Let Me Finish

Book Description

Here, at home inside a Jane Austen novel, I passed my college weekends, carving Sunday roasts and getting the station wagon serviced, explaining the double finesse in bridge, lacing up ice skates, sharing by radio the fall of Paris and the night bombings of London . . . having fallen not just in love but into a family. -from LET ME FINISH

Roger Angell has developed a broad and devoted following through his writings in the New Yorker and as the leading baseball writer of our time. Turning to more personal matters, he has produced a fresh form of auto-biography in this unsentimental look at his early days as a boy growing up in Prohibition-era New York with a remarkable father; a mother, Katherine White, who was a founding editor of the New Yorker; and a famous stepfather, the writer E. B. White. Intimate, funny, and moving portraits form the book's centerpiece as Angell remembers his eccentric relatives, his childhood love of baseball in the time of Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio, and his vivid colleagues during his long career as a New Yorker writer and editor. Infused with both pleasure and sadness, Angell's disarming memoir also evokes a sensuous attachment to life's better moments.

Customer Reviews:

The Perfect Bedside Companion.......2007-06-03

I keep this book ever at my bedside table and I give it five stars because of the incalculable help it's been to me nightly. At the first hint of insomnia's midnight itch, I simply reach for this unfailing bromide and "Poof," am whisked so gently and perfectly into the nether realms of unconscious bliss that I awaken wonderfully refreshed with scarce a moment's recall of the night in question. I highly recommend it. Try it, gentle insomniac, and you too can have flights of Angells sing thee to thy rest.

If Scott Fitzgerald Had Worked At The New Yorker.......2006-11-18

Don't be fooled by Roger Angell's encyclopedic knowledge of major-league baseball into thinking he isn't in the same league as F.Scott Fitzgerald and John O'Hara. Because he is....Roger Angell was keeping score of the American Scene all the while he was watching the "greats" of mid-20th century American literature make their indubitable marks. Now, his chronicler's eye catches some very poignant truths--"hard lines"--in these tranquil reflections about times and places when engaging people wanted to be counted as both cosmopolitan and caring human beings--before "caring" had become, somehow, passe. Roger Angell cared to get it right--and his assemblage of pieces from his New Yorker's reminiscences, titled "Let Me Finish," will stand the test of time for a very long time, indeed. His wistfulness is poet's testament to the "grand illusions" of this fleeting life which he has so masterfully caught in his own "forever amber."

Good Book.......2006-10-29

This book won't change your life or give you insight but I don't hink that was the intention of the author.
It is a very comfortable book.
Mr. Angell vividly describes his life as a writer and his life in general.
I didn't give it four stars because "To Kill a Mockingbird" is the apex. All else pales.

A Pleasure to Read.......2006-09-01

I look forward to reading this again and again to enjoy Angell's flowing and immaculate use of language and to visit again and again with his friends and family.

Humor, Sadness, Excellent Little Stories.......2006-06-29

This biography of a sort is really a series of stories that reflect important parts of his life. Being a supurb writer his little vignettes are a mixture of humor, history, personal views, and whatever he wants to say. I think I liked the story of his Army Air Corp life during World War II the best. The idea of the Army losing his paperwork so that effectively he didn't exist sort of told me that the Army hadn't changed when I went in a generation later.

Angell is best known as a baseball writer and there's some baseball here, but there's a lot more. As he says, he didn't intend to write a biography, he just wrote a few stories about things in his past. Later on he looked at them and here was a book.

It's delightful reading. Not too serious, and he's not going to tell you 'I was born...' Born to well off, if not rich parents, he sums up his life: 'I've had a life sheltered by privilege, and engrossing work, and shot through with good luck.' That almost sums up the book as well.

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Let Me Finish
Udo Grashoff
Manufacturer: Headline Review
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Binding: Paperback

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You Asked Me What Happened to Girls Like Me/We Stole to Hold Our Men/Let Me Finish My Hate List (Front Page Detective)

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You Asked Me What Happened to Girls Like Me/We Stole to Hold Our Men/Let Me Finish My Hate List (Front Page Detective)
Dell Magazines
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000X4X9WY

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Vintage Detective Magazine from November of 1956.

