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- If you really want to know what Einstein said read this book
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Ideas & Opinions
Albert Einstein
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ASIN: 0517003937
Release Date: 1988-12-12 |
Book Description
IDEAS AND OPINIONS contains essays by eminent scientist Albert Einstein on subjects ranging from atomic energy, relativity, and religion to human rights, government, and economics. Previously published articles, speeches, and letters are gathered here to create a fascinating collection of meditations by one of the world's greatest minds.
Customer Reviews:
If you really want to know what Einstein said read this book.......2007-07-10
Einstein's ideas about religion are here in his own words so you don't have to trust does who want to distort them to their own convenience.
These book is writen in a very easy to understand way because as Einstein himself stated "if something can be explained then it can be explained clearly.
The ideas he clearly explains are brilliant and they are about a lot of the things he was interested in his life.
Depends on your purpose.......2007-05-13
If your purpose is simply reading Einstein's articles on issues like world politics, morality, peace, human beings, etc. than this is the book for you. Personally, I wanted the best of his articles, articles that you really want to read because of their specific nature or subject. This is not such a book. Simply a collection of articles.
Window Into One of the Greatest Minds of Modern History.......2007-01-30
This books offers a series of articles written by Einstein on all subjects of life, such as Religion, Politics, War, the Jewish People, and Science. Not only was Einstein a brilliant scientist, he could grasp elements of human life that could rival that of any great philosopher.
Einstein approaches all of the topics with a pragmatism and clarity that is accessible to any reader, which is rare among many intellectuals. It is very interesting to contrast his opinions before, between, and after the world wars and see the further emphasis he puts on his calls for reform around the world. While some might see some of Einstein's socialist tendencies as negative, they are, as stated in the title of the book, only one man's opinion and should be treated as such.
The only reason I give this book 4 stars instead of 5 is the fact that some of the articles seem to be quite similar, repeating themes and ideas that were previously discussed. Also, while someone with a little science background should be able to understand most of the scientific articles, they could be somewhat difficult to get through at times.
Overall, this book provides a great opportunity to read about Einstein's ideas and opinions as a man, not just as a scientist.
Insight.......2007-01-12
If youve ever wondered what was inside Albert's head, than this is the book for you. one example is that I was always torn between science and religion, and Albert was able to elaborate his thoughts on that matter and it was a perspective that I found myself finally agreeing with.
Ideas & Opinions.......2007-01-09
Since Einstein was supposed to be the smartest man of the 19th and 20th centuries, I thought I could get some insight into questions that had puzzled man since the beginning. The meaning of life. What am I doing here? That kind of stuff. Well, let me tell you I spent all my time looking up words on my Franklin. That's the problem with smart people. They try to prove how smart they are by using words that nobody else understands. In my case, Einstein succeeded. I think he's real smart but I still don't know what I'm doing here.
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Sultan's Court
Alain Grosrichard
Manufacturer: Verso
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 1859841228 |
Book Description
An engaging critique of Western misconceptions about the mysterious East. Edward Said's Orientalism has been much praised for its account of Western perceptions of the Orient. But the English-speaking world has for too long been unaware of another classic in the same field which appeared in France only a year later. Alain Grosrichard's The Sultan's Court is a fascinating survey of Western accounts of "Oriental despotism" in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It focuses particularly on portrayals of the Ottoman Empire and the supposedly enigmatic structure of the despot's court -- the seraglio -- with its viziers, janissaries, mutes, dwarfs, eunuchs and countless wives.. Drawing on the writing of Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire, Grosrichard examines their intense fascination with the seraglio He describes the way in which they constructed a fantasized Other in contrast to their own projections of a rational society. The Sultan's Court explores the nature of these fantasies and what they reveal about the foundations of modern political thought.
