Customer Reviews:
Good Lesson Resource.......2007-05-06
This was a good lesson resource for teaching Ellis Island. My students even made their own pictures after reading this book.
really pretty.......2003-08-31
It's a really pretty book. I really advise you to buy it. The images are both personal, unique, as well as intelligent.
Book Description
In Passage to Ararat, which received the National Book Award in 1976, Michael J. Arlen goes beyond the portrait of his father, the famous Anglo-Armenian novelist of the 1920s, that he created in Exiles to try to discover what his father had tried to forget: Armenia and what it meant to be an Armenian, a descendant of a proud people whom conquerors had for centuries tried to exterminate. But perhaps most affectingly, Arlen tells a story as large as a whole people yet as personal as the uneasy bond between a father and a son, offering a masterful account of the affirmation and pain of kinship.
Customer Reviews:
An extraordinary book of memoir and history.......2007-03-13
I read Passage to Ararat thirty years ago, and it continues to ring loud in my memory. Over the years I've given it to many friends as a present. The book is a memoir of Michael Arlen uncovering and discovering his Armenian heritage. It's intimate and personal, a window into the peculiar way history, individual memory and collective tragedy mix. I couldn't help but think of the Jewish and Palestinian experiences as I read it.
Getting to Know Me.......2006-07-22
In THE TEACHINGS OF DON JUAN, Carlos Castaneda takes forever to realize that what he is going to learn is not the pharmacopia of Yaqui Indians. We, the readers, get pretty darn fed up with his obtuse wonderings about "what the heck is going on here ?" Castaneda used this literary device to introduce what turned out to be a very long series of books about other ways of seeing the world. I felt somewhat the same about the style in PASSAGE TO ARARAT, though as far as honesty goes, I would put all my money on Arlen, rather than Castaneda. After finishing Arlen's short, but hard-hitting book, I still felt that he had somehow graded, planed, hammered, and sandpapered my emotions into accepting the transition from "I don't give a damn about the past. I didn't really love my father or understand him. I can't identify with Armenians." to feeling Armenian, to feeling outraged about the early 20th century genocide of "his" people. He wrote of this transition as a result of a trip he took to Soviet Armenia in the 1970s. I like how he wrote about Armenia and the people he met there. I even like how he wrote about Istanbul, which he visited afterwards. But I could hardly believe in that gradual transition. I still do feel that it is a literary device to make a "story" out of this work, and I feel that such a device wasn't necessary. I am not Armenian, but as a Jew I can feel pain when I think of genocide, the many other genocides that sit right in front of us----Native Americans, the Middle Passage, Cambodians, Tasmanians, Rwandans, Darfur---you can add your own. How can a man (a literary man who deals naturally in expressing feelings, ideas, longings, and the pain of the human soul) say that the genocide of Armenians meant little to him ? Maybe we don't want to confront our own past, OK, but do I have to be African to mourn the 800,000 dead Rwandans ? If I am not Cambodian, can I never feel shock and sadness at what was done by the Khmer Rouge ? Where are our American Indian brothers and sisters ?---I ask you in God's name.
Other than this comment, I can only say that this is a fine book about Armenia as it was in the 1970s. You get a lot of well-written, easily-digestible Armenian history, up to and including many pages on the genocide. How long is there going to be an argument about "whether it occurred or not ?" What, did a million people just up and commit suicide ? There is very little about the Soviet aspect of being in the Soviet Union, which since 1991 is beside the point now. I see there is an updated edition, which I did not have. It is also a fine book about changes of heart, even if I still do doubt it could have been that sequenced.
Brilliant.......2006-02-17
I think this book is magnificent.I love it.It really does give accurate historical information.
"Genocide"?.......2005-05-07
It just astonished me as how certain discursive formations can actually lead people to believe as the 'real' reality. It does not matter whether for an event to 'really happen' or not. What matters is that you hear it on a radio or read it on a newspaper or website or even talk about it at the water-cooler. Those who have had the chance to watch 'Wag the Dog' might get the idea of how such 'reality' is constructed.
On a more advanced level 'discursivity', a la Foucault, is a building block of a discourse in which certain linkages, here and their, add to what ordinary people believe on the street.
Now obviously Hitler was one of the worst things that happened during the 20th century. This is commonsense. But to add certain 'material' so as to advance another claim by building upon Hitler, is something that should be carefully approached, at least for people who at least visit and read stuff through Amazon.