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You Won't Let Me Finish
Joan Fleming
Manufacturer: G.P. Putnam's Sons
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000HMMMO8

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You won't let me finish
Joan Fleming
Manufacturer: Collins [for] the Crime Club
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Binding: Unknown Binding

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ASIN: 0002319519

The New Yorker Festival - Roger Angell and Ian Frazier: Writing Your Own Life

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The New Yorker Festival - Roger Angell and Ian Frazier: Writing Your Own Life
Frazier, Roger, Ian Angell
Manufacturer: audible.com
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio Download
ASIN: B000BU28V8

The New Yorker Festival: Master Class in Editing

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The New Yorker Festival: Master Class in Editing
Wickenden, Zalewski, Roger, Dorothy, Daniel Angell
Manufacturer: audible.com
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ASIN: B000K2VLAG

Perfect Pitch.(Let Me Finish )(Book review): An article from: Commonweal

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Perfect Pitch.(Let Me Finish )(Book review): An article from: Commonweal
Charles R. Morris
Manufacturer: Thomson Gale
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This digital document is an article from Commonweal, published by Thomson Gale on May 5, 2006. The length of the article is 1045 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: Perfect Pitch.(Let Me Finish )(Book review)
Author: Charles R. Morris
Publication: Commonweal (Magazine/Journal)
Date: May 5, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 133 Issue: 9 Page: 22(2)

Article Type: Book review

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Thalia Book Club: Let Me Finish by Roger Angell

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Thalia Book Club: Let Me Finish by Roger Angell
Roger Angell
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ASIN: B000J4S4JQ

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Let Me Finish
Udo Grashoff
Manufacturer: NY
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000N6ML58

Amazon.com

As the old saying goes, hindsight is always 20-20; people looking back on the Holocaust and the events leading up to it often wonder why the Jews didn't flee Nazi Germany or why they put up with the prejudice and degradation inflicted upon them by the Nazis. From our perspective, 50 years later, it seems almost incredible that the victims of genocide didn't see it coming and made little effort to escape. But as Marion Kaplan makes clear in her powerful book, Between Dignity and Despair, the choices were much murkier at the time. The Jews didn't leave because Germany was their home and had been for centuries; like everyone else, they had responsibilities and commitments to family, jobs and communities that kept them there. Nor, in the early days of Hitler's regime, could the Jews of Nazi Germany have foreseen the terrible humiliations they would suffer or imagined the horror of the Final Solution.

Kaplan's sensitive narrative, supported by a host of letters, memoirs, and interviews, aims to give a balanced account of German Jewry under the Nazi regime. She convincingly shows how it was German society (indoctrinated by Nazi propaganda) that dealt the first crippling moral blow to the Jewish psyche, before any laws dictated their actions. The Jews succumbed to daily humiliations, ranging from little boys being maliciously teased for being circumcised to older Jews being treated like social pariah's by one-time friends who fell easily into the mindset of racial enmity. Hatred breeds hatred; slowly the German populace strangled the pride of the Jews, creating resentment, distrust and disharmony. Kaplan conveys a poignant, yet subtle message: the fundamental de-facto abandonment of decency and moral civility by the gentile Germans was the catalyst which allowed Nazi leadership to proceed with more aggressive policies that ultimately led to the Holocaust.

Book Description

Between Dignity and Despair draws on the extraordinary memoirs, diaries, interviews, and letters of Jewish women and men to give us the first intimate portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany. Kaplan tells the story of Jews in Germany not from the hindsight of the Holocaust, nor by focusing on the persecutors, but from the bewildered and ambiguous perspective of Jews trying to navigate their daily lives in a world that was becoming more and more insane. Answering the charge that Jews should have left earlier, Kaplan shows that far from seeming inevitable, the Holocaust was impossible to foresee precisely because Nazi repression occurred in irregular and unpredictable steps until the massive violence of Novemer 1938. Then the flow of emigration turned into a torrent, only to be stopped by the war. By that time Jews had been evicted from their homes, robbed of their possessions and their livelihoods, shunned by their former friends, persecuted by their neighbors, and driven into forced labor. For those trapped in Germany, mere survival became a nightmare of increasingly desperate options. Many took their own lives to retain at least some dignity in death; others went underground and endured the fears of nightly bombings and the even greater terror of being discovered by the Nazis. Most were murdered. All were pressed to the limit of human endurance and human loneliness. Focusing on the fate of families and particularly women's experience, Between Dignity and Despair takes us into the neighborhoods, into the kitchens, shops, and schools, to give us the shape and texture, the very feel of what it was like to be a Jew in Nazi Germany.

