Perfect Book Research Articles

A Review of Sexual Health in Drug and Alcohol Treatment: Group Facilitator's Manual

Douglas Braun-Harvey has crafted the perfect book to fill a long-empty, critical need in chemical dependency treatment: how to address sexual health and education to enhance treatment effectiveness and decrease relapse rates. The book, actually a training manual, is so thoroughly complete and comprehensive that it's easily the most ambitious resource available to date on what has been an historically neglected area. Unfortunately, there is also little doubt that this book may be a challenge to some institutions that struggle with the intersection of sexuality and substance use. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to review it for AJSE because I am convinced that this work will, if not revolutionize, most certainly “evolutionize” the field of drug and alcohol treatment.

Street Scenes: Staging the Self in Immigrant New York, 1880–1924 , and: The Immigrant Scene: Ethnic Amusements in New York, 1880–1920 (review)

Reviewed by: Street Scenes: Staging the Self in Immigrant New York, 1880–1924, and: The Immigrant Scene: Ethnic Amusements in New York, 1880–1920 Jennifer Schlueter Street Scenes: Staging the Self in Immigrant New York, 1880–1924. By Esther Romeyn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008; pp. xxxi + 273. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper. The Immigrant Scene: Ethnic Amusements in New York, 1880–1920. By Sabine Haenni. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008; pp. ix + 323. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper. Esther Romeyn's Street Scenes: Staging the Self in Immigrant New York, 1880–1924 and Sabine Haenni's The Immigrant Scene: Ethnic Amusements in New York, 1880–1920 offer richly interdisciplinary analyses of the contentious construction of American identity in the crucible of performance by, about, and (only sometimes) for New York city immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century. While the two authors use some of the same evidence to make their cases, their approaches and their conclusions are significantly different. Both books, however, are worthy of attention from performance scholars working on ethnicity or popular entertainment during the period. Romeyn is trained in American studies, and Street Scenes has a predictably literary bent. In her project, she addresses a variety of texts, including urban guidebooks, "mystery-and-misery" novels, the print coverage of the 1909 Chinatown murder of Elsie Sigel, and Italian, Irish, Yiddish, and blackface dialect comedy. Throughout, she argues that the native-born New York audience, drawn both to slumming tours of Chinatown, as well as to the clown Farfariello's vaudeville acts, saw (or thought they saw) authenticity in these theatricalized and mediated performances in the streets and on the stage. Thus for the immigrant—Romeyn uses the word broadly, to include African American migrants to the city—authenticity and theatricality were crucially at odds. As her subtitle indicates, Romeyn asserts that the immigrant self was performed in anxious response to the knowledge that, in the maelstrom of [End Page 140] New York streets, surfaces mattered and judgments about one's ethnic heritage and social status were quickly made. Immigrant audiences could not help having a DuBoisian sense of double consciousness in response. But native-born audiences also were anxious—about cultural mobility, and about a growing awareness that what begins as Americanized quickly becomes, simply, American. With eight chapters plus an introduction, Street Scenes is divided into two sections. Part 1, "The City as Theater: Performativity and Urban Space," focuses on the representation of immigrants in novels and guidebooks, such as Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) and Helen Campbell's Darkness and Daylight, or Shadows of New York Life (1895). Here, Romeyn is particularly interested in how immigrant neighborhoods were represented as dangerous and miserable and, at the same time, as potential sites for outsider adventure and thrill-seeking; that is, she examines how authors, tour operators, and journalists presented enclaves like Chinatown as available for native-born, middleclass leisure-time consumption. While compelling, part 1 is probably of less use to the theatre scholar than part 2, "Stages of Identity: Performing Ethnic Subjects." Here, Romeyn moves gracefully through close readings of Italian, Yiddish, Irish, and blackface plays, musicals, and vaudeville acts. Her examination of the career of Eduardo Migliaccio (known onstage as Farfariello) in chapter 5 is an outstanding piece of archival work. Throughout, Romeyn emphasizes what she calls "grotesque realism" in these performances, envisioning caricature on the comic stage as a site for negotiating identity. She plays with notions of passing and masquerade, and deftly addresses the "cultural pastiche" of Irish performers in blackface doing Jewish acts (189). Invoking Ann Douglas's notion of a mongrel Manhattan, Romeyn proposes the possibility that these apparent slippages actually "questioned the idea of inherent racial character" (193). Street Scenes is not a perfect book. There are a few factual bobbles and sweeping assumptions to be found in part 2. In addition, some of the examples Romeyn turns to—like Edward Harrigan—are already familiar and well-worn territory. Finally, the book would benefit from a conclusion to integrate the work that unfolds quite separately in the two parts. Nevertheless, the book is worth consulting. Her introduction, which...

