Agaves, Yuccas, and Related Plants: A Gardener's Guide

Book Description

These exotic natives of the Americas are among the most striking of drought-tolerant plants, and they make wonderful accents in the landscape, providing excellent contrasts to flowering perennial plantings. They can also be massed effectively, and many of the species are small, ideal for use in containers.
The authors point out that innovative nurseries and gardeners in cool, humid regions of North America and Europe have shown that many of these plants may be suitable for areas with climates very different from their native range. Full information on cultivation and propagation is provided.

Customer Reviews:

Agaves & Yucca Bible.......2007-05-22

This was also a Mother's Day present, so yet again my review is based on the impressions of another trusted source.
*************
HUGE amount of information - for the enthusiast of all levels
Excellent pictures
Comprehensive
Great price
Good Binding
Good size
*************

Fantastic Book.......2005-12-18

This is the book to have if you are interested in growing agaves, and yuccas particularly if you have an interest in growing them as landscape plants and want to know how hardy a particular species is likely to be. It has rapidly become the Bible for growers of these plants.

Agaves, Yuccas, and Related Plants: A Gardener's Guide.......2005-09-19

A complete description, history, guide and care to this plant group. Not a coffee table book for sure but very informative for the serious gardener.

Agaves, Yuccas, and Related Plants : A Gardener's Guide.......2000-06-13

This book fills a real gap in information for gardeners interested in agaves, yuccas, and similar plants, such as hesperaloes. I haven't found any other book that lists so many species of these plants AND has photographs of each. The text has extensive information for both identifying and growing these plants, whereas many books on plants will emphasize one aspect or the other. In other words, this book would be useful for botanists as well as gardeners and horticulturalists.

There is also some useful information on the cold hardiness and adaptability of these plants to wetter climates. Some experimental gardeners on the east coast of the U.S. may find the minimum temperature limits listed for some plants to be a little conservative. However, the horticultural information on growing these plants, more than makes up for that.

All around, this is a very good book and would be of interest to anyone interested in growing or identifying agaves, yuccas, and similar plants.

Terrific resource.......2000-06-12

I am the librarian at the Desert Botanical Garden and this book has been a tremendous addition to our collection. I have only had it for two weeks and have already used it several times to answer reference questions. The photos are wonderful and the index is extensive. What sets this book apart from all the rest, however, is the clear and succinct format used to describe each plant. Each reference includes the botanical name, synonyms, common names, descriptions of the size, leaves, blooms, distribution, propagation, cultural requirements, similar or related species, and uses. Mary and Gary Irish have created an invaluable resource for anyone interested in agaves, yuccas and related plants.

Reading Under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism

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Reading Under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism

Manufacturer: University of Utah Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Essays | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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Ecopoetry: Critical Introduction
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ASIN: 0874806488

Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Blackwell Manifestos)

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A positive-themed manifesto of means to balance differing agendas into a more unified, and therefore stronger movement

Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Blackwell Manifestos)
Lawrence Buell
Manufacturer: Blackwell Publishing Limited
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Environmental & Natural Resources Law | Law | Subjects | Books

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Ecocriticism (New Critical Idiom)
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Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment (Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism)

ASIN: 1405124768

Book Description

This manifesto summarizes the disparate critical practices that constitute "ecocriticism. " Lawrence Buell, one of the world 's leading theorists in ecocriticism, traces the ecocritical movement back to its roots in the 1970s, through its coalescence into a recognizable entity in the early 1990s, to its diversification and proliferation today. He shows how, from an initial focus on such genres as nature writing and nature poetry, ecocriticism has come to take all of literary history and discourse as its arena; and he addresses questions currently facing the discipline, such as: Why has the interest in environmental literary and cultural studies so quickly increased? Can the nature-preservation emphasis of first-wave ecocriticism be reconciled with second-wave concerns with issues of environmental justice? What is the meaning of "place " in a globalizing world? And how do aesthetic, ethical, and political concerns interact and collide in ecocritical work? Finally, Buell looks to the future of ecocriticism, predicting that discourses of the environment will become a permanent part of literary and cultural studies.

Customer Reviews:

A positive-themed manifesto of means to balance differing agendas into a more unified, and therefore stronger movement.......2006-02-06

The Future Of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis And Literary Imagination is a scholarly summary of the distinct critical practices that constitute "ecocriticism" today. Written by one of the world's leading theorists, who traces the ecocritical movement to its roots in the 1970's and its coalescence in the 1990's, The Future Of Environmental Criticism Asks such bold questions as: Why has interest in environmental literary and cultural studies risen so rapidly in recent times? Can the emphasis upon preserving nature of earlier ecocriticism be successfully reconciled with later ecocritical issues of environmental justice? The Future Of Environmental Criticism draws from past and present reality to predict the directions in which future ecocritical movements will flow, and offers a positive-themed manifesto of means to balance differing agendas into a more unified, and therefore stronger movement.

Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature

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Canonical Text
Category Mistake
A new paradigm
A Potentially Revolutionary Contribution

Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature
Joseph Carroll
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Rethinking Theory)
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Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Theory and Interpretation of Narrative)

ASIN: 0415970148

Book Description

In Literary Darwinism, Carroll presents a comprehensive survey of this new movement with a collection of his most important previously published work, along with three new essays. The essays and reviews give commentary on all the major contributors to the field, situate the field as a whole in relation to historical trends and contemporary schools, provide Darwinist readings of major literary texts such as Pride and Prejudice and Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and analyze literary Darwinism in relation to the affiliated fields of evolutionary metaphysics, cognitive rhetoric, and ecocriticism. Collecting the essays in a single volume will provide a central point of reference for scholars interested in consulting what the "foremost practitioner" (New York Times) of Darwinian literary criticism has to say about his field.

Customer Reviews:

Canonical Text.......2007-03-11

Incredibly inciteful, perceptive, and well-thought out; this book should be required reading in all college English departments. Mr. Carroll approaches literature with the rationality of science, but with none of its often jargon-filled dryness. Fascinating analyses of the evolutionary motives that not only make us tick, but some of our best-loved literary characters as well. A guide to reality, via fiction.

Category Mistake.......2006-10-22

The human imagination is the fount of extraordinary creativity. "Flights of fancy" take us to places and ideas that only the mind can conceive, places where we create our own reality, if only for a time, a place where only "credibility" is a gauge, and often not even that. We've created more deities in our image than any single god can hold. We've traversed Aquinas's labyrinth of angelic worlds were no human has ever gone, and probably never will. Milton took us to Paradise, and explains how we lost it. Dante takes us through hell, purgatory, and back to Paradise. Marx's Utopia is a wonderlust of wishful aspirations and neurotic tensions. Freud's landscape of the psyche is unparalleled in its imagination, however false empirically. Borges takes us into places we can't get out, and we love the dead-ends. Science fiction takes us to worlds we want to explore without the constraints of our present limitations. It's all wonderful, delightful, provocative, and truly human. It's also fiction. We sometimes forget that.

The imaginative arts allow us "freedom" that the sciences, for example, limit. But that "freedom" is our window into ourselves, a projection of every possible nuance one can imagine. It allows us to create and fabricate all sorts of "alternative realities," explore different possibilities, stretch our limits, and go in directions that physics won't allow. Even those "worlds" that bear close resemblance to our own, such as Shakespeare's or Byron's, are still distant lands. We take a journey into realms only our imaginations understand. We must never lose this precious inheritance. But we also must not "confuse" it for the real. Nor try to "codify" it with overarching theories of interpretative hegemony. It remains a frontier that should not be reduced to ideology or the scientific method. That is both perversion and a "category mistake." It boxes-in that vestige of energy that must not be contained.

At first blush, literary Darwinism seems eminently sensible, using sociobiological insights of "life" itself to better understand our "creative lives." After all, we are humans first, and understanding our biological natures surely aids our understanding of each other, not the least of which is our own creative projects. With this level of approach, I have no cavil. It is clearly superior to the dogmatic Ivory Tower Drivel that has infected the Humanities over the past half century. Having "a foot on the ground" cannot but help bring our Humanities folk back to reality. But I cannot endorse a new "empirical" literary theory to replace the old ideological paradigm, however more sensible, because it just adds another template through which to force us through a sieve.

Being empirically-oriented myself, I cannot fault an English-literature professor suggesting we "re-impose" some reality in our literary theory. It's long been absent. Moreover, he's working in an environment hostile to such "realities," but his treatment is worse than the disease. He's advocating placing readers under imaging devices (e.g., fMRIs) to measure their responses to the literary experience, to tabulate the data, and show how it comports with all the other evolutionary work done in anthropology, biology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, etc. This is positively garrish, a project Darwin himself would find repugnant!

Let's situate Carroll in his predicament, and try to understand why he would make such an outlandish proposal. As a former Arnoldean, steeped in the Liberal Humanistic Tradition, he's convinced that only an appeal to "empiricism" will lift off the shackles of the Postmodernist Hegemon that dominates the Humanities. He's convinced that the "entrenched interests" will not budge otherwise, because it's their "bread and butter" to be contrarian, subversive, and radically irrational. He may be right. Certainly the English Departments in Anglo-American academies are a species of their own. And their ideological spue is toxic as well as dissonant. Asking why it persists, despite the onslaught of criticism from all other disciplines, only validates Carroll's point. It's entrenched.

But there is more. Carroll claims that the nexus of Marxism, Freudianism, and Deconstructionism creates a "whole" theory of the "world," arguably false, but complete. This claim needs to be taken seriously, even if I find it preposterous. Do these ideological flights of fancy really make a composite whole? Carroll insists the "nail" was sealed with Deconstructionism, which denies everything but "rhetoric," and then makes rhetoric so indeterminate, that all that is left is the assertion of the "will to power." Marxism and Freudianism just fill-in on the margins when anxieties get too tough. It's an interesting claim. And, if the claim is true, why? Why are English Departments exempt from substantiating their dogmas? No other academic discipline is "allowed" this latitude.

