Abraham Lincoln and the Washington Territory

Customer Reviews:

Mediocre.......2003-08-16

Mostly a personal account, not much real data. Sort of a feminist take on rape in wartime, but a little under-researched and over-dramatized. Not recommended.

Take Note: An Influential Book.......2001-04-02

Rape Warfare was a courageous book to write: Beverly Allen dared to speak out about how rape was being used systematically before `historical consensus' had validated that claim. Thus it became an influential and historically significant work, credited today with having been instrumental in the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal's decision to change international law so that war rape might now be prosecuted as a "crime against humanity." The very first convictions under this new law were handed down in February 2001.

Incidentally, some apparently not up-to-date on recent strides in research approaches, failed to grasp the importance of the inclusion in Rape Warfare of Dr. Allen's personal responses, especially considering the situation on the ground in the Balkans at that time. The information coming from interviews is always shaped by the attitudes and expectations of the interviewer. Thus it becomes the interviewer's duty to both REVEAL and SITUATE the details of her/his own subjectivity.

By withholding the gruesome details of the rapes, Allen protected the women she interviewed; she spared them the kind of re-victimization they experience when journalists pander to public prurience, making pornography of these women's horrors. Nonetheless, or perhaps even, therefore, Rape Warfare is also `about' the power of stories; it makes a significant contribution to demonstrating that narrative, often disqualified as "not objective," is, in fact, a valid tool for discovering the deepest truths.

[Susan Schwartz Senstad is the author of MUSIC FOR THE THIRD EAR (Picador, 2001), which treats the fate of, among others, a Croatian woman who seeks asylum in Norway after being subjected to the mass rapes in Bosnia.]

Take Note: An Influential Book.......2001-04-02

Incidentally, some reader reviewers, apparently not up-to-date on recent strides in research approaches, failed to grasp the importance of the inclusion in Rape Warfare of Dr. Allen's personal responses, especially considering the situation on the ground in the Balkans at that time. The information coming from interviews is always shaped by the attitudes and expectations of the interviewer. Thus it becomes the interviewer's duty to both REVEAL and SITUATE the details of her/his own subjectivity.

Terrible Book.......2000-12-29

Allen knows zilch about the Balkans, knows nothing about the war, prattles on incessantly about herself. Seems she heard some horrifying stories of mass rapes from acquaintances and decided to write about how bad that made her feel. That's it. If you care about that, then this book is for you.

Not a Great Book.......2000-03-17

After reading the book, I read all of the reviews below. This book isn't as bad as the worst critics make it out to be, but it's not as good as the apologists purport. It's just another read. If you get assigned it for a feminist class, relax, read it, and move on. It's a strange book because it's not really about Bosnia - not having much to offer about politics or the war. It's not about sexual politics - being just another feminist screed. But it's mostly about the writer's own personal thoughts on rape as a military tool. If that interests you, you'll enjoy the book. If not, you probably won't be able to finish it.

The Suitcase: Refugee Voices from Bosnia and Croatia

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Poignant and Powerful Voices of Refugees
EXPERTLY EDITED AND BOTH A TRAGEDY AND DELIGHT TO READ

The Suitcase: Refugee Voices from Bosnia and Croatia
Julie Mertus , Jasmina Tesanovic , Habiba Metikos , and Rada Boric
Manufacturer: University of California Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0520206347

Book Description

The whirlwind of Europe's longest war in half a century has produced this powerful collection of personal narratives--essays, letters, and poems--from refugees fleeing Bosnia and Croatia. Taking us behind the barrage of media coverage, these stories tell of perseverance, brutality, forced departure, exile, and courage. With startling immediacy and in moving detail, speakers tell of stuffing a few belongings--a handful of photographs, a rock from the garden, a change of clothes--into a suitcase and fleeing their homeland.
Contributors from all ethnic groups and every region of Bosnia and Croatia describe their sense of lost community, memories of those left behind, recollections of town squares that no longer exist, and homes now occupied by neighbors. The editors of The Suitcase, themselves representing the diverse peoples of the region, traveled to camps and temporary homes across the globe to collect these stories. An antidote to apathy, this work moves beyond and outside the vicissitudes of daily politics to portray the human tragedy at the center of present-day Bosnia and Croatia. Probing the intimate losses of countless individuals, it delivers a powerful indictment of injustice, militarism, prejudice, and warfare.

