Bookpedia : Library WWWisdom : Author : B

Summary: Problemi e prospettive di economia dell'alimentazione

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Summary: French cultural theory is known for its wordiness and complexity, and yet in 'The Poetics of Space', Bachelard largely transcends these potential pitfalls and instead produces a meditative, poetic book that was not what I expected. It is still theory, and so not a light read, but the daydreams and thoughts this book inspires whilst reading make it far from an arduous text. What makes this book special is its amazingly straightforward subject matter: the spaces in which we live - cellars, corners, wardrobes, shells - and reading it makes you wonder why there has been so little theoretical consideration of such an important aspect of human life. The synthesis of theory, literature and architecture in this book is an unusual one, but fascinating in its originality.
Bachelard approaches philosophy from the angle of poetry, using a number of different poets and writers to illustrate and expand upon his discussion of how people experience and think about the spaces we inhabit. Quite a different tack from most theory, but as he writes, "How much philosophers would learn, if they would consent to read the poets!" I'm not a fan of poetry, but I'll certainly be following up on a few poets quoted, especially Rilke - Bachelard discusses their work with real insight. Nonetheless, he writes phenomenology rather than literary criticism, yet the extensive use of quotation does not feel at all extraneous to his argument. 'The Poetics of Space' is perhaps aesthetic philosphy that integrates creativity and thought better than anything else I've read.
Why not five stars? It takes a little while to get into Bachelard's style, and the theory-dense introduction is not the easiest of openings. Nonetheless, as you acclimatise to his way of thought, the book gets better and better; the penultimate chapter on "intimate immensity" is a beautiful consideration of human fascination with deserts and the sea. I think it is a book I will be coming back to, and I suspect it will reveal itself more with each reading.

Summary: Kurz vor seinem 30. Geburtstag stürzt der Held dieser Erzählung in eine schwere Identitätskrise: Er verzweifelt an der Welt und vor allem auch an der Sprache. "Eine neue Sprache zu schaffen, die getaugt hätte, das Neue auszudrücken" , das wollte er schaffen. Die vorherrschende Sprache ist für ihn nur "Gaunersprache". Sein verzweifeltes, unentschlossenes Umherwandern umfasst alle Stadien der Auflösung und der Suche nach Sinn. Egal, in welchem Land er sich aufhält, immer fühlt er sich in der "Falle". Weder die Liebe noch ein bürgerlicher Beruf können ihn retten. Und sein alter Freund oder Begleiter Moll "die Laus im Pelz, der der eine Sprache hat" wird zum Inbegriff des Angepassten, Unechten. Mit dieser 1961 erschienenen Erzählung "Das dreißigste Jahr" aus dem gleichnamigen Erzählband wendet sich die brillante Lyrikerin Ingeborg Bachmann hin zur Prosa und vollzieht mit ihren eigenen Worten "einen Umzug im Kopf". Das Sprach-Thema war ihr ganzes Leben lang für sie von größter Bedeutung. Sie suchte eine "andere Sprache" für eine neue Welt. "Die Welt und er selbst schien sich kündbar."
Solche tiefen Sätze und die vielen lyrisch formulierten Grenzüberschreitungen brauchen besondere Sprecher. Der "König der Vorleser", Gert Westphal, und Oswald Döpke wechseln sich ab. Sicher ist: Wer nur ein klein wenig für Sprachmagie übrig hat, dem wird diese Aufnahme aus dem Jahr 1961 gefallen. Lesung ohne Musik, Spieldauer: 79 Minuten, 1CD. Mit Booklet.
"-- culture.text"

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Summary: An illustrated account of the development of urban form, from ancient Athens to modern Brasilia

Summary: Francis Bacon, Novum Organon
Francis Bacon, New Atlantis
Descartes. Rules for the Direction of the Mind
Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason
Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy
Descartes, Objections Against the Meditations, and Replies
Descartes, The Geometry
Spinoza, Ethics

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Summary: I suoi delitti, le sue prove, la sua liberazione

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Summary: L’amour maternel est-il un instinct qui procéderait d’une « nature féminine » ou bien relève-t-il largement d’un comportement social, variable selon les individus, les époques et les mœurs ? Tel est l’enjeu du débat qu’étudie ici Élisabeth Badinter, au fil d’une enquête historique très précise : à observer l’évolution du comportement maternel depuis quatre siècles, elle constate que l’intérêt et le dévouement pour l’enfant se manifestent – ou ne se manifestent pas. La tendresse existe – ou n’existe pas. Aussi choquant que cela puisse paraître, le sentiment maternel est un sentiment humain, incertain et fragile. Ce dévoilement d’une contingence de l’amour maternel suscita des réactions passionnées lors de la première publication du livre, en 1980 : les uns y virent une aberration, remettant scandaleusement en question le concept de nature ; les autres y trouvèrent une véritable libération, l’occasion d’une meilleure compréhension de la maternité et d’une reconnaissance de la multiplicité des expériences féminines. Trente ans après, L’Amour en plus est toujours un livre nécessaire et dérangeant, tant il est vrai que nous avons changé de vocabulaire, mais pas d’illusions.