If a chain in a series of discursive formations can be shown to be weak or invalid than it would be proven that that chain of a discourse is on shaky grounds, and that most of what is known about it is likely to be false.
Unfortunately we see certain 'material' is attached to certain claims so as to resemble the Holocaust. Let us revisit a single claim on part of those would like to exploit the events during the early 20th century. A reviewer, for instance, obviously bought one claim and thus knows it to be the 'truth'
Adolf Hitler: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
Now has anybody bothered to investigate it. No, of course. "It sounds like as if it is true, so why not believe it". Well fortunately there are still people who like investigating such stuff.
Read for example :
Heath W. Lowry
Washington, D.C.
Political Communication and Persuasion, Volume 3, Number 2 (1985)
Abstract This article traces the history of a purported Adolf Hitler quote which cites the perecent of the world's lack of reaction to the fate of Armenians during the First World War as a justification for his planned extermination of European Jewry in the course of the Second World War. By a detailed examination of the genesis of this quotation the author demonstrates that there is no historical basis for attributing such a statement to Hitler...
[...]
If one is serious about really getting into history, rather than believing simply what is out their in the popular press,
I would additionally suggest to take a tour of the documents of Ambassador Morgenthau. First let us not take any word for having a Godly truth 'Its ambassador so its gotta be true' mentality is ok if you're ok with it (respect of thought). But there are historical evidence that suggests that Morgenthau did not even know Ottoman scripture, and that this is proved throughout his letters when he attempts to translate 'words' and 'dates' of events. Do not hesitate to read...
[...]
For those who have CAREFULLY read what I have written so far, notice I am not either on one side of the argument between Armenian historians or historians of the Ottoman empire, but that I have just thrown out some thought provoking information so that one will at least ask some questions before believing what they read. Doubtless there will be those occasional pointless replies to this review, but again all I am saying is, think before you react. Now one could argue that I am saying is a postmodernist crituque and historical relativism. That would be false. I believe in historical analysis, as a scientific enterprise (and only the scientific version of it). But then again let us not forget that some American historians who were studying the case at hand were bombed by Armenians. Now if history is written by historians and that some historians (i.e. UCLA professor Stanford Shaw)are bullied so as not to investigate certain historical matters than, at least if you have a capacity to think critically than be suspicious about it. [...]
By the way absolutely nothing is mentioned about the equal ammount of civilian Turks that were slaugthered by Russian backed Armenian militia. Nor anything about the terrorism campaign of Armenians during the 1970's that left thousands of people dead and wounded. To say "denying genocide is a wrong thing" is one thing. But in doing so if one is denying the death of tens of thousands of innocent Turks, is called hypocrism and puts one in ethically shaky grounds.
The latest British governemeents acceptance that the "blue book", which Armenian claims are based upon, have been declared by the government itself to be a WW1 time propaganda material. Yes you heard it right!
Here's another eye opener: Often the claim is made there 1 million Armenians were murdered. What they do not say that the same material they indicate that a "genocide" happened says that
the ENTIRE Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire was 800 thousand (200 thousand difference!) MOREOVER Keep in mind that the Armenian diaspora, that builds its own desire to have a national identity, has a population of more than 9 million people across the world. HOW CAN this be??? Well thats how nationalism is formed: impossibile numbers, man on white horse, the evil "other" etc.... So this "genocide" attitude is more of identity building rather than real history.
Well I hope I contributed on an intellectual level and I hope 'thought thugs' would not misunderstand what I have suggested.
Coming of (middle) age.......2004-10-05
Michael Arlen takes a very novel approach to discovering his roots. He freely admits early on that he doesn't even like Armenians, although he himself is of Armenian descent. Arlen's father shielded him from the burdens that virtually all Armenians bare: that of the genocide/massacres of 1915. It is not until his father's death that Arlen begins to interact with the Armenian community and ultimately takes a trip to Soviet Armenia. He describes the country and the people in a detached manner and with a dry sense of humor. His research of Armenian history is rather academic at first. Ultimately he is affected by the great suffering of his people.
Arlen asks many questions that he cannot and does not answer. His references to certain Armenian qualities as "childlike" was offensive, and his attempt to examine the Armenian race using traditional psychological analysis, determining finally that Armenians are burdened with self-hate, had its limitations. But I do not view Passage to Ararat as a scholarly treatise. It is instead one man's journey to the land of his ancestors in order to come to grips with who he is and whether he should be proud of that.