These questions need answers before we start forcing the "arts" through the "scientific" paradigm. Gilbert Ryle's famous phrase "category mistake" just screams at this indiscretion. And the "cure" is just as unsettling as the "sickness." Again, don't misunderstand me. Biological insights certainly enhance our understanding of imaginative works, because they both herald from "life" itself. Here we're on common ground. But "empiricizing" the imaginative arts should seem terribly dissonant, and "measuring" the aesthetic experience is fundamentally incoherent. Even if it could be done, why would we? To save the Humanities from itself? The prescription is worse than the problem.

Notwithstanding this broader reservation, Carroll's articulate, incisive, and well-crafted Humanistic scholarship blends with sociobiological facts and theory to produce one of the most sustained indictments of the impoverished Humanities and a compelling raison d'etre to look to proven sociobiological theory, coupled with Wilson's advocacy of "consilience" (unity of knowledge), to move Humanistic Study forward to a far more promising frontier. There's no looking back.

A new paradigm.......2005-02-04

The greatest mind of the 19th Century, perhaps of any century, was that of Charles Darwin. If any mind of the 20th Century might be said to equal Darwin's it would be that of Edward Osborne Wilson. An entomologist, it was Wilson who demonstrated the implications of insect societies for human cultures. His ideas were first promulgated in his 1975 book "Sociobiology" and bore full fruit with "Consilience" in 1998. In "Consilience", Wilson proposed that, as humans were as much a part of Nature as any other creature, our behaviour traits, including the arts and literature, should be viewed in the light of evolution. Wilson demonstrated how the human spirit would be expanded, not diminished, by such a framework. The research ensuing since "Sociobiology" has affirmed Wilson's insight. How would such scenario apply to literature?

Joseph Carroll, a literary critic, incorporates Wilson's insights throughout this collection. Carroll argues that our outlook on the world would be expanded, not confined, by consciously applying Darwin's principles to our literature. Many authors, he notes, have done this through an intuitive sense. Jane Austen, hardly a Darwinian, still presented her characters fully integrated within their natural environment. Austen distinguished between which environments suited a character and which left the individual feeling displaced. For Carroll, this is an encouraging sign. Observant and astute writers can apply what he calls the "Darwinian paradigm", imparting a more natural and plausible foundation to fiction. He wants new writers to understand how to employ those principles from the outset. In this, Carroll is following where Wilson is pointing. The result, Carroll feels, will be an improved basis for literature's production and analysis.

Narrative itself, not only common to the human condition, but apparently necessary to it, reflects our ancestral past. As Wilson pointed out, human beings are a social, not a solitary, animal. Carroll's thesis furthers this idea by noting that narrative accounts are a means of identification within a community. Depicted human interactions must reflect that situation and be based on firm knowledge of Darwinian principles, not on assumptions nor sketchy awareness. He criticises authors who pay lip service to the "Darwinian paradigm" without truly understanding its tenets.

Carroll's thesis is based on what is known as "the Adapted Mind". Our mental states, whether in writing or reading, are derived from the long evolutionary path we've traversed. We aren't separated or "elevated" from it. Much of his attention is given to revealing the false notion of "poststructuralism" - that there are no "truths" [whether absolute or relative] and that authors have no intent in their writings, simply expression formed by local "culture". Darwin's idea, for example, could only have occured in Victorian Britain. Obviously, in such a framework, evolutionary roots have no role in composition, reading or criticism. It seems trite when Carroll writes "the subject matter of literature is human experience", but he feels we need to be reminded of that truth. Writing, he contends, must reflect that truism more forcefully than is often the case. Steps have already been taken, he notes. Such works as "Biopoetics" and "Homo Aestheticus" are indicators of a more realistic approach in fiction.

Carroll's three part collection - a view of the "literary landscape", theory and practical criticism, and assessments of Darwian biographers and critics, is a splendid example of how consilience works. He is opening a new frontier of both writing and reading, and is optimistic for its success. He stresses that a merger of the humanities and sciences, is not only desireable, but necessary. A better knowledge of ourselves must involve a better knowledge of our world. That can only be beneficial to all humanity and its habitat, using literature as a means. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

A Potentially Revolutionary Contribution.......2004-11-29

The various essays, articles and book reviews comprising Joseph Carroll's Literary Darwinism are rooted in two principles: first, humans share a common nature that can be revealed through the scientific method; second, this universal nature is the product of relentless Darwinian selection over eons. While this is obviously orthodox stuff in the world of behavioral biology, these notions remain quite heretical among the social constructivists who continue to dominate the world of literary studies. From Carroll's simple principles flow corollaries with large implications for literary studies and behavioral biology. The most important corollary for literary scholars is that a large proportion of all that has been said, written, or merely thought in the realm of literary theory and criticism over the last several decades is obviously and often breathtakingly wrong. This is because all of the dominant "poststructuralist" approaches--Lacanian, Foucauldian, Marxist, radical feminist, deconstructionist, and others--are organized around an adamantine core of social constructivist theory that is profoundly at odds both with Darwinian theory and with practical research in what Steven Pinker calls "the new sciences of human nature."