Book Reviews

This is the perfect book to prepare individuals for nursing programmes, whether studying mathematics for the first time or just brushing up on existing skills. The manner in which this book is presented and laid out certainly provides a clear, step-by-step approach to solving mathematical problems that will suit any level of learner. The use of clear sign posting throughout enables learners to move through the book at a pace which suits their needs, and there are many opportunities for self-assessment that build confidence by the nature of the construction of the exercises.

Mediating Knowledges: Origins of a Zuni Tribal Museum (review)

Reviewed by: Mediating Knowledges: Origins of a Zuni Tribal Museum Nancy J. Parezo (bio) and Sunny K. Lybarger (bio) Gwyneira Isaac . Mediating Knowledges: Origins of a Zuni Tribal Museum. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007. 272 pp. Cloth, $50.00. Mediating Knowledges: Origins of a Zuni Tribal Museum by Gwyneira Isaac, an assistant professor of anthropology and director of the Museum Studies Program at Arizona State University, is a perfect book to be reviewed in Collaborative Anthropologies. It is a best practices example of a successful collaborative research process between a native community and a young anthropologist who really knows how to listen to what community members tell her, how to center and integrate their desires throughout her study (not simply place it in a single chapter), and how to honor their restrictions. It is contemporary yet classic ethnography based on long-term fieldwork at its best. It is also exemplary because it shows the respect Isaac has for the Zuni community and their research interests and testifies to the Zunis' respect for her and her research concerns. The collaborative nature of the project can be seen in the fact that Isaac had distinct research goals of her own stemming from her family background (growing up in an anthropological family whose lives centered on university museums); her interest in what is now being called materiality, knowledge production, and museology; the lingering effects of past anthropological practices and relations with native communities; and her commitment to decolonizing research topics, theories, and methodologies by centering indigenous epistemologies as the paradigmatic heart of her study. To readers in American Indian studies, Native studies, and indigenous studies who have long used and advocated such an approach, Mediating Knowledges documents how community-based, participatory cultural research should be done. Tribal museums have for many years been an intellectual and practical topic of academic and community debate as Native communities strive to conceptualize and build culturally relevant institutions that will help them maintain their heritage and language for future generations. [End Page 232] Much of the extant literature has dealt with the founding and politics of the National Museum of the American Indian, Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), and intellectual property rights; how indigenous peoples have felt about Euro-American museums (often conceptualized and stereotyped static places where photographs, documents, and objects are not always interpreted or stored correctly using culturally specific principles); representational issues; and power. This growing literature has challenged standard concepts about the idea of the museum as an institution that collects, researches, stores, and displays objects for the edification and education of the public. New concepts, like the ecomuseum idea, have been developed from the ground up, producing a rich debate on what museums should be and should do as community-based and societal-based institutions. What Isaac has done in this book is to show how the Zuni community debated these issues over a number of years, how the internal debate worked (and was often contested), and how The People came to subsume the idea of a museum under the idea of a cultural and heritage center conceptualized as a place of activity, a location where culture in action can occur, not simply where culture can be seen. Isaac begins her book with a description of Zuni as a place of social, cultural, and intellectual engagement and then describes how she slowly learned to see and think like a Zuni community member would; in short, how the Zuni came to see museums both as a resource for preserving and telling historical knowledge and as a site in which to interrogate past practices of Euro-American scholars and scientists. Such a personalized encounter helps the reader understand how Isaac positioned herself in the community and slowly gained people's trust and confidence. It also shows how she began to alter her thinking and revise her initial research questions and interests as she came to see what was truly important about her research project: examining people's expectations about how their system of knowledge operates, rather than simply asking what kind of museum could work in Zuni and what kinds of knowledge could be shared with non-Zunis. In the...