Average customer rating:
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Passage to Ararat and Exiles
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000HZH8JE |
Average customer rating:
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Passage to Ararat: Exiles
Michael J. Arlen
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
 General
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
Asia
| History
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| Afghanistan
| Armenia
| Bangladesh
| Belarus
| Bhutan
| Brunei
| Cambodia
| Central Asia
| China
| Far East
| General
| Georgia
| Hong Kong
| India
| Indonesia
| Japan
| Korea
| Laos
| Malaysia
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ASIN: 0140063110 |
Amazon.com Reviews
How much do we humans enjoy our current status as the most intelligent beings on earth? Enough to try to stop our own inventions from surpassing us in smarts? If so, we'd better pull the plug right now, because if Ray Kurzweil is right we've only got until about 2020 before computers outpace the human brain in computational power. Kurzweil, artificial intelligence expert and author of The Age of Intelligent Machines, shows that technological evolution moves at an exponential pace. Further, he asserts, in a sort of swirling postulate, time speeds up as order increases, and vice versa. He calls this the "Law of Time and Chaos," and it means that although entropy is slowing the stream of time down for the universe overall, and thus vastly increasing the amount of time between major events, in the eddy of technological evolution the exact opposite is happening, and events will soon be coming faster and more furiously. This means that we'd better figure out how to deal with conscious machines as soon as possible--they'll soon not only be able to beat us at chess, but also likely demand civil rights, and might at last realize the very human dream of immortality.
The Age of Spiritual Machines is compelling and accessible, and not necessarily best read from front to back--it's less heavily historical if you jump around (Kurzweil encourages this). Much of the content of the book lays the groundwork to justify Kurzweil's timeline, providing an engaging primer on the philosophical and technological ideas behind the study of consciousness. Instead of being a gee-whiz futurist manifesto, Spiritual Machines reads like a history of the future, without too much science fiction dystopianism. Instead, Kurzweil shows us the logical outgrowths of current trends, with all their attendant possibilities. This is the book we'll turn to when our computers first say "hello." --Therese Littleton
Book Description
The national bestseller by the "ultimate thinking machine" (Forbes) whose predictions for the future are startling, provocative--and closer to fruition than you think.
Ray Kurzweil is the inventor of the most innovative and compelling technology of our era, an international authority on artificial intelligence, and one of our greatest living visionaries. Now he offers a framework for envisioning the twenty-first century--an age in which the marriage of human sensitivity and artificial intelligence fundamentally alters and improves the way we live. Kurzweil's prophetic blueprint for the future takes us through the advances that inexorably result in computers exceeding the memory capacity and computational ability of the human brain by the year 2020 (with human-level capabilities not far behind); in relationships with automated personalities who will be our teachers, companions, and lovers; and in information fed straight into our brains along direct neural pathways. Optimistic and challenging, thought-provoking and engaging, The Age of Spiritual Machines is the ultimate guide on our road into the next century.
"The Age of Spiritual Machines will blow your mind. . . . Kurzweil lays out a scenario that might seem like science fiction if it weren't coming from a proven entrepreneur."-- San Francisco Chronicle
The Age of Spiritual Machines appeared on national bestseller lists, including the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle
Kurzweil's first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, won the Association of American Publishers Award for the Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990
Customer Reviews:
optimestic and yet not too far fetched.......2007-06-08
Ray did good inventions and he writes good books too.
In this book, Ray describes an evolution path that will lead us ( human on earth) to
a 'digitalized' (not necessarily completely digital) world where humanity transcend
the universe. Too bold? too big? too crazy? Maybe not. However, I do think he is a bit over optimestic on the time line. We could possibly change our descedant greatly in the next 100 years through our understanding about gene, protein, and cellular interaction. They could be immortal (in general, and live as long as the univese could provide humanily livable space) Nano technology could spring into life (puns intended) in the next 100 years, as for how much change will be made, it's hard to precisely predict but it will definitely fundamentally change human civilization and culture. As for computational intelligence matches human's will happen in mid 2020,
I think it is a bit early, perhaps, add another five years but who knows, it might just happen that way.
Is Ray really far fetched? no, but probably optimestic and I don't mean the overly one but hey... that is part of the reason why scientist keeps doing what they are doing and create a good impact to the world.
Now, whoever has read this perhaps should start reading "The singularity is near".