Carroll's argument is really quite simple. All literary criticism and theory is ultimately based on theories of human nature (even the theory that there is no such thing as human nature is a theory of human nature). Literary scholarship constructed on unsound theoretical foundations--on essentially faulty premises about human tendencies and potential--must itself be unsound, no matter how internally self-consistent. The chapters of Literary Darwinism articulate Carroll's vision of a foundation-up reorganization of literary studies along Darwinian lines. Carroll describes a Darwinian Literary Study where judgments about literary plots, characters, and themes are rooted in the bedrock of evolutionary theory, are disciplined by the findings of scientific research, and, when possible, are tested using scientific methods.

Literary scholars and evolutionists who are interested in the concept of consilience will also be interested in Literary Darwinism, which represents one of the most serious and sustained attempts to establish consilience between the humanities and behavioral biology-and to plumb its implications.

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very fine introduction, with two teeny blemishes

Ecocriticism (New Critical Idiom)
Greg Garrard
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Blackwell Manifestos)
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The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America

ASIN: 0415196922

Book Description

This volume offers one of the first introductory guides to the emergent field of literary ecological criticism. With an accessible and animated approach to the subject, Greg Garrard presents the reader with the theoretical background of the genre and explores the practice of ecocriticism in key areas of cultural production. Topics covered include:
*Wilderness
*Apocalypse
*Dwelling
*Animals
*Earth.
Featuring a comprehensive glossary of terms and suggestions for further reading, ecocriticism is the ideal handbook for all students new to the burgeoning disciplines of literature and environment studies, ecology and green studies.

Customer Reviews:

very fine introduction, with two teeny blemishes.......2006-12-26

I got this book not expecting much. As I've seen it the ecocriticism field is just as rotten through with poor thought as most fields of literary criticism. But the book turned out to puncture many ecopieties and call into question almost every preconception but two.

One is that Christianity is destructive of the earth. Yes, he left that unquestioned on the table. The earth is a gift from God so to not respect it or to trash it as this book implies is just purely wrong for Christians.

Second, that matriarchy is a good thing. The notion of a primitive matriarchy that preexisted patriarchy is shaky and based on wish-fulfillment. The very definition of matriarchy is hard to pin down, and doesn't turn out to mean anything. Feminist scholars have turned the idea upside down and inside out and find that it's largely a 70s feminist idea that is based purely on the essentialism of that era.

But those are small blemishes. The prose is sharp, and the ideas are otherwise fairly sound throughout the book. There is a great bibliography, and many new ideas. It is also fairly simple and easy to read. I only had to look up one word.

I recommend this book to anyone who would like an overview of ecocriticism. Not only does this book provide that, it provides a fairly sound drubbing to most of ecocriticism. At 20 dollars this book is a very sound investment. It's probably the best book of literary criticism I've read in a long time. I'm glad I have it. I'm going to read it two or three times. The mind here is playful and expansive and erudite. Couldn't ask for anything more.

Joyce's Rare View: The Nature of Things in Finnegans Wake (Florida James Joyce)

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New Views of "Finnegans Wake"

Joyce's Rare View: The Nature of Things in Finnegans Wake (Florida James Joyce)
Richard Beckman
Manufacturer: University Press of Florida
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Annotations to Finnegans Wake

ASIN: 0813030595

Book Description

"Beckman has mastered a staggering array of source materials and humanities disciplines to provide this survey. It is a lucid and profound contribution to the literature in this area."--Michael J. O'Shea, editor, Studies in Short Fiction

"Offers many, many penetrating and persuasive readings of different passages in Finnegans Wake, and does so in a lucid, lively, and engaging style."--John Gordon, Connecticut College

"Beckman has written a wonderfully wise book, with a critical and sensitive eye, a book that delights in close reading, and holds everywhere a philosopher's detachment from his subject."--Sebastian D. G. Knowles, Ohio State University

Richard Beckman argues that readers of Finnegans Wake must develop a new method of reading that flows from the text itself. Focusing on the mode of perception in the Wake--seeing the world obliquely because that is often the only way to get at the nature of things--Beckman maintains that Joyce's satire depends on looking at the public scene from behind, a view at the same time vaudevillian and philosophic.