Customer Reviews:

Poignant and Powerful Voices of Refugees.......1999-03-11

Who are refugees? People who fled the wars in Bosnia and Croatia are scattered in Missouri and Ontario, Germany and Austria, Israel and Pakistan, and they are displaced to other towns within their own countries. They are not voluntary emigrants whose bags are packed with hopes in search of a dream. They may be wealthy, or at least they may once have been. The refugee cleaning floors for minimum wage may have been a surgeon in her own life. The eight-year old girl may be the only one in her family who has learned English, so it is only she who can speak with government officials and store clerks. Refugees are anyone and everyone. They are professionals and farmers and little boys and criminals and poets, but mostly they are women and children and the elderly.

The Suitcase gives voice to the people "without context". They speak of their dreams and their losses. Their poems are here and sad scenes of small things washed away forever by tides of war. "War taught us a lot. How the fear makes people irrationally greedy. It is difficult to resist becoming greedy. It is almost like an instinct. To possess, to hold on to something. In shelters, to hold on to somebody. To hold on to your prayer, even if you never prayed before". Some refugees long only for the day when they can return to their hometowns to begin to reglue the shards of their old lives. Some can speak only of Bosnia's beauty or the pleasures of a cup of coffee with friends.

Others close and lock the door on the past with determination. "We arrived here safely. Everyone is fine. Please do not write us or try to contact us. We do not want to be reminded of anything", reads the postcard sent by a Bosnian family after they arrived in Canada in 1994.

The book is well-edited and well-organized along five broad themes. These are followed by three powerful afterwords, of which Dubravka Ugresic's is the strongest as she muses on the fact that the people of the Balkans are one people. Divided by the same language, they look alike, and yet "not one generation in the Balkans manages to escape war, in every family there is at least one killer and one killed, new life only begins on somebody else's dead head." There is one minor error (p.11, Vukovar was attacked in 1991, not 1992).

The Suitcase rings powerfully and true. The simple message here is that refugees are people, and the lives they lead are but a shot away for us all.

EXPERTLY EDITED AND BOTH A TRAGEDY AND DELIGHT TO READ.......1997-09-13

The Suitcase is a wonderful and sorrowful journey into the hearts of an oppressed and victimized land. the personal stories are of those who, throughout history have had no voice. Any person with a sense of history will surely feel the magnitude of the plight of a refugee.

The War in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1991-1995

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The War in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1991-1995
Branka Magas
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0714682012

Book Description

This work provides an understanding of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. These two interdependent wars were the greatest armed conflicts in Europe in the second half of the 20th century. This work provides an analysis of their successes and failures.

Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina sacral institutions on target: Deliberate military destruction of the sacral institutions in Crotia and Bosnia-Herzegovina

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Truth
Propaganda from the Croatian Ministry of Information

Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina sacral institutions on target: Deliberate military destruction of the sacral institutions in Crotia and Bosnia-Herzegovina

Manufacturer: Croatian Information Centre
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

Customer Reviews:

Truth.......2003-12-21

A wide ranging expose of the deliberate attempt by serbian war criminals to destroy all traces of any other religions on occuppied territories. What is truly pathetic is that many of these crimes were supported and encouraged by the Serb Orthodox Church as they bulit Serb churches over the remains of dynamited mosques and churches

Propaganda from the Croatian Ministry of Information.......2003-09-09

This book is a part of the propaganda war waged by the former Tudjman government of Croatia. The reason it is out of print is probably that the current, democratic and less nationalist, government of Croatia is ashamed of the product.

Book Description

Managing Arms in Peace Processes (Disarmament & Conflict Resolution Project)

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Managing Arms in Peace Processes (Disarmament & Conflict Resolution Project)
United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research
Manufacturer: Stationery Office Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Amazon.com

This is the book that made "innumeracy" a household word, at least in some households. Paulos admits that "at least part of the motivation for any book is anger, and this book is no exception. I'm distressed by a society which depends so completely on mathematics and science and yet seems to indifferent to the innumeracy and scientific illiteracy of so many of its citizens."

