Book Description
The gritty inside story of a NASCAR champion.
Customer Reviews:
True Speed was good.......2007-02-27
I loved this book. It was very entertaining. It really held my attention. As a matter of fact it only took me a week to read it all. That is pretty good for me and always a sign of a good book. I highly recommend it. It had some pretty funny stuff in it.
great book.......2006-11-05
this book is a great tool for those wanting to know just how someone as talented as Tony Stewart got where he is. Its a book on racing and stays out of being too personal.
If I could only read it.......2006-03-17
Well, I would think it would be a great book, however, I have been waiting for more than two (2) months for Amazon to sent it to me. I hope those of you who order it have months to wait for it to be shipped to you. Good luck and happy racing!
Why does Tony act that way?.......2006-01-19
That's a question that race fans have either heard or wondered a good deal over the past few years. To anyone who's followed the sport of NASCAR for a few months two things become obvious: Tony has an unbelievable amount of talent and he seems to attract trouble. Some are his doing and some is not.
In "True Speed" you'll get a lot of background information on Tony the person and Tony the racer straight from himself. There are certain things in life that motivate us all. Tony explains his desire to succeed and attempts (successfully if you ask me) to explain what motivates him. If you've ever wondered why Tony acts the way he does, read this book and find out.
True Speed.......2004-03-03
The biography True Speed is about Tony Stewart and his road to bemoming a pre nascar driver. The Idea of the book is to tell you how Tony made it and what he went through to get there. The book talks about his life and about when he was younger and racing other cars to lead up to nascar.
The book really goes into detail about about Tony's like nascar and what he did before he drove nascar. The book also talks about races he won when he was racing those other vehicles and championships as well as how Tony was offered his nascar chance and how and why he took it. The book goes into detail about when he got offered and by who.
The book also talks bout what happened when Tony took the offer and what happens during his career and the races he won and lost. It talks about what happens when his attitude gets out of hand and is very detailed.
The book talks about what happened when Tony got into a verbal argument with an official and got fined.
The book is very detailed in talking about how Tony go his start and how he got into racing and how he was into it since he was a little kid racing go karts. The book was very gook in talking about what happened in Tony's life and when and where and how it happened. This book accuratly talked about every aspect of Tony's life and his career.
The book was actually a really gook book and a great book to read because it gives every little tiny detail on every liitle aspect of his career. This book would be a great book to read if you are a nascar fan. The book is just full of facts on Tony's life and his career.
Overall I would say that this book was a great boook and is a very well written novel and is great if you want to learn everything about Tony's life and career and what happened when he lost. The book also talks to his bosses and his teamates and got everybody's oopinion.
The book goes over every time Tony was mad, sad, happy, or depresed. IT talks about every little fight and every little aspect of all the races that Tony won and lost. The book is just great it has alot of action excitement. From the fights to the races to fines. The book is overall good book to read because it is enjoyable.
If I had to rate this book on a scale from one to ten I would give it a nine because it is very enjoyable and exciting. This book is very detailed and very very accurate to what happened in his life. I would recomend this book to any body who asked, just because it was that good. So I would say read it to anyone.
Book Description
This collection of primary, secondary, and visual sources for the Western Civilization survey course provides a broad introduction to the materials historians use, the interpretations historians make, and hundreds of years of Western civilization. Its broad selection of documents, photographs, maps, and charts, and its full array of accompanying commentaries--drawn from a balanced spectrum of perspectives and approaches--offer valuable insight into the work of historians and provide the context that helps students understand the texts' full historical significance.
Book Description
Photographs, illustrations, maps, charts, and texts are celebrating the arrival of a larger size and beautiful colors to the fourth edition of World Civilizations: Sources, Images, and Interpretations. This collection of primary, secondary, and visual sources for world history survey courses offers a broad introduction to the materials historians use and the interpretations historians make.
This text also provides introductions, commentaries, guides, and questions, making it a truly valuable source for world history courses. The selections and accompanying notes, drawn from a vast spectrum of approaches, provide insight into how historians work and place the material in a context that furthers readers’ understanding.