Biochemical Compounds and Nutritional Roles of the Foods Explained in the Qur`an

Moslems believe that Islam is the most perfect religion and Qur'an the most perfect book that explains all human needs with the best style and there isn't any defect in Islam and Qur'an. The Holy Qur'an says; let man consider his food. Therefore we have decided to investigate the nutritional roles of those foods stated in Qur'an and their biochemical compounds. Almost all diet that is known as complete food today, mentioned in Qur'an and their advantages explained occasionally. A number of verses justified some differences that there were in divine religions about food consumption and a few explained advantages and disadvantages of certain nutrients and drinks such as wine. However according to our knowledge about nutritional roles of food in Qur'an it could be concluded their importance in health and prevention of disorders. Nevertheless, Islam has stressed on health and ordered to save it as a deposit, so the foods mentioned in Qur'an might have a lot of advantages, for example the best oil that has protective role in atherosclerosis is olive oil that is contain of a lot of ω9 fatty acids, researchers say today, olive is mentioned several times in Holy Qur'an. It is more possible that many unknown advantages in Olive and other Qur'an's nutrients exist that will be revealed in future. Therefore Moslem scientists have an important duty to reveal a part of these unknowns.

War and liberty: an American dilemma: 1790 to the present

Winner of eight national awards for his magisterial work Perilous Times, Geoffrey R. Stone has now created a condensed, updated, and more accessible history of civil liberties in wartime. With an in-depth examination of how our constitutional rights have fared during the presidency of George W. Bush, Stone reveals how the federal government has suppressed civil liberties in times of war throughout American history. A sparkling historical narrative, War and Liberty is the perfect book for any reader who wants to understand the current national debate and assess the state of our freedoms.

The wide world of Wnts

Researchers studying the Wnt pathway frequently like to joke that `Wnts do everything', and that this fact keeps us all in business. Over time, this claim has become less facetious, as the number of known roles for Wnt signaling has grown rapidly. Following on from the first identified functions of

<b>Book Review:</b> <em>Enhancing Learning Through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: The Challenges and Joys of Juggling</em> by Kathleen McKinney (Anker 2007)

Excerpt: At last, here is the book many have been asking for: a practical, concise introduction to doing the scholarship of teaching and learning. If Huber and Hutchings’s The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons “leaves the reader wanting more,” as John Tagg wrote in the first issue of IJ-SoTL (2007), this small book answers that desire. Written as a “how to” guide, its structure is logical and user-friendly, its prose easy and accessible, and (perhaps most strikingly) its general points consistently grounded in specifics and examples. It just may be the perfect book for SoTL newbies and faculty development programs. Even SoTL veterans will also appreciate it as a resource for the latest advice on doing SoTL lit reviews, ideas for mentoring newbies, responses to persistent questions about SoTL, and thoughtful predictions about SoTL’s future.

Radiance: Poems (review)

Reviewed by: Radiance: Poems Linnea Johnson (bio) Barbara Crooker . Radiance: Poems. Word Press The three-plus pages of single-spaced acknowledgments attest to the fact that Barbara Crooker is one of the best poets you've been able to read only every now and then. Writing her entire adult life and now a grandmother, this is her very first full-length collection of poems; a fact to give all poets [End Page 211] pause, even as one splashes into the lightstream of finally being able to read this perfect book. Like the Impressionists Crooker daubs into the lyrics and onto the palette of her poems . . . these iris rise writhe,charmed like snakes by the song of the sun.The wild blue heart of longing moves up, up, from papery rhizomes. . . ["Iris, 1889"] she has proceeded without standard imprimatur and brouhaha. Like the Impressionists, too, Crooker has succeeded. With a minim here, a tittle there, an iota virtually everywhere, she's been nominated for seventeen Pushcart Prizes; she is the author of ten chapbooks and more than four hundred fifty published poems; she has had ten residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; Stanley Kunitz judged the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred competition which she won; and for her terrific, wit-whipped poem, "Nearing Menopause, I Run Into Elvis at Shoprite," and read by Alfre Woodard on the 1997 audio collection, Grow Old Along With Me-The Best is Yet to Be, she was nominated for a Grammy. Radiance, divided into six parts, opens with "All That Is Glorious Around Us" and closes with "Poem Ending with a Line by Rumi," establishing a frame of the "grand vistas, sublime peaks, mist-filled overlooks, and towering clouds" of the luminous paintings referenced by the poem's title and the Thomas Worthington Whittredge oil painting, "Kaaterskill Falls," reproduced on this book's cover. Immediately, Crooker tells us that "everything is glorious around us" including "doing errands on a day of driving rain." Full of journeying water, red and gold leaves, rocky escarpment, panoramic landscape, the "glories of breath" and how her mother struggles to breathe, this poem causes us to notice "small rainbows of oil on the pavement" in juxtaposition with the oil paintings of The Hudson River School of art. "There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground" is Rumi's line of poetry with which Crooker closes the book. Everything here, too, is "glorious around us." The line before Rumi's, one of Crooker's, leaves us in the hushed and tawny silence of a late autumn, ". . . so deep, the only sound, leaf falling on leaf." In this volume of 84 pages/50 poems Crooker re-constitutes Aix-en-Provence, Paris, Shoprite, and a grammar lesson; she pegs wash onto a line, calls hawks from the sky, blazes iris, peonies, and sunflowers to life, gives us the Shozui temple, lilacs, licks of desire, red and blue, the gyre, Deconstructionism, a comet, and an opossum. In "The Comet and the Opossum" Crooker, out at night, momentarily balances on transience, like a tightrope walker teetering on a highwire timeline, seeing light from a 20,000 years ago comet even as she notices the familiar backyard opossum diminish to bones alone, bones which might still be where she is now 20,000 years hence. [End Page 212] Last night, looking up at the inky blackness, I felt myselfshrink, smaller than the smallest bones in the opossum's tail,and then I found the comet one last time. . . When into words she forms her son's autism, her friend's cancer, or any of the other galvanic, tearing, breaking things of life, she isn't confessional or asking for pity, she's creating 'the made thing.' In a 2005 interview, she says, "I don't look at writing as a form of self-expression, but rather, the love of the made thing, like a hand-thrown bowl or oil on canvas. I try to do what William Stafford said, "I have woven a parachute out of everything broken." This is all there is: the red cherries, the green leaves,sky like a pale silk dress, and the rise...