But that is not all that drives him. The difference between our pretensions and reality is absurd and humorous, and the numerate can see this better than those who don't speak math. "I think there's something of the divine in these feelings of our absurdity, and they should be cherished, not avoided."

Paulos is not entirely successful at balancing anger and absurdity, but he tries. His diatribes against astrology, bad math education, Freud, and willful ignorance are leavened with jokes, mathematical or the sort (he claims) favored by the numerate.

It remains to be seen if Innumeracy will indeed be able, as Hofstadter hoped, to "help launch a revolution in math education that would do for innumeracy what Sabin and Salk did for polio"--but many of the improvements Paulos suggested have come to pass within 10 years. Only time will tell if the generation raised on these new principles is more resistant to innumeracy--and need only worry about being incomputable. --Mary Ellen Curtin

Book Description

Why do even well-educated people understand so little about mathematics? And what are the costs of our innumeracy? John Allen Paulos, in his celebrated bestseller first published in 1988, argues that our inability to deal rationally with very large numbers and the probabilities associated with them results in misinformed governmental policies, confused personal decisions, and an increased susceptibility to pseudoscience of all kinds. Innumeracy lets us know what we're missing, and how we can do something about it.

Sprinkling his discussion of numbers and probabilities with quirky stories and anecdotes, Paulos ranges freely over many aspects of modern life, from contested elections to sports stats, from stock scams and newspaper psychics to diet and medical claims, sex discrimination, insurance, lotteries, and drug testing. Readers of Innumeracy will be rewarded with scores of astonishing facts, a fistful of powerful ideas, and, most important, a clearer, more quantitative way of looking at their world.

Customer Reviews:

Good despite the self-referential inference to innumeracy.......2007-09-14

An otherwise interesting, thoughtful book is marred by the phrase that seems obligatory in most popular mathematical books, "the occasional difficult passage can be ignored with impunity." As the title suggests, this book addresses the general public's inability to deal with numbers and their uses. To provide another excuse for avoiding "difficult" mathematics really tends to defeat the purpose of the book and could possibly be considered as a psychological "put down." Are these passages really important to the reader or are they in some manner more important to the author and merely serve to distract the reader? Most often, as is the case in this book, such passages have reasonably comprehensible explanations. Why not use the space to provide another paragraph of explanation?
With this initial hurdle addressed, it should be pointed out that Paulos does a very good job in presenting interesting examples of the use and misuse of numbers, many of which are used in our society, and to some extent are being used to shape it. For example, consider the fact that in general female workers earn approximately 59% the salary of males, which has been used as the argument for stiff equal pay legislation. This fact alone does not take into account the additional information that a greater percentage of women work part-time and many have only recently entered the job market and so have yet to work their way up the hierarchical job ladder. Many other examples deal with the continued popularity of pseudoscience, despite the alternative "reality" that all the "evidence" for it can easily be explained by random variations in the data.
Written in the author's relaxed style and sporting an occasional pun, this book should be read by anyone concerned with the general lack of mathematical sophistication among the general public. Unfortunately, the conditional probability that a person will read it, given that they are themselves innumerate, is no doubt quite low.

A Good Look at the NUMBERS!.......2007-07-15

Numbers - hearing that word makes a lot of people feel a certain numbness in their brains. Well, at least that is true for a rather large portion of the Earth's population. The human populace seems to be divided between those who love numbers and those who love words. There are perhaps a mere handful that can lay claim to loving BOTH with equal passion.

And it is for simply this reason that whenever a Mathematician comes along with a certain passionate feel for language, his works seem to suddenly adorn the shelves of even the most innumerate literary reader. People from one camp, often wonder how the other lives, and thinks. John Allen Paulos happens to be one of those people who has ventured where others of his peerage dare not tread: the world of the Mathematically Illiterate.

In this book, he attempts to look at how numbers simply don't seem to register with some people. In particular, how statistical probability seems entirely unrelated to our associated fears about daily existence. Although this book was written around 1988, and most of the actual numbers may have altered somewhat since that time (the number of people dying annually from smoking, for instance) it is easy to see why a large portion of people simply switch their brains off when numbers are involved: the truth is simply too shocking. Would you ever get into a car, knowing that you had a one in 5,300 chance of dying in an accident? Or, would you ever light up your next cigarette knowing that you had a one in 800 chance of dying as a result of that activity?

