Idaho Mountain Wildflowers: A Photographic Compendium

Customer Reviews:

GREAT BOOK!!.......2005-08-13

WE TAKE THIS BOOK WITH US WHEN WE GO CAMPING AND IT IS GREAT TO MARK THE FLOWERS WE SEE AND KNOW THE NAMES!!

Book Description

The Baltic capital cities of Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius, and Kaliningrad offer a range of attractions that appeal to both tourists and business travelers to the region. Located within easy reach of each other, they are ideal for a multi-center trip or individually for that unusual short break while in Europe. Getting the most out of a short stay couldn't be simpler using this selection of the best sightseeing, accommodations, and restaurant options in all four cities. Walking tours, city plans, and half-day excursions make it easy for independent travelers to compile their own itinerary. A background to history and culture, and essential words and phrases in four languages are included. Compiled by Baltic States specialists, this guide ensures that visitors have all the essentials for an inspiring city stay.

Customer Reviews:

A great companion in the Baltics.......2003-10-01

This book has good all-around coverage of the three capitals, but where it really shines is in describing history/culture/architecture. Rather than reciting dry facts, this book really makes the past come alive and also gives a real sense of what these countries are like today as they transform. The authors' passion for their subject is infectious. And a lot of thought has gone into this guide - The Riga section even has a little map just to identify each of the Art Nouveau buildings!
Each section of the book includes brief firsthand accounts from those who were in these cities at critical times in their history. (The reminiscences from a former German resident of Kaliningrad are remarkable.) I've spent the most time in Tallinn but have also visited the two other Baltic capitals and this is definitely the book to use.

Invaluable!.......2003-09-23

Definitely the best regional guide that I've found. As someone who often travels to Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius, I really appreciated the fact that there was so much well-researched information all in one place. I've just about worn out my copy.

Baltic Capitals- a waste of money.......2003-09-18

This book contained nothing that I could not get on-line for free. I consider this to be a complete waste of money.

Book Description

Marc Hauser's eminently readable and comprehensive book Moral Minds is revolutionary. He argues that humans have evolved a universal moral instinct, unconsciously propelling us to deliver judgments of right and wrong independent of gender, education, and religion. Experience tunes up our moral actions, guiding what we do as opposed to how we deliver our moral verdicts.

For hundreds of years, scholars have argued that moral judgments arise from rational and voluntary deliberations about what ought to be. The common belief today is that we reach moral decisions by consciously reasoning from principled explanations of what society determines is right or wrong. This perspective has generated the further belief that our moral psychology is founded entirely on experience and education, developing slowly and subject to considerable variation across cultures. In his groundbreaking book, Hauser shows that this dominant view is illusory.

Combining his own cutting-edge research with findings in cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, economics, and anthropology, he examines the implications of his theory for issues of bioethics, religion, law, and our everyday lives.

Customer Reviews:

Natural Morality.......2007-09-17

Over the last decade the study of the human brain has moved out of the leafy halls of academia into many different fields, including ethics and the law. If socially unacceptable behavior is being driven by some wiring problem in the brain, is a person legally liable? Or is the brain just one part of the chain of causes with learning and experience playing a larger part? The lion's share of the evidence indicates that genes and the brain determine how we interact with the environment rather than determining how we behave, but there is still a great deal of research that needs to be done.

This book has been getting a lot of attention and for a very good reason: not only is it a well-written account by someone who is an exceptionally clear thinker, but the implications of his book stretch far beyond simple academic discussions: they have implications not only for neuroscience, but for ethics, spirituality and the law.

Marc Hauser is a biologist at Harvard and in this book he argues that the human moral sense is inbuilt and the product of evolution, much like our capacity for language. He suggests that the structure of our minds - or at least our brains - reflect our egalitarian hunter-gatherer past and reveals "left over circuitry from the cavemen."