Book Description
From George Washington's desire (in the heat of the Revolutionary War) for a proper set of Chinese porcelains for afternoon tea, to the lives of Chinese-Irish couples in the 1830s, to the commercial success of Chang and Eng (the "Siamese Twins"), to rising fears of "heathen Chinee," New York before Chinatown offers a provocative look at the role Chinese people, things, and ideas played in the fashioning of American culture and politics.
Piecing together various historical fragments and anecdotes from the years before Chinatown emerged in the late 1870s, historian John Kuo Wei Tchen redraws Manhattan's historical landscape and broadens our understanding of the role of port cultures in the making of American identities. Tchen tells his story in three parts. In the first, he explores America's fascination with Asia as a source of luxury items, cultural taste, and lucrative trade. In the second, he explains how Chinese, European-Americans in Yellowface, and various caricatures became objects of curiosity in the expansive commercial marketplace. In the third part, Tchen focuses on how Americans' attitude toward the Chinese changed from fascination to demonization, leading to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Acts beginning in 1882.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent.......2007-03-17
In New York Before Chinatown John Kuo Wei Tchen explores the dramatic shift in representations of Chinese people throughout the 19th century that, he argues, are essential to the development of modern "white" identity. Tchen expands the late Arab/American critic Edward Said's theoretical framework "orientalism", which famously illuminated the fear, loathing and desire of the West for the East, to include cultural phenomena intrinsic to US American life. In doing so he argues that orientalism has been instrumental in forming US American cultural identity. Writing in 1999 Tchen modestly offers this study as an attempt to tease out "subtle patterns" in U.S. history. The academic discretion he employs in so framing his argument belies its power and, in a post 9/11 world seems almost quaint. There can be no question that orientalist scenarios are shaping our contemporary historical moment.
Beginning in the colonial period Tchen describes the struggle to establish a distinct American identity in orientalist terms. He writes, "The beginnings of US modernity in (the) decades after the revolution...were characterized by the rise of self-made men and radical changes in everyday economic, political and social life." The flux of this period was mediated through Chinese consumable goods as US American identities, caught between the modes of patrician Europe and the needs of the new nation, cohered. Tchen emphasizes the passion for collecting Chinese porcelain, which became known as "china" and the merchants who sold it "Chinamen and women." In this way oriental objects came to represent Asian people, a conflation that persists.
While the "tasteful display" of oriental objects was a signifier of wealth and class in Europe and colonial America such "luxury and profuseness" was viewed by some as cause for alarm. British novelist Tobias Smollet warned against oriental luxuries as harbingers of "Indigence and Effeminacy: which prepared the Minds of the People for Corruption (and) Subjugation." Smollet and his contemporaries read a threat into the absence of actual Chinese people that their luxury items represented. His use of feminine terms as a frame for moral degeneracy that prefigures a "fall" is a sexist tactic not exclusive to orientalist scenarios but nonetheless often finds its expression there. The eastern other often vacillates between a degenerate effeminacy and a robust, sexually threatening vitality: an iteration that Tchen describes later as the "Chinese devil man."
Tchen notes that despite such warnings the fashion for oriental objects ran unabated in colonial America. He writes, "Average Americans chafed at any sumptuary limits on consumables deemed foreign and therefore taboo." I'd argue that this early American exercise in white privilege is a scenario that plays itself out in our current moment not over Chinese tea, but Middle Eastern oil. Even as racialized representations of Arabs--which echo the effeminate/hyper-masculine representations of the 19th century Chinese--abound in our culture the hunger for Middle Eastern oil only grows. As in the "American century" our "desire for `oriental' goods (is) stronger than the threat of `oriental despotism.'"
This pattern of orientalist imagining of eastern others from paternalistic delight, to sexual fear (characterized by moral outrage) to demonization (characterized by physical and or mental abjection) plays itself out in the past via Tchen's study and the present through the ethno-racist tropes applied by the Bush presidency in its foreign policy. The arguments John Kuo Wei Tchen makes in New York Before Chinatown have, through the events of the past several years, become overt expressions of the material culture of the United States.