Customer Reviews:

Wonderfully informative.......2007-05-30

This book does a marvelous job of helping us to understand how such a thing as the Holocaust could occur in a supposedly "civil" society such as Germany in the mid-20th century. Kaplan shows us how the deprivations increased so incrementally that by the time people became aware of what was truly taking place, it was too late for many of them to rescue themselves. This book also reveals how the people of Germany came to accept what was happening to the Jewish people among them; even rejoicing in it, and it lifts the veil over our eyes of the day-to-day tribulations endured before the exterminations. Well done.

"Social Death".......2004-04-13

Marion Kaplan's, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) is an in-depth study into the lives of Jewish people in Nazi Germany beginning with the takeover by Adolf Hitler in 1933. She concludes that not only were the physical lives of the Jewish people tormented and taken from them, the pervasiveness of the German government into everyday life led to emotional and physiological death of the Jews.
In developing the reader's mind to comprehend the lives of the Jews, Kaplan gives attention to little known details of Nazi Germany. As spoken about in chapter one, by establishing the Jews as social outcasts, they were removed from the rest of Germany. The new position of Jews in the public sphere affected their private lives as well. Focusing primarily on the role of women in the Jewish household, the challenges of dealing with new laws makes apparent the death beyond that of the physical means. Perhaps most intrusive to the emotional downfall of the Jews was the hostile environment they were forced to live in everyday. Faced with the torturous nature of school, Jewish children became aware of the plight of their families even as their parents tried to hide it from them. The November Pogrom of 1938 stifled the Jews politically, economically, and socially more intensely and more violently that ever before. By the official outbreak of World War II, Hitler had succeeded in massacring the Jews psychologically.
Throughout the book Marion Kaplan makes it very apparent that the destruction of Jews did not begin when war was declared in 1939 but instead in 1933. The affliction against the Jewish people deteriorated them emotionally and psychologically as well as physically. There is concrete evidence proposed in the book such as the staggering number of suicides, and the indifference to death among the Jews. The deceased were not criticized or blamed for their actions, but they were admired and envied signifying the loss of Jewish will to live.
Overall, Marion Kaplan's Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany is extremely well written. Through her frequent use of primary sources, the pain and distress of the Jews is more easily comprehended as the expressions of the suffering Jews appeal to the reader's emotions. Its exploration of little known details of Jewish life in Germany is useful not only to those studying the Holocaust, but also to all people. Kaplan makes it evident that acts of discrimination or the invasiveness into one's private life can profoundly destroy a person's pride. Ultimately, the destruction of the emotional and physiological conditions of people can occur as it did to the Jews in Nazi Germany.

Accurate Portrayal of the results of hatred.......2002-09-10

Missing in many Holocaust works are the experiences of common German Jews and what daily life for them became like after Hitler's rise to power in the early 1930s. One can read about the Nuremberg Laws or the November Pogrom but one can't get a real feel for how those laws impacted daily life except through memoirs and the testimony of common people. Marion Kaplan's book wonderfully fills the gap between history from the "top down" and history from the "bottom up."
This book makes you realize that stories of hiding and rescue weren't just an occasional thing that's celebrated by Hollywood in such things as Schindler's List, but they happend every day. Kaplan also makes it clear the incredible courage involved in hiding and also the courage of others who hid Jews during Hitler's reign of terror. One bone of contention among historians many times is also how popular were the anti-Semitic measures, with many historians asserting that the population at large really wasn't that bad. Kaplan's book destroys any myths that the German popluation didn't overwhelmingly approve of Hitler's anti-Semitic measures, even if they perhaps didn't see the conclusion of them coming in the "Final Solution." If a German didn't know about the anti-Semitic measures it's only because they willingly didn't pay attention or tried to delude themselves.
One interesting part that Kaplan writes about are the Jews who collaborated with the Nazis in cities as "Jew Hunters," including one Jewish woman who led the Gestapo to over 60 hidden Jews in a single day. Reading stories such as this, perhaps Hannah Arendt's frightening conclusion wasn't so far off in that without the help of the Jews many more could have been saved.
The one drawback to this book is that Kaplan focuses on memoirs and testimony exclusively from women and assumes much about the male Jewish population. This could have been a much better book if she had included memoirs from a wider selection of men rather than constantly referring to Klemperer's book.