Hauser begins by contrasting three approaches to moral thinking:
The first was espoused by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in the late eighteenth century, who proposed that we follow a categorical imperative. In Kant's view, we could and should live by the Golden Rule, treating others as we would have them treat us, and never using people merely as a means to something else.

The second approach was proposed by the eighteen century Scottish philosopher David Hume, who came to the conclusion that reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions. So if we do something because we are frustrated or angry, we should be castigated and punished because we failed to express out true nature.

The third approach is that of the political philosopher John Rawls. Rawls - like the Harvard linguist Noam Chomsky - proposed that there are deep similarities between language and morality. Chomsky believes that we are hardwired to understand and produce language, while Rawls believes that we all have an innate moral faculty. What that means is that we are all born with an ability to form moral judgments, and that we do not simply embrace the views of our family, tribe or church. The rub is this: because it is an innate ability bred of countless millennia of evolution, we often have no idea why we hold the views they we do.

The parallels between our innate morality and language are explored in this book.

When a twenty-nine year old Chomsky produced his first book in 1957 it created a firestorm of protest as well as some enthusiastic acceptance. We know that people the world over utter grammatical sentences in their own language, but it had been assumed that it began as simple mimicry: children copied the language, syntax and grammar of their parents and others. But Chomsky proposed that the ability is hardwired into the structure of the brain, and that is why we have little or no insight into how grammar works. By analogy, Hauser proposes that children and adults construct moral codes and make judgments without any insight into their reasons for doing so.

Hauser is an acclaimed academic, and it is no surprise that he supports his hypothesis with an array of thought-provoking examples, some better known than others.

One of the better known has been used in psychology and philosophy classes for years. It is the Trolley Problem, taken from a classic set of moral dilemmas proposed by the philosopher Phillipa Foot. The story goes like this. A bystander named Denise is a passenger on an out-of-control railway trolley, which is speeding down the track with an incapacitated driver. The vehicle is heading directly toward five people on the track ahead, bringing with it certain death. Denise can flip a switch that would turn the trolley onto a sidetrack with just one person on it. That one person will die, saving the other five. Should she flip the switch? Hauser's own intuition is that she should, and he marshals various moral arguments to support him.

But now comes the second part. Consider another bystander named Frank. He is on a footbridge over the same railway trolley with the same five endangered people. On the bridge is a large man whom Frank can push off the bridge and so stop the trolley and save the five. Should he do so? Should he sacrifice one man to save five?

Here Hauser's view is that he should not. But exactly why not? Is it because of Denise and Frank's intentions? Is it because Frank would be using the man as a means? In each case the result is the same, one person is killed and five are saved. This is interesting, not as an academic exercise, but because most people come up with similar responses to the dilemma.

Here is another example: what if a surgeon can save the lives of five dying people by taking organs from one perfectly healthy person? Almost no one says that this action is justified, but why not? In fact when such a thing was actually done during the Holocaust, the prosecutors at Nuremberg considered it to be one of the most egregious of all the crimes committed. The utter breakdown of agreed moral norms during those dark years and continuing depravity in some parts of the world remains a challenge for philosophers and scientists to this day; including the author of this book.

Hauser is evidently a good teacher, and he constructs a number of variations of these themes to show us that, with the kinds of exceptions that I just mentioned, the intuitions of very different people are usually much the same. Second. He shows how difficult it is to provide logical justifications for those intuitions. Like all good teachers he includes some personal disclosures, and tells an amusing tale about his own father, who, despite being an intelligent and well-educated physicist, became confused and frustrated when he tried to find logical justifications for his immediate responses.

Hauser reviews evidence from different cultures and from his own research using an online Moral Sense Test, to show how little judgments vary between people of different backgrounds and cultures.

This leads to another important similarity between language and morality. Languages are not chaotic: they follow certain constraints. All known languages follow a set of universal principles. But there are also a set of variable parameters that include the order of words, different ways of making plurals, gender attributions and all those other nuances that can frustrate anyone trying to master a foreign language. Hauser argues that it is the same with morality: there are universal principles and culture-bound parameters. He continues the parallels to point out that as with a language, once people acquire their specific moral grammar, other grammars may seem as incomprehensible as does Japanese to a native English speaker.