Chinatown.......2004-06-26
This is a very good book on a subject that is very interesting. I thought that John Kuo Wei Tchen did a great job.
A long awaited, groundbreaking book.......2000-06-29
The study of the Chinese in America has been given a major boost with the publication of this important book by historian John Kuo Wei Tchen. In clear and vivid prose, Tchen has altered the landscape of what has heretofore been accepted as Chinese-American history. From George Washington's porcelain tea set to the Bowery to "Siamese" twins Chang and Eng, the book is filled with eye opening original research and thought provoking conclusions. Sure to become a standard reference in the coming years.
Book Description
Why have noted Western intellectuals-from George Bernard Shaw to Jean-Paul Sartre to Susan Sontag-embraced the vision of various "revolutionary" societies, often in their most repressive historical phase, while downgrading (and yet enjoying) the benefits of Western liberal pluralistic political cultures? How have the delusions and dreams of many Western observers of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other socialist states contributed to a moral and political double standard? Paul Hollander explores these crucial questions in a remarkable study of travel reports on socialist countries written by Western visitors. Observing that political pilgrims represent a tradition of seeking alternatives to flawed social arrangements at home, Hollander also suggests that underlying these visits is a quest for meaning, purpose, and sense of community that intellectuals feel increasingly deprived of in secular and individualistic societies in the West. "Political Pilgrims," listed among "The Notable Books of the Year" in the "New York Times Book Review," is a provocative study of the relationship between political commitment, perception, and moral sensibility. Originally published by Oxford University Press in 1981.
Customer Reviews:
Wrong side of history as usually for the intellectuals.......2006-03-21
This is an awesome book which helps the reader understand why intellectuals always seem to be on the wrong side of history. They loved Communism even when it was obvious that Lenin & Stalin were exterminating hoards of people! They are defective in their thinking and they stick to it. The author has a quote at the beginning of the book. "A GREAT DEAL OF INTELLEGENCE CAN BE INVESTED IN IGNORANCE WHEN THE NEED FOR ILLUSION IS DEEP." (Saul Bellows) . This book walks you through the 'needs' that these intellectuals seem to have which continually seems to cause them to deny the stark realities around them & cling to their 'ideologies'. I am so glad I read this book as I just laugh now when I hear so much of what is on the news. I GET IT!
As pertinent today as it was 25 years ago..........2005-02-09
25 years ago, "Political Pilgrims" documented beyond any doubt the willing self-deception of intellectuals in love with the totalitarian regimes in Cuba, China, the Soviet Union and East Germany. The debate no longer rages over whether these countries were "freer" than their counterparts in the West. They aren't. What hasn't changed, however, is the continued willingness of intellectuals to find paradise anywhere but in the US.
Paul Hollander brings his trademark meticulousness to the study of Intellectuals who travel to what used to be referred to as Worker's Paradises. Using mountains of evidence, one cannot help but be persuaded that Western Intellectuals experience such a depth of alienation from their cultural birthplace, that they become morally blind to the abuses of its antagonists.
What's truly remarkable, is that none of this has changed. One merely needs to point to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and it's grotesque representation of Hussein's Iraq as an innocently peaceful place of playful children and mothers. At no point in that execrable movie does he mention the mass graves or torture chambers.
Michael, post your wish list on Amazon and I'll send you this book. Promise.
Take me by the hand and let's go strolling in wonderland.......2001-10-29
Hollander puts the selective moral outrage and selective acceptance of evidence of the Left on parade as he follows these blinkered one's through the various Potemkin Villages of the Totalitarians, from the October revolution forward into most of the 20th century. Smug arrogance knows no political party or religious faith, no gender, race or sexual preference, it seems to be evenly spread among us. In this instance the highly developed capacity for self-deception of the Left is on trial and an amusing trial at that. Their tortured explanations of the intellectually unexplainable are a fictive of mankind's marvelous ability "to transform things to the liking of his desires".
