Russell's attempt to set the record straight. He begins with a discussion of geographical knowledge in the Middle Ages, examining what Columbus and his contemporaries actually did believe, and then moves to a look at how the error was first propagated in the 1820s and 1830s--including how noted writers Washington Irving and Antoinne-Jean Letronne were among those responsible. He shows how later day historians followed these original mistakes, and how this "snowball effect" grew to outrageous proportions in the late nineteenth century, when Christians opposed to Darwinism were labelled as similar to Medieval Christians who (allegedly) thought the earth was flat. But perhaps the most intriguing focus of the book is the reason why we allow this error to persist. Do we prefer to languish in a comfortable and familiar error rather than exert the effort necessary to discover the truth? This uncomfortable question is engagingly answered, and includes a discussion about the implications of this for historical knowledge and scholarly honesty.
Customer Reviews:
Fine Book, but with a few errors.......2006-02-10
Russell convincingly argues almost all of the leading Christian intellectuals have believed the Earth to be a sphere. However, I cannot give the book five stars because there were a few rather serious factual errors in the book. For example, on page 13, Russell writes "The astronomers reviving Proltemy's cosmology in the fifteenth century created a more complex system of spheres modified by smaller spheres called epicycles and deferents. " Actually, as some of Russell's own references (e.g. his reference 69, Thomas Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution) would have informed him, the epicycles and deferents were part of Prolemy's own system; they were not added by the 15th century astronomers. Further, epicycles and deferents were CIRCLES, not spheres. A more serious error is on page 21: "But unlike some modern Christians, few of them [the Church Fathers, St. Augustine being singled out in the preceding sentence but one] took the Bible as a guide to scientific truth." St. Augustine certainity took the Bible as a guide to scientific truth. As an example, see Russell's own reference 62, "City of God, Book 16 Chapter 9. St. Augustine says that there cannot be people living on the other side of the Earth (the Antipodes), on the grounds that the Bible says all humans are descended from a single male-female pair (Adam and Eve) and no human could possibly have travelled from where Adam and Eve originated to the Antipodes. (on page 20 Russell himself summarizes this part of St. Augustine's argument.) But the question of whether all humans have a monogenetic or a polygenetic origin is surely a scientific question. Finally, I take strong issue with Russell's claim that "... historians and philosphers [have undercut] the reductionist assumption that science [is] the only way to truth ...(p. 74)" They have done no such thing. Science IS the only way to truth. Recent historians and philosophers indeed THINK they have undercut reductionism, but a study of their arguments show only that they have failed to understand the actual relationship between classical and modern physics.
In spite of these errors, I would still recommend reading Russell's book. Until reading it myself, I had mistakenly thought that St. Augustine was a Flat Earther. Upon going to the passage in City of God cited above in this review, I realized that I had misinterpreted this passage in St. Augustine, who in fact was neutral on the question of sphericality. Thank you, Professor Russell, for correcting MY error.
Great book - even OT bible quotes say "globe" or "circle" to describe earth.......2005-12-16
I can only imagine staring up at the sky and watching the moon seeing it's shape obviously round and globular, now believing the earth wasn't flat would not be a hard sell.
Bottom line- not everybody thought the earth was flat. Funny though, even today's top scientists and weathermen still insist that the sun rises and sets.
Isaiah 40:22
A good introduction to the history of geography.......2005-08-04
Russel has written an excellent introduction to the history of the perception of the sphericity of earth. As most historians of medieval thought already know and agree upon, the view of the sphericity of earth was more or less common knowledge among the learned people of the middle ages (and for the reviewer who points to the Hereford mappae mundi as "proof" of otherwise, he can't have read Russels book very thoroughly - the Hereford map, a wonderful work of art, is a classical T-O mappae mundi, a map meant for religious use, not navigation. The stupidity of such statements would be similar to believe that the Rand McNally 2005 US Road Atlas shows that modern americans believe that there are no other continents because it doesn't show them in this, also very flat, map).