A Perfect Book for a Bibliographer

A Perfect Book for a Bibliographer

A Perfect Book for a Bibliographer

A Perfect Book for a Bibliographer

Doctors as Patients

Few will read this book for enjoyment, though some might read it as a lifeline in time of trouble. Doctors as Patients emerges from the Doctors’ Support Network [www.dsn.org.uk], a self-help organization run by and for doctors who have experienced mental illness. The proceeds go to the organization and its history is recounted here (in Chapter 27). In 28 chapters, a third of them authored or co-authored by the editor, accounts are provided either of the phenomenology of mental illness itself (most often an affective or eating disorder) or the practical information that a suffering medic might need (e.g. on employment law and antidiscriminatory legislation). Though the book contains contributions from 24 authors, two are identified solely by their initials and nine as simply ‘Anon’. These features are perhaps indicative enough of the book’s central thesis—that there is something different about being a doctor in difficulty. There is also a noticeable preponderance of general practitioners, giving rise to pertinent chapters on the business aspects of practices and partnerships. Though the authors emphasize the value of support and mutual respect, and the importance of knowing that others ‘are there’ for one, what emerges most forcibly is the central loneliness that afflicts those who are ill. Whether it is consequent upon that shame associated with such illness, the blow to the career anticipated, or all the sheer complexity of the hoops to be jumped through in order to receive adequate treatment (from those whom one might trust), the feeling identified by many of these doctors is the rejection coming down the track—from colleagues, friends and maybe even family. And, at the end of the line, there is the General Medical Council with an impersonal letter and its seeming conflation of (mental) illness with immorality. Yet it would seem that by the time others are kicking the professional when they are down, they (the professional) have already started to dissect themselves: ‘When a doctor questions their ability to practise medicine, they are not only questioning their ability to earn a living, they are questioning who they are, their identity, and everything they believe about themselves.’—Lizzie Miller, p. 147 Indeed, the book is a pot-pourri of autobiographical accounts of suffering and partial redemptions, notes to the wise for others (e.g. always have adequate health insurance) and notes to the self in case of future danger: ‘My warning signs... Bursting into tears between patients Crying in the car between home visits Feeling that I cannot think in a straight line Finding decisions almost impossible to make Thinking about self-harm and finding where the scalpels are kept’—Anon. p. 110 This is not a perfect book; the organization of the chapters bounces in all directions, typos accrue towards the end, and some voices are perhaps a little too prominent, but it contains some terrific poetry (most of it too extended for citation here), including Anon’s ‘The rope’ (p. 95) and Joanne Watson’s ‘Weekend on call’ (p. 97). Some of those writing, like the Anon who authored ‘Lithium’ (p. 99) appear to be doing so post-medicine: Here are the last two of eight stanzas. ‘And the job is a role I took on, long ago. It is not who I am, Just the person you know. So keep your pills And let me go free. No longer a doctor But created to be.’ This is a book you’ll hope you never need.

Zhuangzi and the Cultivation of Life

AbstractWhat is the intellectual consciousness of the Chinese culture? A philosophical and literary masterpiece of Daoism gives us an insight into ancient Chinese philosophy — “The Perfect Book of Nanhua”

Give This Book to a Chemistry Professor?