He illustrates his thesis with valuable discussions about murder and manslaughter, the treatment of women in different cultures, attitudes to abortion, euthanasia, pedophilia and incest, together with notions of fairness and punishment.

The book is illustrated by some delightful little drawings that do an excellent job of breaking up the narrative.

Marc Hauser if a very good writer and the book is not a difficult read, despite weighing in at over 400 closely reasoned pages. He makes many points that need to be heard. Not only by his colleagues and by people curious to understand more about themselves and those around them, but also by politicians, lawyers and ethicists.

Highly recommended.

Richard G. Petty, MD, author of Healing, Meaning and Purpose: The Magical Power of the Emerging Laws of Life

A poor collection of sophomoric philosophy.......2007-04-01

In a grand way Marc Hauser represents centuries of philosophy intermingled with anecdotes from psychological, anthropological, and economic research. Unfortunately, what he doesn't do is provide a scientific grounding for understanding moral choice.

To understand why people call things right and wrong you need to start with the biology of learning, expectation, and cognition. Given that we are just barely now scratching the surface of these topics Hauser's attempt was bound to fail. His own morals pervade the book and act as logical starting points for his arguments, but rarely does he act as a scientist and dismiss his own morality to seek out the real question which is, "How does the brain create a sense of right and wrong, and is there any definitive proof that there is a universal biological morality?"

Neuroscience tells us that there are very few things we are hardwired to do that we cannot unlearn or adapt to deal with our environments. Hauser spectacularly fails to convince that any moral code is anything other than a learned societal norm.

great idea, poor execution.......2007-03-31

I agree with Rick: great idea, poor execution. Various moral and social systems have long tried to codify and explain away through religious and other naratives what is only natural to us. Kudos to Mark Hauser for bringing our innate "moral organ" to broad attention.

His writing however is another matter. I suggest, read his introductory chapter "What Is Wrong?" and then cherry-pick from the rest of the book as much of the following material is highly repetitive. This is topic waiting to be tackled again by another, stronger writer.

Placing morals into the biological realm where they belong.......2007-03-23

This book affirms something that I have thought true for some time now - that morality is governed by instinctual paradigms in healthy individuals. Hearing from birth and from right-wing sources on the news daily that our morality can only be saved by a reversion to "biblical" mores, I had always wondered why the statistics do not back this "moral majority" up. For instance, in countries like Sweden and Iceland and many other European nations where secularism is high, they have much lower rates of crime and their citizens are just as happy if not more so than the average Sunday-bible-toting-American who thinks they have a "higher" version of morality than the "godless heathen."

Hauser cites empirical data that shows that morality is often operating at an unconscious level in human beings as evidenced by tests where subjects make a moral choice but then can offer only incoherent justifications. Hauser's parallel to our "Language Instinct" here is spot on, given that most native speakers can form perfectly grammatical sentences, but if asked about detailed grammatical structures and relationships, they fail miserably. This, I think, is one reason that religion enjoys its ascendant status (at least in America) in regards to morality. Religion is an overt manifestation of moral principles, something people otherwise have little or no conscious access to. It doesn't matter how outdated or ridiculous religious "morals" are, people will cling to them because in their minds it is the only available source of a description of morality. The faster that science can describe these principles, the better off humanity will be.

Taking in relevant topics from moral philosophy, economics, psychology, and of course, the meat of his argument, socio-biological findings from our primate and animal cousins, Hauser shows that the precursors of human morality, at least in rudimentary form, are present in many other animals. This presence gives science a strong foothold in the arena of ethics. These findings must be to the chagrin of such writers as Francis Collins who invoked the god of the gaps in "The Language of God" to explain that human morality must be due to divine fiat. Indeed it is not.