Intersection between Jewish and Women's history.......2001-11-30

In Between Dignity and Despair, Kaplan sought to examine the everyday lives of Jewish people under the Nazi Regime. Many Holocaust historians tend to approach the Jewish history from the male perspective (as men were involved in politics). Kaplan sought to explain the importance of women's roles in the Jewish society and how Jewish women urged their husbands to leave Germany when the Nazi gained power and influence.

Kaplan also sought to explain what it felt like to be a Jew living under the Nazi regime and how they became isolated from the rest of the society. She also explained how by and large Germans participated in this persecution and by this she did not mean physical persecution but social persecution.

She gave special attention to the Jewish women and how the women tried to adapt to their new roles and the new situation. The women were able to provide mental and emotional support to their families when their husbands lost their jobs. It was indeed insightful to see how the women were able to cope and how they were the first group to realize the isolation that took place, mainly because of their interaction with neighbors, store owners, public officials, etc.

I would recommend this book for anyone who wants to learn more about the Jewish life under Nazi Germany and the focus here is not those who suffered under the concentration camps but the "ordinary people" who had to cope with their new situation.

Haunting and painful........2000-02-20

Between Dignity and Despair is haunting and painful. The statistics of the Holocaust and "sadistics" of its perpetrators can never capture the true cost in Human terms. History is more than a chronicle and analysis of events. It is also an understanding of the experiences of the people who lived through those events. These experiences do not lend themselves to quantitative assessment and validation. None-the-less, the stories and letters of the people who lived during that time are essential to our interpretation of the geopolitical, military and social events that have shaped our world.

The great question facing us today involves the "collective guilt" of the German people for the persecution and genocide of their Jewish neighbors. The frightening and logical extension of this question is: if such horrors can arise from the children "of the enlightenment," could it not also come from "the sons and daughters of liberty?" It is clear from these accounts that the society as a whole, actively and passively, participated in this process. When studied in Human terms, it is inconceivable that it could have happened any other way.

Cain, after murdering Able, asked of God "Am I my brother's keeper?" The response of the German people to the obvious disenfranchisement, persecution and suffering of the Jews seemed to be: "It depends on your definition of `brother.'" It teaches us that our high and noble beliefs such as equality, liberty, freedom, and brotherly love, are empty words if not applied universally. This lesson was painfully learned in 19th century America when the statement "all Men are created equal" was understood as only applying to those of White, Northern European ancestry.

Between Dignity and Despair is haunting and painful because within its pages we see our own demons and feel the fragility of our own Humanity. We also see to what extreme our quiet personal prejudices can lead us when they go unchecked by the better angels of our nature.

Ms Kaplan has contributed to our understanding of the horrors of systematic psychological terrorism practiced by the Nazis. No revisionist, seeking to absolve German society, can deny the conclusions drawn from the experiences she has documented. Her work is essential to an understanding of the Holocaust.

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Between Dignity and Despair : Jewish Life in Nazi Germany
Marion A. Kaplan
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OK6HYY

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Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany
Marion A. Kaplan
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OKP3A8

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Good

Do yourself, your family and the future a big favor; be sure to buy this book

What everybody should know and all have forgotten

Rizzi book insightful; Harris criticism flawed

Science strangely appraised

The Science Before Science: A Guide to Thinking in the 21st Century
Anthony Rizzi
Manufacturer: AuthorHouse
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1418465038