Like all those who are "blowin' in the wind", these intellectual hard heads do not seek truth, but instead to validate their worldview. This book is a study of intellectuals, estrangement and its consequences.
Peace, peace, when there is no peace........2001-06-24
Political Pilgrims is the amazing story of how Western intellectuals embraced Marxist tyrants at the very moment their colleagues were rotting in prison cells, and the common people everyone claimed to be concerned for, were starving. The book relates how cultural and religious leaders from the West, including familiar names, visited the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other communist countries, and told the most appalling lies to flatter their hosts and express their contempt for Western society. It is quite an education, as another reviewer put it. Marx's revolutionary myth dominated history for the better part of the 20th Century, and if we are serious about not repeating the errors of that period, this book should be a part of our education. The short story Buddha's Smile in Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece, The First Circle, brilliantly tells the same story, from the point of view of Soviet prisoners. Lewis Feuer's Marx and the Intellectuals compares Marx and Engels themselves with the kind of people Hollander is describing. I also recommend the writings of the Rumanian philosopher, pastor, and former prisoner, Richard Wurmbrand.
Hollander retells George Keenan's story of a Norwegian radical who, when asked what country he most admired, said, "Albania." Keenan noted that the student obviously knew nothing of Albania, but chose that country "simply because it seems to be a club with a particularly sharp nail at the end of it with which to beat one's own society."
The same reactionary psychology has, it seems to me, been transferred in our day to an uncritical and naive attraction towards what is (simplistically) called "eastern religion." One could write an even longer book about how Westerners project their fantasies on monist ideologies: people like Joseph Campbell and Karen Armstrong "explaining" human sacrifice, the Theosophical Society standing up for caste, Arthur C. Clarke (Did he know much more of Asian history than the Albanian radical knew of Albania?) describing Buddhism as "the only faith that never became stained with blood." Even Hollander allowed that, "While the suspension of disbelief has its place in human life, it belongs more to the religious (or asthetic) than the political realm." But his book should be read, in my opinion, as a warning against all forms of ideological naivite. A love of truth, and a determination to tell it no matter how out of fashion it may seem, is essential to integrity in all walks of life. Political Pilgrims vividly illustrates, in the political realm, the evil that can be done when honesty plays second fiddle to fashion.....
Left-Wing Hypocrisy Exposed Brilliantly and Humorously!.......2000-07-21
In this fascinating book, Paul Hollander exposes the self deception of 19th and 20th century intellectuals. In their search for the perfect society, they wander from Revolutionary Russia to modern-day Cuba.
In spite of massive evidence of human rights abuse, including genocide, false imprisonments, and confiscation of private property, the political pilgrims never waver in their loyalty to failed, left-wing ideals. They journey onward after each "socialist" failure, with the fervor of religious converts.
This book is meticulously documented and easy to read. Highly recommended.
Product Description
The life and writings of the great genius. --- The landmark works and definitive biography of one of history's greatest scientists: The Meaning of Relativity, The Evolution of Physics and Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein, plus Einstein: The Life and Times by Ronald W. Clark.
Book Description
This innovative book is a pioneering study of political debate in an important Southeast Asian society. It re-examines the formative period in Malay nationalism and argues against using nationalism as the paradigm of analysis. By "interrogating" key Malay texts from the 19th and 20th centuries, Anthony Milner shows how contested, and problematic, the sphere of nationalism was.
Customer Reviews:
An indispensible addition to Malaysian historiography.......1999-02-13
This is a path-breaking book, the first of its genre in Malaysian 'post-modern' historiography. It is both about the invention of Malay politics as well as Malay identity articulated eloquently through the dialogues between three nationalist positions, name, 'bangsa', 'kerajaan' and 'ummah'. A good read on Malay intellectual history,too.