A Book that everybody should read........2007-05-15
Since I get into contact with the Vinge's singularity concept I developed a very great attraction for the matter.
Ray Kurzweil explains it in a easy, not alarming and optimistic way.
After reading The Age of Spiritual Machines and his later book the Singularity is near I can not understand how somebody can live without knowing about this potential threat and at the same time potential solution to mankind problems.
A half-baked masturbatatory science fiction sourcebook.......2006-11-11
I had this book recomended to me (repeatedly) over the course of my reading of Radical Evolution. I was underimpressed by Ray's endless wanking at the idea of replacing human interaction with computer interaction, and the substition of the mortal coil with the superiortity of the T-800. If you are non-proficient with the subtlety of human mechinations, then the promise of escape via virtual reality, nano-orgasm machines, and techno-immortality can seem like the stuff of dreams. As a list of "bold predictions" this sketchbook of sci-fi cliches lacks the hard science to suggest the wildly optomistic timelines the author suggests.
As an artifact from the heady, euphoric days before the dot com burst, one can see how this book was published, and subsequently purchased by a great many people. By the time the author was defending previousely made statements about the actualization of his earlier predictions, I saw a pattern of half-truths that paints a techno-eutopia which here, in 2006, hardly exists in the labs of MIT, let alone for purchase as Best Buy, as the author so desperately hopes for.
This book summarizes a decade's worth of Popular Science articles (that decade being the 1990's) and the most enticing fantasies of the transhumanists, but is not actually fun to read. The dialogues with "Molly," the author's internal dialouge about the future of the toys he wishes will save him, borders on embarrassing.
There are a dozen books about exactly these subjects, which should be read first.
Awesome, megalomaniacal, and fantastic........2006-10-29
Ray Kurzweil is my best writer. I love his books. He writes in a clear way and he is really persuasive. This book is the best book I have read about the future of artificial intelligence. It teaches you so many interesting topics on computational neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience. This book has been written in 1999 and some of its first predictions are about to become true in 2006. I believe in all of the Kurzweil's theories because I am writing and programming my undergraduate thesis on computational neuroscience. I am sure you will enjoy the book. It is worth the price!
Judge By The Evidence.......2006-08-11
I read SINGULARITY before SPIRITUAL which, of course, is exactly the wrong order. In the time since this book was published he has had an opportunity (in SINGULARITY) to reflect, confirm and gloat if you will. Unlike Drake, who promised we would receive confirmation of extraterrestrial life by the year 2000, Kurzweil is amazingly accurate. He forecast an extremely short discovery period for the Human Genome (confounding the "experts" who predicted 100s of years). He stated that Big Blue would defeat a human - this after a devestating defeat. He correctly predicted the exponential rate of computer power and all that this implies for our future.
When he says "spiritual" - a word I am uncomfortable with - he is not assigning theological or mystical characteristics. More accurately he is describing a "human" machine, a machine with its philosophical underpinnings as human but yet it is more than human. The Age of Human Machines would be a more apt title. The book is not straight forward (perhaps by design) making the reader browse, go back, skip, etc.
Many readers take their eye off the mark and get stuck in local or current events - starvation in Africa, war in the Mideast, ethnic cleansing, ecology, global warming, etc. Yet none of these has had any effect on the rate of the acquisition of knowledge. We have reached a point where progress is almost self-sustaining - the more we discover, the more we know how much we don't know. Like a boulder rolling down a hill, the rush to research, experiment and design shows no sign of slowing. I was less than impressed with the discussion about consciousness and the future of the universe. Does a machine that is aware that it is learning "conscious"? Is consciousness simply a function of having enought nodes operating in parallel? If spiritual machines come to fruition history will veer into new directions we cannot conceive.
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Preserving Different Pasts: The American National Monuments
Hal Rothman
Manufacturer: University of Illinois Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
General
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Civil Procedure
| Procedures & Litigation
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Environmental & Natural Resources Law
| Law
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Labor & Employment
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ASIN: 0252015487 |
Customer Reviews:
Competent if unexciting........2005-02-13
As much a history of the Antiquities Act of 1906 as the national monuments themselves, Preserving Different Pasts is overly concerned with turf battles, especially those of Frank Pinkley (1881-1940), superintendent of the southwestern national monuments. The book does not attempt even an overview of the individual monuments, which are a grab bag of smaller NPS sites both natural and historical. The research is thorough and the writing is workmanlike if unexciting.
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