Indirect perception is at once the basis for Joyce's peculiar locutions, conveying incompatible double and triple meanings, and also an account of how the mind works. Thus, Beckman shows, the object world in the Wake is as unstable as a troubled dream, accessible only by glimpses and guesses at suspected overtones of significance. If the Wake shows only the wrong side of things, this perception hardly belongs to the Wake alone, but Beckman maintains that no other text has presented this idea with such imitative power, applied it to life so energetically, or wrung so much humor from it. In the Wake, Joyce has made his case for choosing the wrong and even oddball way of considering the human situation--as opposed to the ever-present culture of received opinions--and he creates a book of life that goes nowhere and everywhere, doubling back on itself, methodically seeing things the wrong way, and conjuring up characters, events, and meanings that are inherently reversible.

Written for students of the Wake and Joyce scholars and critics seeking innovative commentary that renders familiar passages fresh, Joyce's Rare View offers new, close readings of a myriad of passages and phrases in the Wake, illuminating many of the themes of this encyclopedic satire.

Customer Reviews:

New Views of "Finnegans Wake".......2007-07-22

With "Joyce's Rare View" Richard Beckman has added an important new look into the comic, cosmic, puzzling pages of James Joyce's most difficult yet, ultimately, rewarding text. Through a close reading of various sections of the "Wake," Beckman provides information and insights that are completely fresh, making it an instant classic to be included with the well-known scholarship of the last century. This work is clearly written as well, accessible to lay Wakeans such as I and not restricted to academicians. It offers valuable and welcome guidance through that amazing maze, the wonderful word world of "Finnegans Wake."

The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making

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mistitled
Why do we trust books?
Different
disappointing
Revisit every assumption you brought to the act of reading

The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making
Adrian Johns
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Volumes 1 and 2 in One)
The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the 14th and 18th Centuries
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ASIN: 0226401219

Amazon.com

Weighing in at 750-plus pages, Adrian Johns's sturdy tome is several books in one. At one level, it is a close study of print culture in early modern England, a time of civil war in which social and civic relations were being remade from the mores of feudal monarchy to a politics approximating modern democracy. In this transformation, the printing press was an essential vehicle for empowering the common people, and control over the publishing industry was contested among several parties--the government, authors, booksellers, the printers themselves. At another level, Johns's book is a study of the role of printing in the formation of scientific knowledge, a means whereby scientific discoveries could be widely circulated and codified. At another, it is a contribution to the sociology of communication, concentrating on changes in English society thanks to the press, through which a literate but remarkably isolated people who, an 18th-century writer observed, knew no more of the city and countryside outside their immediate neighborhood than they did of France or Russia, could become aware of the larger world--often over the objections of power-makers like Sir Francis Bacon, who urged that the people not be given access to information that did not immediately concern them.

Johns's book is dense with facts and quotations from the contemporary literature, but his prose is lightened by keen observation and telling anecdotes. (In one, Benjamin Franklin tried to make his way across Europe as a journeyman printer but grew so disgusted at the copious drinking of his fellow tradesmen that he switched careers, an accident that would change the course of history.) The Nature of the Book will be especially useful to those now tracking the communications revolution of the late 20th century, in which new technologies are once again changing power relations and supplanting old media. --Gregory McNamee

Book Description

In The Nature of the Book, a tour de force of cultural history, Adrian Johns constructs an entirely original and vivid picture of print culture and its many arenas—commercial, intellectual, political, and individual.

"A compelling exposition of how authors, printers, booksellers and readers competed for power over the printed page. . . . The richness of Mr. Johns's book lies in the splendid detail he has collected to describe the world of books in the first two centuries after the printing press arrived in England."—Alberto Manguel, Washington Times

"[A] mammoth and stimulating account of the place of print in the history of knowledge. . . . Johns has written a tremendously learned primer."—D. Graham Burnett, New Republic

"A detailed, engrossing, and genuinely eye-opening account of the formative stages of the print culture. . . . This is scholarship at its best."—Merle Rubin, Christian Science Monitor

"The most lucid and persuasive account of the new kind of knowledge produced by print. . . . A work to rank alongside McLuhan."—John Sutherland, The Independent

"Entertainingly written. . . . The most comprehensive account available . . . well documented and engaging."—Ian Maclean, Times Literary Supplement

Customer Reviews:

mistitled.......2002-03-21

Adrian Johns tells us much less about the nature of the book than about the origins of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge, the physical conditions in which books were printed and distributed, and the architecture of the Royal Stationers Hall. These subjects are lovingly treated with, as another reviewer noted, Johns's prolix style -- not only could the book have shaved a third of its length were the language pared down even slightly, but there could easily have been 3 very interesting books made of this one, and none of them would have borne the title 'The Nature of the Book.'