Average customer rating:
- Thorough, Generous, Beautifully Illustrated
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Western Civilization: Sources, Images, and Interpretations, Volume 2, Since 1660
Dennis Sherman
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages
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ASIN: 0072565659 |
Book Description
This collection of primary, secondary, and visual sources for the Western Civilization survey course provides a broad introduction to the materials historians use, the interpretations historians make, and hundreds of years of Western civilization. Its broad selection of documents, photographs, maps, and charts, and its full array of accompanying commentaries--drawn from a balanced spectrum of perspectives and approaches--offer valuable insight into the work of historians and provide the context that helps students understand the texts' full historical significance.
Customer Reviews:
Thorough, Generous, Beautifully Illustrated.......2004-02-11
This book is unique in its balance of primary sources and their interpretations. All the figures you'd expect are present: Macchiavelli, Luther, Locke, Paine, Engles, Freud, etc. And with secondary sources coming from Fromm, Ulam, et. al, the data is clearly and comprehensively analyzed. What readers will appreciate are the generous illustrations throughout the text which give you some idea how the philosophies/theories/values of the times are reflected in visual media. What some readers won't appreaciate is the single-spaced type that changes font and styles so often that one might get motion sickness. It's a minor point that has nothing to do with the value of the texts presented, but it does interfere with the pleasure of reading. Still, this is a great history book to teach from or just as a casual read/refresher for the history fan.
Book Description
A new picture of the mind is emerging, and explanations now exist for what has so long seemed mysterious. This real understanding of how the biological brain works -- of how we work -- has generated a mood of excitement that is shared in a half-dozen intersecting disciplines. Philosopher Paul Churchland, who is widely known as a gifted teacher and expository writer, explains these scientific developments in a simple, authoritative, and pictorial fashion. He not only opens the door into the ongoing research of the neurobiological and connectionist communities but goes further, probing the social and moral dimensions of recent experimental results that assign consciousness to all but the very simplest forms of animals.
In a fast-paced, entertaining narrative, replete with examples and numerous explanatory illustrations, Churchland brings together an exceptionally broad range of intellectual issues. He summarizes new results from neuroscience and recent work with artificial neural networks that together suggest a unified set of answers to questions about how the brain actually works; how it sustains a thinking, feeling, dreaming self; and how it sustains a self-conscious person.
Churchland first explains the science -- the powerful role of vector coding in sensory representation and pattern recognition, artificial neural networks that imitate parts of the brain, recurrent networks, neural representation of the social world, and diagnostic technologies and therapies for the brain in trouble. He then explores the far-reaching consequences of the current neurocomputational understanding of mind for our philosophical convictions, and for our social, moral, legal, medical, and personal lives.
Churchland's wry wit and skillful teaching style are evident throughout. He introduces the remarkable representational power of a single human brain, for instance, via a captivating brain/World-Trade-Tower TV screen analogy. "Who can be watching this pixilated show?" Churchland queries; the answer is a provocative "no one." And he has included a folded stereoscopic viewer, attached to the inside back cover of the book, that readers can use to participate directly in several revealing experiments concerning stereo vision.
A Bradford Book
Customer Reviews:
Good pop-science (philosophy?) book on the topic.......2005-12-11
I've been a fan of the churchlands work for a while and someone got me this book for a gift (probably wouldn't have gotten it otherwise) and I decided to give it a read.
The content in the book is similar to the content of other books (ones published by his wife) such as "Neurophilosophy" but this book is much more accessible to lay philosophers/scientists.
If you have on interest in the philosophy of mind and are not the sort that is wrapped up in archaec metaphysics than this book should be of interest, it gives a decent picture of some of the research that has been done with neuro networks etc.
My only complaint is that the book is rather weak philosophically, but one can read the philosophically implications etc in Paul Churchland's articles (some of which are listed in the bibliography) or in Patricia Churchland's book "Neurophilosophy" which touches on the philosophical issues more (also has much more detail about the brain too).
I only wish I had more time to try and implement and experiment with neuro nets.
Exciting and Eminently Readable.......2002-08-31
I can't evaluate the neurobiology in the book since I'm no scientist, but Churchland's entirely accessible discussions of vector coding, feed-forward and recurrent networks, and the general landscape of contemporary neuroscience were exhilarating to read. They made me want to rush out and buy textbooks on the brain--a pretty impressive achievement, as far as I'm concerned.