Book Description
In No Island Is an Island an internationally renowned historian approaches four works of English literature from unexpected angles. Following in the footsteps of a sixteenth-century Spanish bishop we gain a fresh view of Thomas More's Utopia. Comparing Bayle's Dictionary with Tristram Shandy we suddenly enter into Laurence Sterne's mind. A seemingly narrow dispute among Elizabethan critics for and against rhyme turns into an early debate on English national identity. Robert Louis Stevenson's story "The Bottle Imp" throws a new light on Bronislaw Malinowsky's attempts to discover meaning in the "kula" trading system among the Trobriand Islanders. Throughout, Ginzburg's inquiry is informed by his unique microhistorical sensibility, his attention to minute detail, and his extraordinary synthesizing imagination.
Book Description
Was there such a thing as 'public opinion' before the age of newspapers and party politics? The essays in this collection show that in the Low Countries, at least, there certainly was. In this highly urbanised society, with high literacy rates and good connections, news and public debate could spread fast in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, enabling the growth of powerful opposition movements against the Crown, the creation of the Dutch Republic, and of the distinctive Netherlandish culture of the Golden Age.
Contributors include: Hugh Dunthorne, Raingard Esser, Jonathan Israel, Gustaaf Janssens, Henk van Nierop, Guido Marnef, M.E.H. Nicolette Mout, Andrew Pettegree, Judith Pollmann, Paul Regan*, Andrew Sawyer*, Jo Spaans, Andrew Spicer*, and Juliaan Woltjer. (* Supervised by Alastair Duke)
Book Description
"If the Holocaust, as image and symbol, seems to have sprung loose from its origins, it does not mean we should decry Americanization; rather, the pervasive presence of representations of the Holocaust in our culture demands responsible evaluation and interpretation."-from the Introduction The Holocaust is everywhere in American cultural consciousness today-in movies, books, theater, and television, in college courses, museums, and public monuments. In The Americanization of the Holocaust, Hilene Flanzbaum presents a collection of essays on America's cultural appropriation of this central event in twentieth-century history. The authors discuss a broad range of topics and examples, from Schindler's List to Elie Wiesel's throwing out the first pitch at the Mets season opener in 1988, from the idealizations of Anne Frank to a cookbook of recipes from survivors of the Terezin concentration camp, from a look at Art Spiegelman's acclaimed comic book Maus to a contemporary faux pas at the Nike Corporation. While several authors draw directly from the testimony of survivors, the volume as a whole examines how much of our knowledge of the Holocaust comes to us through cultural filters--from editors and publishers, producers and directors, artists and advertising executives. Covering the more than fifty years since the end of the Holocaust, this rich and comprehensive overview spans a wide variety of critical approaches, media, and genres.
Contents and contributors: The Imaginary Jew and the American Poet, Hilene Flanzbaum . Aliens in the Wasteland: American Encounters with the Holocaust on 1960s Science Fiction Television, Jeffrey Shandler . Imagining Survivors: Testimony and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness, Henry Greenspan . America's Holocaust: Memory and the Politics of Identity, James E. Young . Inheriting the Holocaust: Jewish American Fiction and the Double Bind of the Second-Generation Survivor, Andrew Furman . Surviving Rego Park: Holocaust Theory from Art Spiegelman to Berel Lang, Amy Hungerford . "Three Thousand Miles Away": The Holocaust in Recent Works for the American Theater, Joyce Antler . The Cinematic Triangulation of Jewish American Identity: Israel, America, and the Holocaust, Sara R. Horowitz . Reflections on the Holocaust from Nebraska, Alan E. Steinweis . "You Who Never Was There": Slavery and the New Historicism-Deconstruction and the Holocaust, Walter Benn Michaels . Suffering as a Moral Beacon: Blacks and Jews, Laurence Mordekhai Thomas . Play Will Make You Free: Reprising The Triumph of the Will in Chicago's Nike Town, Andrew Levy
Customer Reviews:
An important, interesting book.......1999-04-21
An eye-opening, multi-perspective book about a topic I hadn't really thought about.
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