Johns's ostensible purpose in tying all these themes together is to attack Elizabeth Eisenstein's theory that fixity is an inherent effect of the advent of print culture; however his argument isn't supported by the evidence he so ponderously provides. He does not in fact compare print culture with manuscript culture, as an earlier reviewer stated; and without this comparison it's hard to say Eisenstein's theory suffers any damage as a result of Johns's book. His point is merely that fixity (of authorship, edition, form) was a problem for authors and printers in seventeenth century London, one that the Royal Society and the Company of Stationers both worked to solve; if anything, this rather supports Eisenstein's theory, since her point is that prior to the printing press the very notion of 'fixity' was impossible to imagine, nevermind realize.

Despite the fact that the book is mistitled and its unifying argument is not especially choate, it does contain a wealth of interesting information about the gritty physicality of printing in seventeenth century London, and its later chapters are excellent intellectual/scientific history. I only wish the editors at the University of Chicago Press, whom Johns praises so highly in his acknowledgements, had been a bit tougher with the manuscript.

Why do we trust books?.......2001-10-09

We uncritically accept that a book which says it has been written by so-and-so an author is, in fact, an accurate representation of that particular author's ideas. We believe that a book claiming to be published by such-and-such a publisher on this-or-that date has, in truth, come from that claimed publisher on that given date.

Most historians of the printed word have considered our acceptance of these claims as a pre-destined result of the factory-like uniformity of print. A printed page can be exactly reproduced over and over again through printing, and this consistency lead the reading public to trust the claimed provenance of a printed materials in comparison to manuscripts.

Adrian Johns' "Nature of the Book" disputes the inevitability of a trusted print culture. It did not arise as a mechanistic result of the printing process. Rather, Johns' argues that it was the individual and collective efforts of printers, booksellers, authors, and others who successes and failures prepared Western society to accept a print culture based on propriety and trust.

Focusing on the Stationers' Guild of London in the mid-to-late 1600s and the British Royal Society of the early-to-mid 1700s, Johns highlights critical conflicts, collusions, competitions, cooperations, and crises which directly contributed to the trusted print culture we share today. Johns is an historian of science and he uses the development of experimental philosophy as championed by the Royal Society as a prime example of how diverse interest groups struggled with the dilemma of trusting books the printed word.

In nine carefully focused chapters covering over 600 pages, the author builds his case that there was nothing inevitable about how our print culture evolved. The corollaries to our modern struggles over the veracity of electronic media are obvious. Western society has been in this position before and Johns does a wonderful job of telling the tale. If history is going to repeat itself, it will ultimately be the meatware rather than the hardware which defines the trustworthiness of our electronic information culture.

Different.......2001-01-24

(I used this book in a graduate seminar on early modern printed books at the Newberry Library. It's worth delving into if you are seriously interested in the subject.)

Overturning Elizabeth Eisenstein and Marshal McLuhan, Johns argues that the emergence of print technology did not stabilize and thus give authority to texts -- on the contrary, print culture could be even messier than manuscript culture. Authority and fixity were attributes and values that had to be constructed and ascribed to printed texts over a substantial period of time.

The book reads like it is the product of a gang of Umberto Ecos--avoiding a grand narrative of 17th century English print culture, Johns describes famous and marginal characters as well as their physical milieu with incredible detail. If this doesn't fascinate you, it will at least inform you with a more concrete grasp of the subject than one normally receives from academics.

On the other hand, the length of the book can become tedious and its argument elusive. Avoiding a grand, teleological narrative is one thing; losing sight of your thesis is another. But if you don't mind working with this book in interpreting a ton of data and fascinating events, you will find it a rewarding read.

disappointing.......2001-01-08

I bought this in the expectation of something a bit like Haskell's 'History and its Images': an examination of the ways that people have come to terms with books and other printed materials in the past, and the ways that it differs from what we do today. And I believe that that is also what Johns wanted to write, and maybe even believes he has written. Unfortunately, he hasn't: early modern readers never really get a look in, and in spite of (or even because of?) more than 600 pages of main text, he fails ever to get to the point. In essence, this is not really a book, so much as large pile of stuff - it is as if, having done all his research, he could not bear to throw anything away.

Thus, for instance, we get to learn a great deal about the finer social points of the printers/publishers guild in London, even about who should pay for dinner. But this information is on a scale, and left in a state, where it is more interesting to someone researching a novel set in a printing workshop in England in the middle of the seventeen century, than to someone wondering what, in 1650, was going through the head of someone settling down with a newly acquired book.

Similarly, we learn a great about the publishing arrangements and politics of the Royal Society, and in particular about the 'Philosophical Transactions', as a lead up to a description of the bust-up between Christiaan Huygens and Robert Hooke over the invention of the spring escapement watch movement (David Landes' account, in 'Revolution in Time', which I would have thought definitive, and fairly well known - it is certainly more concise, and much clearer about the technical issues of who may or may not have been in the right, and to what extent - is not cited in the bibliography). But again this chapter leads nowhere, except to a conclusion about how the virtues of the Royal Society and the Philosophical Transactions, and the model of science they embodied, were not 'obvious' to contemporaries. This would be an interesting point to argue (it is certainly one with which I would be fascinated to engage). It might well be possible to build a case that a society that included Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren and many similar others among its members, corresponded regularly with the most learned men in the rest of Europe, and published a journal where articles were admitted for publication only after review by members, had no obvious virtues as a clearing house for scientific information in comparision to, e.g., a journal that solicited materials to be dropped of at a specified coffee house, but I'm afraid Johns is going to have to work a bit harder if I am to accept such a claim seriously as an argument rather than as wishful thinking. (He even admits that all competitors to the Philosophical Transactions took it as a model, and also that most of them failed completely and almost immediately, though he does not discuss in satisfactory detail why).