J.A. Paulos not only shows you the numbers but also takes a mental microscope to certain misconceptions on what the numbers are telling you. Being blind to figures is one thing - but not seeing things correctly, can sometimes be even more dangerous.

One thing is for certain when you are done reading this book: you WILL look at the world you live in differently. That is, unless you are among those who already use numbers to make sense of the world around you. For me, the book was somewhat of a vindication of my point of view on Life itself. If you want to know anything at all about it and the world you live in - you simply HAVE to look at the NUMBERS!

(I would have given this book FIVE stars had I only read it sooner... say back in 1988 when I was in High School. It would have made my life A LOT easier, back then!)

A must.......2007-06-23

This book explains why we are so easily manipulated. Follow the numbers and a larger truth emerges.

Innumerate masses.......2007-05-23

Any professional and an academic especially, will tell you that our society underestimates the value of their field. However, John Allen Paulos has a much stronger case for his argument - we rely on mathematics and statistics in even the most mundane circumstance of everyday life, and yet most people are largely ignorant of the common mathematical principles. In essence, they are innumerate.

Consequently, most underestimate the plausibility of coincidences, random occurrences, and why, paradoxically, the unlikely is not unlikely to happen. Pseudosciences, ESP, and TV healers to name a few, have all taken advantage of this situation, and we need to fight back.

John Allen Paulos offers a brief introduction to the basics of probability theory, and a few other important mathematical concepts. Also, sprinkled throughout the book are numerous examples from real life with applications of these concepts. It's a light read, and you will benefit greatly from picking it up!

A classic must read.......2007-04-08

Innumeracy remains one of my favorite books to date, and one that I use frequently in my courses as a math teacher to make concepts in probability and statistics come alive. Here is my quick guide to whether you should buy the book, with the caveat that it is not nearly 100% accurate!

Who will love it:
* People who loved mathematics in high school but more in a practical and useful way.
* You probably preferred statistics over calculus, and probability may often guide how you think about decisions.
* You play poker in a rigorously logical way, analyzing pot odds and what not.
* You may have also enjoyed books like Freakonomics, Moneyball, Fortune's Formula

Who may not like it:
*Mathematicians - particularly those not in the field of applied math
*Sadly, people who are innumerate.

PS. This is not only characteristics that define me - I assigned this once to my students to very mixed reviews.

INNUMERACY Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences

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INNUMERACY Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences
John Allen Paulos
Manufacturer: Hill And Wang
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000H3T3QC

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INNUMERACY MATHEMATICAL ILLITERACY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

Manufacturer: Hill and Wang
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000HFC09M

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Innumeracy : Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences
John Allen Paulos
Manufacturer: Hill and Wang
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Innumeracy Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences
John Allen Paulos
Manufacturer: Collins Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000NLA330

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Innumeracy, Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences
John Allen Paulos
Manufacturer: Hill and Wang
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000MY7A8O

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Innumeracy, Mathematical Illiteracy And Its Consequences -
John Allen Paulos -
Manufacturer: Hill Publishing -
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000QS10I2

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INNUMERACY: MATHEMATICAL ILLITERACY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
JOHN ALLEN PAULOS
Manufacturer: HILL AND WANG
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OIYAI6

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Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences
John Allen Paulos
Manufacturer: Hill and Wang
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000O017BW

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Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences

Manufacturer: Vintage Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000HIFJ2Y

Book Description

This IEA report provides a comprehensive, in-depth assessment of the energy policies of Germany, including recommendations on future policy. The report describes the 1998 energy law, which aims at introducing competition in electricity and natural gas markets, and makes suggestions to ensure the development of effective competition. It also examines Germany's coal policy, in particular the 1997 law on the reduction of hard coal subsidies, and makes recommendations for the elimination of subsidies. Germany has set an ambitious target for the reduction of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion. The report describes measures undertaken and offers several ideas on increasing the cost effectiveness of those policies. This report is one of a series of periodic in-depth reviews conducted by IEA Member countries on a four-year cycle. Short reviews of energy policy developments in all twenty-four Member countries are published annually in Energy Policies of IEA Countries.

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