Some aspects of the book are lacking, though. Russel goes so much into the minority beliefs of Cosmas and Lactantius that these two atypical writers occupy more space in his book than the vast majority of medieval and ancient writers who took the sphericity of the earth for granted from their observations and corpus of learning. Also, he doesn't really discuss why modern people (post-1900) haven't revised the popular view - his hypothesis that the progressivist worldview that predominates today makes people WANT to believe medieval academics to be stupid because it fits the idea of constant development is probably valid, but he does not show this sufficiently.
On the other hand, his bibliography and source listings are excellent, and are the main reasons I had for buying his book.
While I really do not profess to know Russels' religious views - he might certainly be a christian apologist - this does not matter. Letting a foolish contrafactual myth stand in the face of all evidence in textbooks and the popular mind has little to do with apologism and more to do with correcting the prejudices of the modern age.
In the end, I'd like to quote a little tidbit from the Norse Middle ages Russel probably does not know of. The "King's Mirror", a secular book written for the education of younger sons of norwegian nobility of the 13th century, has the following to say on the shape of the earth:
"Take a burning candle and put it in a big room. Then suspend an apple from the roof near to the flame - so near the apple becomes hot. Then, it will almost put in shadow the one half of the room or even more. But if you hang it by the wall, it does not warm up, and the candle light the entire room, and the shadow of the apple on the wall is barely the size of the apple itself.
Now you must know from this that the earth's sphere is like a ball, and does not at all places come as close to the sun as others. Where the rounded part of it comes closer to the sun's path, it will be hottest. And in some of the lands that lie directly against its beams, one cannot live"
While this quote certainly shows that norwegian high medieval nobility had some incorrect ideas of the movement of the sun and the earth (as elsewhere, due to their lack of observational instruments), it cannot be disputed that they agreed that the world was a sphere.
Odd tidbits in Dave Bills review.......2005-03-30
Imagine my surprise when one of my heroes, Jeffrey
Burton Russell, was savaged in an ostensibly erudite
review by Dave Bills (April 4, 2002). At first, he
seemed to know what he was talking about.
Then I noticed the little signs of poor scholarship:
1. Misspelling Russell's last name both times he used it.
2. Referring to Russell as a theologian, not a historian,
when Amazon itself describes him as a Professor of
History at the University of California, Santa Barbara,
something a bit of Googling could easily confirm.
Speaking of Googling, that was my next step: Rather than
wade through tons of stuff on St. Cyril or St. Boniface,
I Googled the more obscure Cecco d'Ascoli. Ah! Only 802
hits! Won't take long!
And it didn't. I stopped after just two, Columbia
Encyclopedia and some Brit who has a pretty sensible
Faith and Reason website.
The encyclopedia's entire entry showed me that Dave Bills'
review is not to be trusted:
"1269?-1327, Italian astrologer, mathematician, poet, and physician, whose real name was Francesco degli Stabili, b. Ascoli. A teacher of astrology at several institutions in Italy, he was professor of mathematics and astrology at the Univ. of Bologna (1322-24). He was denounced as heretical largely because, in defending astrology against Dante's attack on it in the Divine Comedy, Cecco himself had accused the great poet of heresy; he was burned at the stake. His chief work was L'acerba, an allegorical didactic poem of encyclopedic range."
Then I read this from James Hannam, the aforementioned Brit.,
in a larger piece taking Andrew Dickson White to task:
"In chapter 2, White informs us "In 1327 Cecco d'Ascoli, noted as an astronomer, was for this [the doctrine of antipodes] and other results of thought, which brought him under suspicion of sorcery, driven from his professorship at Bologna and burned alive at Florence." Cecco D'Ascoli was indeed burnt at the stake in 1327 in Florence. He is the only natural philosopher in the entire Middle Ages to pay this penalty and was executed for breaking parole after a previous trial when he had been convicted of heresy for, apparently, claiming Jesus Christ was subject to the stars. This is not enough for White who claims, entirely without foundation, that Cecco met his fate partly for the scientific view that the antipodes were inhabited as well as dishonestly calling him an `astronomer' rather than an `astrologer' to strengthen his scientific credentials."