This book does, however, convince me that there is a fascinating book to be written on the relationship between readers and texts in early modern Europe, a book that follows up properly on a sentence that tantalized me in the introduction: 'It seems that nobody in 1660's Europe built an air-pump sucessfully by relying solely on Boyle's textual description of the engine. Some we know, tried; all, we think, failed.' There is also the book that is actually to be found at the core of this one: a monograph on the the issues an author in early modern Europe had to deal with in getting a book published, and securing credit for his ideas. Such a monograph would be the result of throwing away the stuff about, for instance, who paid for dinner at Stationers Hall, and tightening up the text and the supporting materials (Johns - who, in passing, accuses technical philosophers of 'canting speech' - has a pompously prolix style: rewritten, the text could easily, among other things, lose a quarter of its length).

Revisit every assumption you brought to the act of reading.......1998-11-28

This rich study asks the reader to revisit every assumption s/he brings to the act of reading a book. Provides a sound history of the process of book publishing, revealing what a wonder it is that books actually manage to be published. A wonderful account of the history of intellectual property, copyright, authors' claims, and the rise of print culture in Europe (particularly England) during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. All in all, an enlightening read.

The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy

Average customer rating:

Excellent book on what is know but open to other's theories
If you're a neo-pagan, you won't be after reading this (if you have any sense)
This is how historical surveys should be written.
An Academic Masterpiece
Definitely interesting

The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy
Ronald Hutton
Manufacturer: Blackwell Pub
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0631172882

Customer Reviews:

Excellent book on what is know but open to other's theories.......2007-09-04

I found this to be a very informative book. The author presents what was know about the various time periods in Great Britian, states clearly that any further interpretation is best guess on anyone's parts, and presents both the archeological data, the guesses of academia and the guesses of intuitives. A very all around approach to the subject.

If you're a neo-pagan, you won't be after reading this (if you have any sense).......2007-08-07

I don't think I could add much to the reviews. This is a marvelous work, and a good antidote to the more common "newage" (rhymes with "sewage") books churned out by the thousands on the beliefs of the pre-Christian inhabitants of the British Isles. MAKE your neo-pagan friends read this! Tie them down and read it to them if you have to!

This is how historical surveys should be written........2005-12-23

Agreeing with D.P. Birkett's review below, the greatest strength of this book (and it has many) is that it can stand as a model of how a scholar with integrity can not only give you the facts about a subject but can also discuss - fairly and rigourously - what others (scholars and non-scholars) have said before. Hutton scrupulously gives credit where it is due, even to writers with whom (on other points) he utterly disagrees. This is scholarship at its best, and if only more books were written in this manner (ie. diligently finding out what IS known, and not distorting or going beyond the facts), we would all be intellectually better off.
Highly recommended.

An Academic Masterpiece.......2004-10-02

As a practising pagan of several years now, I'm rather disappointed by the review that dashes this work and author out of hand with a curt, "he must be a Christian" followed by a stream of rhetoric. No, this book isn't the fuzzy little love-love story that pagandom has been inundated with, and the world is the greater for it.

Ronald Hutton IS actually well versed in pagan traditions as an academic, if not a practitioner, having attended numerous pagan celebrations in the U.K. and actually pursuing pagan history as a personal interest (over what the establishment might deem as more suitable research topics). His degree of scholarship is apparent throughout this work. Archaeologically and historically (or prehistorically, if you will), this work is comprehensive and current, quite an eye-opener to those who have been bombarded with outdated archaeology/anthropology on the one hand and romantic mythology dressed as fact on the other.

Although parts of this book are dry, that is more a comment on the material than on the author himself. Containing numerous priceless diagrams and sketches, this book is a virtual treasure trove. This is the Number One book on my ample bookshelves for its history and applicability to my understanding of my own religious tradition.

I would highly recommend it to both academics and to pagans seeking a better comprehension of what has gone before (without the fluff and filler). For a more modern history of current paganism, try the author's Triumph of the Moon. For more great history/prehistory, try Ellis' The Celtic Empire, Barry Raftery's Pagan Celtic Ireland, Dillon's and Chadwick's Celtic Realms, Harding's European Societies in the Bronze Age and Whittle's Europe in the Neolithic.

Definitely interesting.......2004-08-06

OT: I find it amusing to read reviews stating that "obviously, Hutton is a Christian scholar." Oh really?