Book Description

What is the key to the truth and power of science? Would a theory of everything disprove the soul? Is matter all there is? Can I keep science and my common sense? Can we travel back in time? Is it evolution or creation or .? Will scientists ever make a man? Will we ever create artificial intelligence? If so, what does that say about my worth? What is the ultimate source of our intellectual malaise? Anthony Rizzi, a distinguished physicist, answers these questions and more. "What a terrific book!!...The time is now. Philosophers, scientists, and the educated reader will profit enormously from this book." -Ralph McInerny University of Notre Dame philosophy professor, Gifford Lecturer "There is a pressing need for Anthony Rizzi's book, which reveals the link between science and man's deepest questions in a bold, clear and truthful way. His book is full of insights that readers will relish and want to read again and again to plumb their depths." -Marcus Grodi, host of The Journey Home, EWTN "The Science Before Science .provides much needed perspective." -Joseph Martin Chief Scientist, Planetary Science Lab (retired), Lockheed Martin

Customer Reviews:

Good.......2007-07-10

A nice antidote for those scientists who seem to think that philosophy only consists of Popper's principle of falsifiability.

Do yourself, your family and the future a big favor; be sure to buy this book.......2007-04-27

What can you say about a book that reunites the everyday experience of our lives of our common sense and reasonable observations with the sometimes jarringly unlikely claims of some scientists about the nature of reality.

Does the great 'relative' distance from electrons to protons really mean that everything in the universe is really mostly just a vast meaningless near emptiness? More likely Rizzi says is that the scientist forget his real life sized self conducting a real lifesized experiment with real-life sized equipment?

"Possible universes" emerging when you observe a particle for momentum rather than location? Bizarre. No thank you, it's time for a few weeks of vacation and don't bring the calculator! Such errors in interpretation of data follow when your guiding philosophical common-sense principles get forgotten while a scientist is emerged in remote calculations. Do equations really fully 'explain' things like motion, matter? Er, no. Materialism has no basis in science.

What about the spiritual, free will, the intellect...just atoms banging into each other randomly? A quarkfest? An old idea, that misses something remarkable about the difference between sensing and knowing. Rizzi's insights are exciting.

Isn't it possible and maybe even very likely that God brings about creation at the quantum level? This level transcends our means to know exactly but reduces us to probabilities or "chance"? Isn't 'chance' just another way of saying ' I've reached the limit of my ability to know this particular matter exactly and am reduced to probable results.' Nature transcends our ability to completely know it scientifically.

Dr Rizzi clarifies this sometimes confused and conflicted world of science where mere mathematical calculations are too readily given ontological status as if the numbers explained themselves. They don't.

It is the real world of experience and sound starting principles, the science before science, that allows human intelligence to follow faithfully in its scientific and metaphysical journey.

If you have kids, you will love this book, for it provides a coherent intellectual apprehension of reality, a universe not stripped of all that is finest in the human and divine. Rather consider how God might operate in evolution as the efficient cause in a universe that has led to consciousness and intelligence. Good science, good philosophy, good foundations for an integrated religious sense of the wonder of being.

One doesn't have to accept the type of intelligent design theory like that recently argued in a Pennsylvania court to show how God can and likely does operate in his creation and evolution in ways that are of course consistent with the valuable insights of good science. Intelligent Design is so obvious in things that one is naturally and reasonably religious.

What Dr Rizzi does is give us the way to integrate it all, God and the world of experience and the good science that should flow naturally from sound philosophical guiding principles. We can avoid 17th century errors of arbitray materialism and blinding idealism that still afflict the scientific and philosophical enterprise.

You owe it to yourself to get this book for yourself and those you care about. It is a true and faithful guide to thinking in the 21st century and as another reviewer pointed out, it is geared to include a wide readership from high-schoolers to Phd's.

You'll love this unique book and be very, very happy you bought it.

What everybody should know and all have forgotten.......2006-11-09

It must be stated that one needs to acquire a certain way of thinking (or perhaps tap into a prior unused part of the brain) to follow the scenic route Anthony Rizzi takes you on the way to wisdom. Once you've got the hang of it, it is a singular experience. The book explains a lot (if not all), but foremost why nobody, including scientists and students alike, shouldn't confuse the hardware with the software. Brilliant stuff!