Churchland's philosophical perspective, as anyone familiar with his work will expect, is thoroughly naturalistic. He has very little patience with anti-reductive arguments, and the three he discusses (Nagel's, Jackson's, and Searle's) receive straw-man treatments, though like everything else in the book, each treatment is good-natured and fairly humble. Readers already lacking tolerance for Searle will enjoy Churchland's caricature of The Rediscovery of Mind as a Betty Crocker cookbook.
Though his explicit discussion of anti-reductionism is sparse, the rest of Churchland's book serves as a demonstration of how much exciting work can be done if we simply ignore armchair naysaying. So I was more bothered by his lack of engagement with philosophers already on the elimintivist bandwagon. His discussion of Dennett, in particular, was cursory and frustrating. It seems to me that he conflates Dennett's distinct accounts of consciousness and content, needlessly (and in the relevant sense inaccurately) portraying Dennett as being a friend of robust human uniqueness.
But quibbles aside, the book is a fantastic read. Its optimistic view of the possibilities of computational neuroscience is infectious. Anyone without ideological blinders on will come away excited about the future of brain research.
The connectionist dream.......2002-03-14
This book is the hallmark of the connectionist dream -the belief that all aspects of mind, brain and consciousness can be explained by calling up neural network models-. Now the basic premise behind all this I will not contest. The brain is a large parallel distribuited processing network of neurons. But there is another big step from this to the statement that everything the mind is is a vector coding of a neural network. This is far too siplistic. Churchland of course realizes this, but continues to talk of connectionist models like neurosciences messiah.
This is perhaps only one aspect of Churchlands book, however. Overall, the book attempts to reconcile philosophy of mind with neuroscience, and it succeeds to an extent. In many parts the discussion falls into vector coding talk, but in many others it stellarily accounts for deep problems. It is a good introducion to neuroscience, neural networks and philosophy. Churchland does not present his own strong theories, but he does well in staying away from controversy. The best part of the book is in my opinion, the attempt to build a framework of the impacts neuroscience has in social and philosophical domains. This is not done often enough, and if it is, rarely with such lucidity and clarity.
Now I would have ceritanly liked much more speculation when it commes to consciousness, given the Churchland's contribuition to the literature. But he refrains from this and merely describes some other models, like Llinas thalamic oscillations, and is content in stating that it is at leas possible to see what an explanation for consciousness would look like from a neuroscience context.
The book is a grat read, and students of philosophy, neuroscience and cognitive science should enjoy it.
Good Intro to Neural Nets and Its Consequences.......2000-08-25
The book comes in two parts. The part one, which takes up more than a half of the whole book, explains what recurrent neural networks are and how those can be used to explain our own cognitive functions. This is generally a good introduction, I think. His style is casual, and we see certain smugness you normally expect at a college lecture, e.g., introducing certain authorities as his friends and presenting the picture his own daughter and the medial and lateral brain stereographs of his wife (Patricia Churchland). Like other popular science books, however, his description of neural nets is far from precise but let's not expect too much from a book of this kind. Unlike what some of our reviewers below suggested, he minimizes the use of scientific jargons and when he use such jargons he explains what those are. The first part was overall very much enjoyable to read.
You cannot expect it to be a fully philosophical book, though. His new epistemological framework arises from this newest perspective the theory of neural networks has created. To know what neural nets are is immensely important. Let's remind ourselves of a classic work in cognitive science and neurobiology. It's David Marr's _Vision_. There Marr expresses the view that physical (hardware) implementation is quite irrelevant. Now we know this is not true. To understand why this is so one may have to consult the part one.
The problem area is the part two. The chapter 11 was full of hopes and lots of blah-blah-blah's that bore you to hell. What's interesting, and makes you slightly angry, is his explanation of consciousness. Perhaps that is because Churchland's argument seem amazingly simple. But, to think about it, it has to be simple. Otherwise it cannot be a reduction. If you want to argue against reductionism, you need to bring up some form of dualism. In fact, this is what Searle does. Searle's arguments are not directed agains neural networks. His favorate scapegoat is symbolic computation. But this is something researchers have done away with a long ago. I personally think Searle never really understood what neural nets are.