Feminism in Twentieth-Century Science, Technology, and Medicine edited by Angela N. H. Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and Londa Schiebinger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, 272 pp., $20.00 paper.

Monkey Puzzle

This clever, funny story is sure to go down well with your class, who will delight in the catchy rhythm and rhyme. You will find it a perfect book to read aloud. By Jenny Etheredge.

The Huge Bag of Worries

If you're one of life's natural worriers, this is the perfect book to share with your class! You won't find it hard to sympathise with Jenny, whose worries follow her in a big blue bag! By Jenny Etheredge.

The Perfect Text

Recently I had the opportunity to review the manuscript for a textbook that was under consideration for publication. For the first time in my career, I saw a nonmajors' chemistry textbook under construction. The book had promise: there were the requisite interesting tidbits for myriad multicolored boxes, and the chemical fundamentals were well explained. Yet something was lacking in the manuscript that would truly set this book apart from its competitors. I knew that this would not be the book that I'm looking for, the absolutely perfect book for my students. Explaining the fundamentals is not the problem: many textbooks do that very well. The problem is the packaging.

The Birth of American Existentialism

As I began to read Hazel E. Barnes' autobiography, The Story I Tell Myself,1 when it was published recently, my first impression, in addition to the very real pleasure of reading it, was the thought: here is a perfect book for undergraduate women philosophy majors. For I have noticed throughout my many years of teaching that, while I often have bright talented majors of both sexes, women, more often than men, seem to be unsure of their ability; they express doubts about their aptitude in regard to a future career; they take criticisms too seriously. One might, perhaps, sum up their attitude in one sentence: young women take philosophy personally. Now I do not want to deny that young men might have similar tendencies, which they do not express as often, because of cultural expectations of how males ought to act. In fact, I think that the story Hazel Barnes tells herself, along with other stories she has told throughout her career, has value for all of us because of her unique and interesting philosophical position. In this essay I will outline my conception of several important aspects of Hazel Barnes' philosophy. In my view her central philosophical discussion emphasizes the notion of a singular universal, which she prefers to call "a unique universal" (Story, xii), i.e., a conscious existing pour-soi who makes free choices and is, therefore, self-creating and self-determining in the situation in which she finds herself. In the first part of my essay I will outline some of Barnes' themes concerning the situation of the singular universal. This is preliminary to my major discussion of her philosophical notion of the free self in part two. In these sections I will refer to a book she wrote in the late nineteen-sixties, An Existentialist Ethics,2 as well as to brief passages in some of her other books, essays, and translations of Sartre. Finally, in my third and last section, I will sum up the major points of Barnes' philosophical position and discuss, at least briefly, her contribution to American philosophy and to feminism. My last section has implications for some of the strong criticisms of the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre voiced by many contemporary feminists, including some of those whose primary interest is Simone de Beauvoir's philosophy. I have heard Margaret A. Simons, the dean of Beauvoir scholars in the United States, say that she hates that man, and at times she refuses even to say his name. I think that it is natural that early work on Beauvoir as a philosopher in her own right would take place from a vantage point hostile to Sartre; after all, the energy necessary to pull one philosopher out from under another one,3 with whom she has chosen to be buried, requires vigorous effort if not actual violence. As time goes by, however, I think that we will begin to appreciate a more positive influence from Jean-Paul Sartre. Much of human existence results from mere chance, but I do not believe that it can be an accident that one of the greatest woman philosophers of the twentieth-century, Simone de Beauvoir, and one of our most important contemporary American woman philosophers, Hazel E. Barnes, could claim the same man as a major influence on their philosophical lives, unless there were some value for women in that man's philosophy. In the end I will suggest that when Beauvoir and Barnes applied the philosophy of Sartre to their own lived experience, each one created an original, unique interpretation of existentialism. I confess that this is the first time that I have ever written a paper on the philosophy of a living person who can actually reply to my remarks. Like J. Alfred Prufrock, I anticipate that she might say "That is not what I meant at all./ That is not it, at all."4 My terror in this situation is mitigated only by my joy that Hazel Barnes is here with us, and my hope that we will have the pleasure of her philosophical conversation for many years to come. Since Sartre claimed that he never learned anything at all from any critic or commentator, I console myself with the thought that if this paper inspires a similar judgment, at least I will be in company most excellent. …