Rizzi book insightful; Harris criticism flawed.......2006-10-11

Professor Rizzi's book, The Science Before Science, is a great book that gives real insight into the world of science and the world of everyday life, and how they truly belong together.

I don't agree with the preceding reviewer's (Jeremy Harris) criticism of the book. His criticism can be summarized simply as: he doesn't like the book, because it forces him to think outside his culturally imposed box. Dr. Rizzi is an accomplished physicist who clearly loves science, and it's precisely his scientific training that motivates and enables him (as he does in the book) to help others think fresh about the world.

It's clear Mr. Harris did not understand the book and his review is not surprisingly misleading in many places. For example, his selective quotations and summaries of various parts of the book can easily give false notions about the book's general sweep, intention, and clarity. Consider his treatment of Dr. Rizzi's definition of matter. He (the reviewer) quotes disconnected pieces of the book's definition (which would make any proposition hard to follow). No book can stand having key parts (let alone technical definitions) dissected out of their proper context. A deep book like this - full of little known truths, in which each part connects to the other in a beautiful tapestry - is especially vulnerable to such dissection. (The truth is that the book's definition of matter is comprehensive and accurate; in fact, the whole index and glossary is a treasury of important definitions, and puts page numbers of topics and meanings at your fingertips.)

The book helps us see that critical thinking requires some work, but it is nevertheless necessary to properly get at the reality of things, (and its rewards far outweigh the work). True and accurate definitions are part of the science before modern science, which comes before our knowledge even of atoms. After all, it is first the knowledge of things generally that spurs us on to study and explore enough to even find the atoms. (Dr. Rizzi, of course, knows atoms far better than most of us). In other words, we must know (as Dr. Rizzi says) things are there before we can discover clearly what they are. This is a point Dr. Rizzi brings home with special clarity.

A key point of the book is that one must philosophize. Even when we don't realize it, we philosophize. As Dr. Rizzi points out, even arguments we use in ordinary life are philosophy. You may call such simple thinking something else if you don't like the word philosophy; however, that doesn't cease to make it what Aristotle and most other ancients and most moderns would call philosophy. Whatever you call it, it is upon such simple thinking that all else we do will stand, including modern science, and reviews of books.

Science strangely appraised.......2006-07-18

The science which somehow preceded itself in Dr. Rizzi's deliberately paradoxical title turns out to be none other than our old friend, philosophy. The author is out to show us, with something of a vengeance, that philosophical truth is of an intrinsically higher order than scientific truth. He firmly holds that modern science, while useful enough if kept in its place, has become a short-sighted "empiriometric" enterprise which, due mainly to its obvious practical success, has afflicted both scientists and the general public with misguided illusions of grandeur.

This is a thick book (nearly 400 pages), stuffed to the gills with earnest advocacy for a return to the right-minded classical attitude which places philosophical thinking at the pinnacle of human endeavor, with science humbly serving up background information about the nitty-gritty material world in which we are trapped during our brief natural lives. Rizzi exploits his standing as a physicist to edify us regarding the real meanings of all sorts of scientific topics including relativity, quantum mechanics, big-bang cosmology and evolution. Three themes seem to permeate the author's outlook:

1. Classical philosophers such as Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas tend to be vastly underrated. Their work is far more applicable to modern life and thought than those of us steeped in "empiriological" thinking have realized.

2. The role of the Catholic church in history has been gravely misunderstood and misrepresented. Even in Galileo's time the church was not really anti-science. In fact, claims Rizzi, "...it is the single greatest force in the development of our current Western culture."

3. Hardcore metaphysical theism, of a type consistent with Catholic doctrine, yields a true picture of our origins and our place in the universe. Any apparent mismatches, such as evolution versus special creation, can be resolved by a sufficiently enlightened point of view. Rizzi's goal is to help the reader attain such a view.

Try as I might, I couldn't overcome the feeling that the author's proclivity for translating nearly everything into philosophese hinders rather than helps his sincere effort to clarify the nature of the cosmos and its contents. For example, his definition of matter (glossary, p. 374) begins as follows:

a) Matter is generally that part of a form-matter composite that is its potential to become something else, that is, to lose its current form and take on another.