What's not really satisfactory are these: Some will find he never really defeated Nagel and Jackson. I should agree with those who think so. If ever he did, his argument lacked logical clearity or I am very dumb. He is not successful in constructing a model of consciousness, either. The problem is, he thinks he is. Like Newton did, and Euclid earlier, he tries to create a set of descriptive axioms to come to grip with consciousness. But unlike Euclid, Netwon, and Einstein (remember his two postulates), some of his axioms require a first-person perspective. (ref. pp. 213-214) For example, to verify that consciousness disappears in deep sleep, somebody obviously has to go to bed. However imprecise, MEG maybe used to detect conscious activities in a live brain. But there exists no 3rd-person method to verify consciousness is a single unified experience. Churchland has been successful in explaining a lot but I think we still have a long way to go. And his descriptive theory is not adequate.
Plus, there is a misprint in page 230 of the softcover edition. The "o%cial" should be read "official".
Regretfully Disappointed.......2000-06-08
Churchland is a great philosopher who has made many significant contributions to the study of the mind. Unfortunately, most of those contributions lie in his papers, other books, and works co-authored with his wife, Patricia Churchland. "The Engine of Reason..." is aimed for the 'popular science' crowd, and it is a wonderful introduction to vector coding and some introductory neuroscience. But it is surprisingly weak in philosophical arguments. It really reads like a light, scientific textbook, and the bulk of it consists of oversimplified explanations which rely too heavily on scientific findings that aren't thoroughly established yet. He is extremely unfair towards philosophers who aren't eliminative materialists (like Searle, Nagel, etc.), and he spends literally no time refuting their arguments. Instead he bullies the reader into believing that the above writers must hold some antiquated Cartesian view which relies too heavily on intuition. He knows he has science on his side and is rather insulting towards philosophers, making them look like idiotic armchair scientists. While unfortunately philosophers are notorious for that fault, they also ask some pretty good questions and make you think. Churchland does neither in this book. This book is a real good starter for vector coding and neuroscience. But for 'popular science' that's scientific but extremely philosophical, I haven't found anything yet that beats Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained. For a good refutation of Searle, Nagel and the rest, read their own works and don't just listen to the brief overview Churchland gives.
Average customer rating:
- Vintage Whine
- An environmentalist everyman
- Baby Boomers, Work and Wilderness
- Like sitting down for stories around a fire
- Williams gives us permission to go outside and play.
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Halflives: Reconciling Work and Wildness
Brooke Williams
Manufacturer: Johnson Books
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 1555662889 |
Amazon.com
Speaking as a family man, plumber, and direct descendent of Mormon pioneer Brigham Young, author Brooke Williams offers this pensive, humorous, and conflicted memoir about finding the balance between the call to duty and the call of the wild. Because he inherited a family-owned plumbing business, Williams has never had any problems making a living. It was living the life he wanted that seemed to be his greatest challenge. As a lover of wilderness adventure, he found it excruciating and downright depressing to keep leaving nature in order to live the life that was expected of him. Williams eventually realized that he had two "halflives" that make him whole--work and nature. And as the gap began to widen, Williams became more determined to reconcile the split.
Like his wife, Terry Tempest Williams, Brooke uses a journal-like narrative to combine vivid stories from the natural world, scenes from his marriage, memories of a mother's death, and reflections on human nature. "If we survive as a species, it will have nothing to do with what we've invented, developed, or manufactured, but everything to do with what we know in our deep core about being good mammals," Williams writes. That may be true, but as evidenced in this spiritually humble memoir, Williams also knows a lot about being a good writer and a good man to the core. --Gail Hudson
Book Description
As a member of a prominent Salt Lake City family and a direct descendant of Mormon pioneer Brigham Young, Brooke Williams was born into a carefully scripted life. He would study hard, be involved with his church and community, and follow in the footsteps of three previous generations to work in the family plumbing-supply business. And that is what he did.