Nuptial Arithmetic: Marsilio Ficino's Commentary on the Fatal Number in Book VIII of Plato's Republic (review)

684 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:4 OCTOBER 1995 "Private I.anguage" and the pivotal paper in the Stoic section, "The Conjunctive Model," bring out a third feature of Brunschwig's method. Many of his essays take their start from a small text or a relatively local problem, one which does not primafacie bear significantly on large philosophical issues. Yet in a rigorously conceived philosophical system, the whole is often reflected in the details; where possible Brunschwig elicits the larger significance. He shows how Epicurean physics provides a normative model for Epicurean psychology without falling into the reductionist error; the Epicurean does extrapolate from physical theory to human experience, but in so doing he does not forget that human beings are not just atomic; they are atomic compounds. Reductionism does not follow from materialism, for Epicurus or for us. Similarly in "The Conjunctive Model" Brunschwig connects, in a manner which is speculative but nevertheless compelling, a important Stoic thesis in logic (that a conjunction is false if even one of its conjuncts is false) with a comprehensive understanding of Stoic ethics and physics, thereby giving definite content to the Stoic claims about the coherence of their system. The other Stoic papers focus on ontology and logic, showing how central these are to Stoicism. The titles speak for themselves: "Remarks on the Stoic Theory of the Proper Noun," "Remarks on the Classification of Simple Propositions in Hellenistic Logics," "The Stoic Theory of the Supreme Genus and Platonic Ontology," and "Did Diogenes of Babylon Invent the Ontological Argument?" (the answer is 'no'). One essay ("On a Stoic Way of Not Being") disguises by its title a crucial contribution to the philosophy of mind. The papers on Scepticism include "The 6oov ~t~ x~ ~.6"f .t 9 Formula in Sextus Empiricus ," a definitive treatment of a verbal formula crucial to understanding the precise character of his sceptical stance, and "Sextus Empiricus on the xptxfl0tov," the only paper in the volume which has previously appeared in English. The papers "Once Again on Eusebius on Aristocles on Timon on Pyrrho" and "The Title of Timon's lndalmoi: From Odysseus to Pyrrho" deal with early Pyrrhonism, for which the evidence is so thin that no firm conclusions can be drawn. Yet even here Brunschwig's care and skill are exemplary, and his argument that we should look to Timon rather than Pyrrho as the creator of Pyrrhonism is as convincing as anything could be in this area. This is a collection which specialists must read and even nonspecialists will value for its elegant combination of rigor, intellectual honesty, and philosophical insight. BRAD INWOOD University of Toronto Michael J. B. Allen. Nuptial Arithmetic: Marsilio Ficino's Commentary on the Fatal Number in Book VIII of Plato's Republic. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. PP. x + 291. Cloth, $5o.oo. Marsilio Ficino was born in 1433 and died in 1499 at the age of 66. He would have been pleased if he could have known that. For three years before in 1496 (or slightly earlier) he declared in his Commentary on the Fatal Number that 6 was the perfect number and BOOK R~VIEWS 685 that contemplations of the sextile relations of the planets might lead to the return of the golden age of Saturn "some day," This is the fifth volume of Michael Allen's seminal studies of Ficino's Platonic commentaries; if his notable additional articles on further Ficino commentaries were assembled, as they sometime must be, it would be his sixth--not that he takes the same pleasure in numbers as his subject Ficino did. But 6 is the key to Ficino's unraveling of Plato's "fatal number" in Republic 546. To end the suspense, Ficino's solution, aided by Aristotle, Politics V. 1316, is (4 + 3 + 5)3or (6 x 2)3 or 1728. But 1728 what? There is no clue. The book is itself a valuable contribution to the history of philosophy. Allen reviews the history of this topos up to Brumbaugh and Rees. Although Ficino's entry was known and discussed in the sixteenth century, it has been lost from sight since, and Alien restores it importantly to...

The end of victory culture: Cold War America and the disillusioning of a generation

An absorbing and provocative ( New York Times ) autopsy of a once-vital all-American myth: the cherished belief that elimination of a less-than human enemy was necessary to achieve our national destiny.An extraordinarily original work that places postwar American history in an entirely new perspective. Anyone who wishes to introduce students to post-1945 American culture should assign this wonderful book.--John Dower, MIT, author of War Without Mercy Absorbing and provocative. --New York Times Full of brilliancies, this tour de force is one of those rare books that can change the way we see.--Todd Gitlin, author of The Sixties A perfect book to use in twentieth-century history courses.--Elaine Tyler May, author of Homeward Bound