Now while I encourage everyone to read White's "Fiat Money
Inflation in France" (available via Amazon), I have found White
much less trustworthy when writing on religious history than
on economic history.
And it seems Dave Bills shares with White an extreme anti-
Christian bias and he fails to fight the bias strongly enough
to present us Amazon readers with truth.
I hope I have fought my pro-Christian bias sufficiently so that
the information above will stand the scrutiny of my fellow
Amazon.com users.
A Well-Argued, but False, Position.......2004-07-30
In less than 80 pages, the author - who taught history and religious studies at many US universities - presents a readable and well-argued case that the consensus in the Middle Ages was that the Earth was round, not flat.
However, I do not buy the package. The author agrees there were, from Antiquity to the Renaissance, authors who argued for both views. He then tries systematically to overstate the influence of the round earthers, and likewise understate that of the flat earthers. Add the occasional small misrepresentation - St Augustine, for example did not commit himself one way or the other. In my opinion, the author's concludes as he does only because his thumb is firmly pressed down on one side of the balance.
But argument is unnecessary, because we can see what the Mediaeval Church thought the earth looked like, right here:
http://www.herefordwebpages.co.uk/mapmundi.shtml. And if you visit Hereford Cathedral, as I have done, you can see the original for yourselves. So whom do I believe, Professor Russell or my own eyes?
Customer Reviews:
Stats. .......2007-01-10
This book was hard to understand. It was in good condition for being used. I think this is a useful tool for anyone wanting to learn statistics.
Statistics.......2005-10-04
I liked the quick shipment of the book. I had no problems at all with it. The only thing that was a shock was that I recieved the teachers edition rather than the student edition, but there really is not much difference between them.
Product Description
Description
For algebra-based Introductory Statistics Courses.
This very popular text is written to promote student success while maintaining the statistical integrity of the course. The author draws on his teaching experience and background in statistics and mathematics to achieve this balance. Three fundamental objectives motivate this text: (1) to generate and maintain student interest, thereby promoting student success and confidence; (2) to provide extensive and effective opportunity for student practice; (3) Allowing for flexibility of teaching styles.
Product Description
13 CDs covering data collection, organizing and summarizing data, numerically summarizing data, describing the relation between two variables, probability, discrete probability distributions, normal probability distribution , confidence intervals about a single parameter, hpypothesis testing, inferences on two samples, chi-square procedures, inference on the least-squares regression model; ANOVA, and nonparametric statistics.
Average customer rating:
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Statistics: Informed Decisions Using Data - Student Solutions Manual
III Michael Sullivan
Manufacturer: Prentice-Hall
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The Suffering Gene: Environmental Threats to Our Health
Roy Burdon
Manufacturer: Zed Books
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ASIN: 1842772848 |
Book Description
This book explains how our genes work, and how they are adversely impacted by a huge range of factors in modern society in both the countries of the North and the South. These include toxic industrial and agricultural chemicals, excessive sunlight (as a result of the hole in the ozone layer), nuclear radiation from power plants and the military, as well as other forms of radiation (mobile phones, electricity transmission systems and the like), food contaminants, atmospheric pollutants (including things like tobacco smoke and car exhaust fumes), and the potential impact of genetic engineering.
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Suffering Gene: Environmental Threats to Our Health
Roy H. Burdon
Manufacturer: McGill-Queen's University Press
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This digital document is an article from Environments, published by Thomson Gale on August 1, 2005. The length of the article is 710 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 Suffering Gene: Environmental Threats to our Health.(Book Review)
Author: Genevieve Moreau
Publication:
Environments (Magazine/Journal)
Date: August 1, 2005
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 33
Issue: 1
Page: 115(2)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
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The Suffering Gene: Environmental Threats to Our Health
R. H. Burdon
Manufacturer: McGill-Queen's University Press
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ASIN: 0864866275 |
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