Yet despite his business success, Williams was not satisfied. His deep and abiding love of the outdoors and insatiable desire to experience wild nature made living the life that was expected of him an ongoing struggle. He found himself escaping at every opportunity into wildness, deliberately seeking risky ski routes and long, lonely runs. He realized he was drowning emotionally, unable to bring his "halflives" together, and growing increasingly miserable as the gap between his two worlds expanded. In Halflives, Brooke Williams presents the engrossing story of his personal journey in balancing the expectations of family and society, and the needs and desires of his heart. In witty, poignant prose, he tells how he came to free himself from the life he was expected to live. Williams comes to realize he is not alone in this struggle, and he identifies a balance we all must strike between our cultural obligations and the strong pull toward wildness that our evolutionary heritage exerts on the human psyche. As he says, "If we survive as a species, it will have nothing to do with what we've invented, developed or manufactured, but everything to do with what we know in our deep cores about being good mammals. Like grizzly bears, slime molds, mosquitoes, and hawks, we have not been genetically manipulated, and we are still wild creatures. We need to act more that way."
Customer Reviews:
Vintage Whine.......2000-06-28
Like so many memoirs, this one is at it's best when the author is self deprecating and humorous. Going to an action movie to fight off a plumbing business funk, he is hilariously able to cite the names and model numbers of the plumbing fixtures that the hero rips off the wall or uses in other creative ways to bonk, conk and stomp the bad guys. The scene was jammed with wonderful ironies and plenty of fun. However, the author has a revolving tendency toward self-pity and overly dramatizes having been born into the ownership (as opposed to a clerkship) of a cushy business and having to work in an office, while longing to protect the terrain, as if the two were incompatible. In those sections, the book gets maudlin and soggy and resembles another fixture--the power flusher. (Hello? Has anyone visited the hospital or getto lately, but then perspective is always on the endangered species list in this type of memoir.) Cut or replace just twenty-five percent of the book, all of the cry-baby-culture stuff, and this would amount to a solid reflection, a hardy effort, something to carry in the backpack over all that resilient and unforgiving terrain we in Utah love so much.
An environmentalist everyman.......1999-12-16
Brooke's wife is Terry Tempest Williams, a local hero of the Utah environmental movement. When she gives a pro-wilderness talk or a reading, the seats are packed and she's the star. You sometimes see Brooke standing in the background, the spouse of the Famous Person like Alice B. Tolkas to Terry's Gertrude Stein. In this book he doesn't talk much about his famous wife, but it's obvious how strongly his life path has been influenced by his marriage. His association with her circle of high-powered environmental activists draws Brooke to feel like he should be doing more to better the world himself. He feels like a stolid and practical business man without the flamboyant ideological passion or natural eloquence of many leaders in the environmental movement, and to tell the truth, he's more interested in outdoors sports than in the spiritual aspects of wilderness. From this standpoint, his voice for wildlands conservation seems all the more powerful. He's not an ideologue, a media star or a nature mystic -- he's an ordinary person who loves wild places and has seen the need to do what he can to protect them.
Baby Boomers, Work and Wilderness.......1999-12-08
For all the baby boomers who love the outdoors, this is the book for you. From worrying about the draft in the Vietnam years to fishing for halibut in Alaska, this book covers the experiences so many of us have gone through, with some special Utah twists to the story. We have all delt with trying to find meaningful, productive work. We all cope with balancing the demands and wishes of work, spouces, family, and our own personal needs for space and recreation. Brooke shares it all in a manner that is both serious and light-hearted. Great camping stories and personal revelations on coping with life in the 90's and beyond. Makes me equally eager to go skiing or desert canyon camping again soon.
Like sitting down for stories around a fire.......1999-11-30
Having known and been fortunate enough to have worked with Brooke recently his book does justice with presenting his look at how life can be fulfilled without cable, fashion or surround-sound entertainment. He shows his readers a quieter and less stressful way to try and live life outside the realms of what marketers want us to believe our lives should be. Imagine yourself sitting on the front porch, sipping ice tea slowly, enjoying every drop.
Williams gives us permission to go outside and play........1999-11-10
Brooke Williams pays attention. Whether staring at a canyon wall dotted with ancient paintings, bobbing in a small boat in the center of a pod of curious killer whales, skiing the back country in conditions overripe for avalanche, or forming a noose for a halibut more than half his size, Brooke Williams pays such close attention that he leaves us grateful and impatient and reverent and ashamed. He helps us forgive ourselves our paralysis and gives us permission to go outside and play.
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- Woodswoman II: Beyond Black Bear Lake
- Working with People Who Stutter: A Lifespan Approach
- Works of Love Are Works of Peace: Mother Teresa of Calcutta and the Missionaries of Charity
- Years of Upheaval
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