It's just not written well.......2007-03-21

I got this book after hearing Hauser give a very illluminating and fascinating interview on NPR. Sadly his book is not as nearly interesting as his interview technique is. He repeats his thesis into the ground many times. His clever examples are sometimes not so clever. The book is too long and wordy. Being a lover of philosophy, I of all people never thought I would say that about a book. That can be a good thing in capable hands, but Hauser is definitely a scientist and not a writer. Some better editing and tightening of the text would've made this book a real winner. Finally, the link to linguistics, a main theme of the book, is a turn off for me personally as the linguistics field in no way interests me. However, one refreshing aspect is that he amdits its a theory. Sometimes I feel contemporary science books are too ready to start claiming themselves to be fact. Only get it if you can find it cheap, and hopefully Hausers honesty, enthusiasm and knowledge will get you past the poor writing, sadly it wasn't the case for me.

Trading Away Our Rights: Women Working in Global Supply Chains

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Trading Away Our Rights: Women Working in Global Supply Chains
Kate Raworth
Manufacturer: Oxfam Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Women's Studies | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Globalization | Politics | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
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Globalization and trade have drawn millions of women in developing countries into paid work. Their labor is contributing to rising global prosperity and to the profits of some of the world’s most powerful companies. But women workers are systematically being denied their fair share of the benefits from their labor. Failure to address this injustice will perpetuate a model of globalization that is failing poor people.

This report reveals the double standards at the heart of the corporate practices that are emerging under globalization. Companies’ demands for faster, more flexible, and cheaper production in their supply chains are undermining the very labor standards that they claim to be promoting. Women workers – and their families – pay the price. Many face insecure contracts, intense production pressure and intimidation in the workplace. Governments, competing to attract investment and boost exports, have too often exacerbated the problem. Instead of strengthening protection for labor rights, they have simply traded them away.

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Customer Reviews:

Great educational tool for dog owners.......1999-08-14

If you own a dog this book will help with the day to day care of your best friend. Even long time pet owners will find useful information in this book.

Book Description

When a greeting card just isn't enough...send something unique. It's as simple and inexpensive to mail as a card--but it's much more: an entire book to keep and treasure forever! Light as a feather, wonderfully personal, and colorfully visual, these small, self-enclosed little volumes go right into the mail with no wrapping required. Just write your dedication on the inside, address it on the back, seal the flap, stick on a stamp, and put it in the mailbox. Give one for holidays, for birthdays and anniversaries, for messages of cheer, or for any occasion when you want to remember friends and family. And, there's truly something for everyone: expressive dogs and cats for the animal lover; lush roses for the gardener; Monet's paintings for the art buff; a wine companion for the oenophile; and tributes to coffee, tea, chocolate, and more for the home chef--and Belle Époque nudes for...well, you know who! Each is a lasting value--for the recipient and the giver!

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The Studies of a Landscape Designer Over 80 Years. Volume III. Studies in Landscape Design. [Volume Three of Collected Works]
Geoffrey Jellicoe
Manufacturer: Woodbridge,: Garden Art Press, 1996
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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Book Description

In Understanding the Talmud: A Modern Reader's Guide for Study, Rabbi Edward S. Boraz presents a thoughtful introduction to the Talmud designed for study by the untrained reader. Using a unique approach, Rabbi Boraz focuses on a specific selection f

Customer Reviews:

Good Idea, Disappointing Execution.......2002-07-22

After reading a number of general introductions to the Talmud, I was looking for a book that would help me actually read the Talmud -- that is, take me through an extended passage line-by-line and explain what's going on. From the card catalogue description, "Understanding the Talmud" sounded like it fit the bill, and indeed part of the book does exactly what I wanted. Rabbi Boraz takes the reader through a complete sugya that proposes (and refutes and counter-refutes) various arguments offered in support of a particular statement of law (that if two witnesses testify to only part of a loan, the borrower is entitled to take an oath denying that he owes the remainder). He divides the passage up according to the various propositions advanced, providing his own translation (including an invaluable translation of the Rashi to this passage, something I have rarely seen elsewhere), and explaining how the various arguments work. As he goes through the argument, he does an excellent job of explaining background principles that are necessary to understand the argument. After going through the entire sugya once, a separate chapter discusses in more general terms the theological implications of the oath, the lender/borrower relationship, the role of admissions and witnesses, and the function of the court in Biblical and Midrashic sources. A third chapter then applies these general considerations to the specific arguments advanced in the sugya, deepening one's appreciation of the theological significance of the law under discussion. These three chapters are preceded by an excellent chapter that outlines very clearly the structure of several types of rabbinic argument -- the kal v'chomer, binyan av, gezerah shavah, and k'lal u'phrat -- all of which are used in the sugya under discussion.

Although there is a lot to like in this book, there are some significant problems as well. First of all, you are halfway through the book before you actually get to the discussion of the Talmud passage. Some of the introductory material (the discussion of the hermeneutical rules, in particular) is necessary and helpful, but the rest of it could and should have been condensed to about 20 pages.

A second problem was created for me by Rabbi Boraz' underlying assumption (sometimes stated explicitly) that the process the rabbis are engaged in in the Midrash, Mishnah and Talmud is one of objective, logical deduction from the first principles of the Torah. He goes so far as to define "hermeneutics" in the glossary as "the science of logic." I will grant that interpretive methods like the gezerah shavah can be applied logically once you adopt that method, but I do not think that *logic* requires you to agree that because the same phrase is used in two places, you can import all of the rules associated with one circumstance into the other. Nor does *logic* require that every phrase in the Torah have its own meaning, with no repetition allowed. Both of these are subjective interpretive choices that may make sense for all kinds of reasons -- but when presented as objective logic, I found myself fighting the arguments and being unpersuaded, even by positions I might have accepted if presented differently.

The most fundamental problem with "Understanding the Talmud," however, is that the scripturally based method of Talmud study advocated by Rabbi Boraz is not something that the beginning student can transfer on his own to the reading of other passages of Talmud. As noted above, Rabbi Boraz' approach is very helpful with things like understanding the structure of various rabbinic arguments, and that knowledge is certainly portable to other texts. And he succeeds in demonstrating that knowing the Torah and Midrash behind a given passage of Talmud can deepen your understanding of it. But unless you are already thoroughly familiar with Torah and Midrash, you will not know where to look for that additional deep background. In other words, what Rabbi Boraz really does here is prove that you need a teacher.

If you are looking for a general introduction to the Talmud, I would read Rabbi Steinsaltz' "The Essential Talmud" or the early chapters of Holtz' "Back to the Sources," rather than beginning with this. If you already have that background, then you can skip the first four chapters of this book, and just begin with the chapter on hermeneutics. Although "Understanding the Talmud" is not everything I wanted it to be, I can still recommend it because it does an excellent job of explicating the passage under discussion, and gives the reader some skills in analyzing rabbinic arguments that can be used for further reading on one's own.

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Reader's Guide to the Talmud
Jacob Neusner
Manufacturer: NY
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000N6C1TE

Book Description

Every month is showtime under the Big Top, and these babies are born performers. Get a ringside view of the pint-size stars and their acts in these amusing photographs by Jean Marie. Twelve month wall calendar features a new colorful image each month.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent photography & cute as a button subjects! .......2004-07-23

Classic baby shots, done with flair. Colorful and bright! The perfect calendar for new parents-babies love to look at other babies! Our baby smiles and giggles at each baby in this calendar. I highly recommend!

Fantastic calendar, well done, check out January!.......2004-07-16

This is a fantastic idea for a calendar, and done with taste and style. The babies are so adorable, the props and settings are first rate! I am buying several dozen to use as gifts! Baby Clown (January) is by far the cutest of the bunch!

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