Short review for this one: it's good, academic reading that will challenge the way you think. I like it.

Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst and Lawrence

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Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst and Lawrence
Margot Norris
Manufacturer: The Johns Hopkins University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0801832527

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Of Revalations
A fine personal perspective
Never Mind!
Good introduction, but adds little new
An interesting personal view

All in the Mind: Farewell To God
L. Kennedy
Manufacturer: Hodder & Stoughton
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0340680636

Customer Reviews:

Of Revalations.......2006-02-13

An extremly interesting book, the likes of which I'm sad never to have been exposed to growing up. Wouldn't it be great if we could expose our children to the many views of our existence, both religious and non-religous and then let them make up their own minds. Isn't it more than a coincidence that in general our religion is dictated to us almost uniquely by the place we are born.

Being a European currently living in the Southern US, it boggles the mind to see the unquestioning "faith" of so many. It's also eye opening to compare this to their politics and actions both in the US and internationally. There's little correlation. This book is a great read, most revealing..

A fine personal perspective.......2004-08-21

Ludovic Kennedy provides a very personal and broad view of freethought and atheism as he sees it. Starting with his own upbringing and his shock of the death of his christian father he charts christianity thru the ages and the rise of those who dare go against the grain.

Kennedy weaves a broad loom and introduces characters such as Thomas Aikenhead, Chevalier de la Barre and Baron d'Holbach to the unititiated. It's an easy read and excites the truth-seeker to delve into extensive "books consulted" list.

The point of Ludovic Kennedy's work is to promote thought and to answer some of the doubts of the waverers. In this regard it does an excellent job. After reading this book you come away with the view that christianity is a religion that has survived by stifling free expression and that established religions are there because it is useful to elites rather than their truthfulness. If Kennedy wanted to get us to question the status quo he could not have written a better book.

Never Mind!.......2004-07-28

In Kennedy we have yet another non-expert (a newscaster, bnot a Biblical scholar), who had yet another life of "suffering" (a mother too uneducated to answer his questions about God correctly, and a father that was killed in war), who is offended by the idea that sin, especially sexual sin, is bad and that God will judge him, telling us that arguments for the existence of God are "futile" because God is entirely a creature of our imaginations, and we need to get over it. And he brags about there now being 50,000 Humanists in Norway, with "hopes" for 100,000 by that year -- in a country of 4 1/2 million. Joining the ranks in droves, are they not?

From masticating gleefully over Europe's near-empty churches and ignorant clergy (he needs to check out Philip Jenkins' recent study of the growth of Christianity in the Third World) to weeping about the Dark Ages (a term real historians are starting to disdain, knowing that era to have been one in which advances exceeded Greece and Rome), from assuming the JEDP theory true just because some outdated scholar said so, to following the line about anonymity to the Gospels (the evidence for their authorship is just as good as it is for, i.e., Tacitus' Annals -- a credit at the beginning of the work); from hinting that Jesus was homosexual to quoting Thomas Paine as an authority, All in the Mind is little more than a catalog of the most common Skeptical arguments molded into sound bites, placed like cubes of meat and vegetables on a skewer and cooked until burnt to a crisp. Kennedy offers not a single original thought here; even his merely historical portions of the book, consisting of a very, very brief and simplistic look at the evolution of religious thought and the growth of atheism are done far better, and in a far more interesting and complete way, in a variety of sources.

Kennedy thinks we're all deluded for believing in any God, especially the Biblical one. That estimation, coming as it does from someone who clearly used no more sources than he was able to find at the closest library, calls for no more than extended bout of laughter. Give it a pass.

Good introduction, but adds little new.......2001-01-17

This book is more of a history of religious and non-religious thought than a new set of arguaments. Kennedy traces the history of Christianity and then the progression of agnostic and athiestic thought from the 17th century to the present day. Along the way he quotes liberally from the likes of Hume, Paine, Mill, Russell etc.

Ultimately this book reads more like a collection of various peoples thoughts than Kennedy's own. It will serve as a good introduction to those new to the field, and readers will find many signposts to further reading. However, this book adds little that is new to the debate on God's existance. However, reading it one does get the impression that Christianity has been so comprehensively discredited over the years that there is not much new that could be added.

An interesting personal view.......2000-07-08

Kennedy clearly gives his view of Christianity based on his 80 years of life. I found it a good read and persuasive in places. Kennedy really gives the low down on how power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely - and that religious folk are no exception. As he clearly shows, the Christian message has been so tainted, changed and corrupted that its value has become undermined. He accepts that many people believe in a God, but mainly because other people seem to do so. I found him persuasive, although at times shallow. However, Kennedy doesn't pretend that the book is anything but his personal view. It is interesting how the religious minded attack him but produce no valid arguments to sustain their own irrational beliefs. He is charitable about the majority of priests and believers, but sad that so many have been taken in by religion.

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