The definition continues with parts b) and c) for another 180 words or so. Nowhere among terms such as correlative of actuality, being of reason, and accidental change is there any mention of atoms, molecules, mass, density or inertia. Of course the author, as a physicist, is well aware of atomic theory and mentions it from time to time in a fragmented way. In general, though, Rizzi is not content to describe Thomist and Aristotelian views in the historical sense. Rather, he offers them to today's readers as superior wisdom and omits, distorts or downplays later discoveries in the process. To my mind, the modern concepts are simpler, clearer, and vastly more informative (at any level of abstraction) than their ancient counterparts.

Although Darwin's name is mentioned four times in the book, it does not appear in the section (pp 247-61) which purports to explain biological evolution as well as evolution in general. Nor does mutation appear, nor does natural selection. Having undergone radical Rizzification, evolution emerges in barely recognizable form as a process catalyzed by "God," a sentient male entity which infuses Homo sapiens with an immaterial "soul" at just the right moment. Furthermore, as is made clear on page 124, the soul injection routine must be repeated uniquely at the zygote stage of each and every human being. However, our innocent and faithful animal friends, even Flipper and Lassie and Trigger, are rendered forever soulless by the austere theosophical dictums of Rome and Rizzi.

Chapter 5, bearing the admirably frank title "The GOD Chapter," discusses five proofs which the author evidently considers sufficient to dispose of all doubts concerning "God's" actuality. The proofs are in the philosophical QED or "gotcha" tradition, hinging on the notion that there MUST have been a prime (first) mover or "uncaused cause" to initiate the chain of existence culminating in the universe and us. Indeed there MAY have been, but keep in mind the extreme leaps which Rizzi and others make next. They conclude that the uncaused cause is still around, possesses something analogous to an intellect, makes long lists of stunningly silly rules (see Leviticus and Numbers), impregnates a lucky human now and then, and relentlessly interferes with our lives and destinies. It shouldn't be a big surprise that such unjustified and unsupported guesses have never earned much respect from impartial critical thinkers. The truly interesting question is whether pre-existing intelligence is really required to produce new intelligence. Religion reflexively assumes that it is, and the discoveries of science, so far, have come closer and closer to showing that it may not be. A prerequisite for further progress is a skeptical but open mind.

Dr. Rizzi is quite taken with angels and mentions them more than a dozen times. At one point (p.132) he says, "...understanding angels can give us insight into our core selves, which is our immaterial soul." Later, he raises the hypothesis that angels in revolt against the "created order" may be responsible for those evils which are not attributable to human actions. He considers this notion philosophically useful because it explains how bad things can happen to good people in a world overseen by a powerful, benevolent "God." In other words, the tragedies are merely collateral damage from spats among competing supernatural entities!

In the end, I cannot recommend this strange book except as a case study of the extent to which religious obsession can drive a scientist to undervalue and misjudge his own profession.

Rizzi, Anthony. The Science Before Science: a Guide to Thinking in the 21st Century.(Book Review): An article from: The Review of Metaphysics

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Rizzi, Anthony. The Science Before Science: a Guide to Thinking in the 21st Century.(Book Review): An article from: The Review of Metaphysics
Jude P. Dougherty
Manufacturer: Philosophy Education Society, Inc.
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Binding: Digital

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This digital document is an article from The Review of Metaphysics, published by Philosophy Education Society, Inc. on September 1, 2004. The length of the article is 473 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: Rizzi, Anthony. The Science Before Science: a Guide to Thinking in the 21st Century.(Book Review)
Author: Jude P. Dougherty
Publication: The Review of Metaphysics (Refereed)
Date: September 1, 2004
Publisher: Philosophy Education Society, Inc.
Volume: 58 Issue: 1 Page: 190(1)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

The Science Before Science: a Guide To Thinking in the 21ST Century

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The Science Before Science: a Guide To Thinking in the 21ST Century
Anthony Rizzi
Manufacturer: Authorhouse
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000N6ZULU

Book Description

This is a completely revised and update edition of a work first published in 1980 in the USA and deals with the ecological effects of water pollution. It is the result of twenty years of teaching the subject and will be essential reading for all those interested in water quality.

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