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Summary: I wasn't much prepared to like this book. Dr Penny Sparke, the Royal College of Art's design history guru and a specialist on Memphis and all movements Italian, says she was called in by the publishers to rewrite Stephen Bayley's prose; nevertheless she has pulled her name off the finished product in disgust. Instead, the Editor has himself been edited by Stephen Adamson and Sarah Bevan, and no less than four pictures people, plus a design consultancy, are responsible for the look of the finished product. With hyperbole and ungrammatically mixed singulars and plurals evident in the dust-jacket blurb, all the omens suggest that a dog's dinner lies in store.
But in fact the book is pretty good. The writing is crisp and unpretentious, from Sir Terence's foreword and Bayley's introduction, through the seven historical chapters, to the A-to-Z of designers and designs. There is a little repetition but few typographical errors. Some of the pictures are a bit too familiar but many are a pleasure, whether large (the paintings that preface each chapter) or small (the sensationalist cover to Vance Packard's 1960 attack on planned obsolescence, The Wastemakers. The blue, dropped-in quotations on design are fresh.
Altogether, the book gives intelligent newcomers to design a commendably succinct overview of the subject. Compared with the Penguin Dictionary of Design and Designers and Edward Lucie-Smith's A History of Industrial Design (Phaidon), the Directory is modern in focus, which is a relief. Compared with the Macmillan's £50 Dictionary of Contemporary Designers, all microdot print and monochrome photographs, Bayley and designers Mel Petersen Associates have turned up trumps. It is customary to savage books such as these for their subjective preferences and for the people or things they leave out. But the directory says at the outset that it is biased and not comprehensive.
There is little here on interiors. But although the book is mainly about the industrial design of consumer products, interior designers and architects should still read it. The historical section is well organised: broadly, there are three chapters on England before the First World War, then one each on Germany in the 1920s, America in the 1930s, post-war Italy and 1980s Japan.
Nevertheless the book is open to two criticisms. First, the 20th century's great shift from mass production to mass consumption is presented too baldly. It is true that in the post-war boom the West entered a situation in which design became a tool for expressing consumer lifestyle; true, too, that as a result design became part of the manufacturer's marketing mix. But mass consumption has always had its limits in the Third World. Today it is also reaching its limits in the West.
Anyway, most consumer products operate in the context of female domestic work in suburban interiors. The directory ignores the fact that most `mass consumption' is in face mass unpaid production by women, and the fact that domestic appliances have failed to cut down the hours spent in domestic work. A problem with the book is that although the entries for `Taylorism' and `Fordism' overlap, there is nothing on home economics, the largely unsuccessful application of these theories in the house.
The other problem with the book is of a piece with this. There is too little attention to capital goods, and little coverage of office equipment. The discussion on typewriters is weak on function, there is but one reference to computers, and Bürolandschaft does not receive a mention. These are the products and principles that facilitate `mass production' today, and they need to be looked at in greater depth.
A good thing about the book is that London's Central School of Art & Design is given an entry of its own: 'it remains one of Britain's leading industrial design schools', the text reads, which is true and, given all the hype about RCA industrial designers, needs saying. Odd things about the book? Russian Constructivism is held to have ended in 1921; Memphis and Studio Alchymia to have begun in the late 1970s. Marx gains a one-line plaudit for having systematised political economy, whereas he thought he had destroyed it; on another page, Saussure wins a full plug for his contribution to linguistics - surely a discipline less relevant to design than economics?
On page 99, my late father, Lewis, is credited in a picture caption with designing the corporate identity of the Royal Bank of Scotland. He did no such thing. I suspect that this is the only serious error in the book.
From Designers' Journal, January 1986

Summary: Le titre de mon commentaire n'est pas provocateur, mais très sérieux.
En voici la raison: presque tout le monde pense savoir ce qu'est l'anarchie, et donc l'anarchisme, or il s'avère que l'immense majorité des gens se méprennent sur le sens même du mot anarchisme. Après cette lecture vous aurez peut-être l'immense surprise de vous dire: "mais c'est de moi qu'on parle ici...!".
En 200 pages clairement rédigées, Normand Baillargeon répare brillamment cette distorsion sémantique et cette méprise, dont la faute est imputable à plusieurs facteurs dont voici les principaux:
-Toute forme d'autorité (Etat, etc.) a intérêt à utiliser le terme d'"anarchie" en lieu et place du terme "anomie" (chaos, désordre, désorganisation, etc.), de façon à le discréditer.
-L'idée d'anarchisme a donné naissance à une nébuleuse de différents mouvements anarchistes parmi lesquels il est souvent difficile de s'y retrouver.
-Les anarchistes eux-mêmes ont souvent eu le tort de se replier sur eux-mêmes, de ne pas rendre leurs idées compréhensibles, tolérantes, ouvertes, et surtout concrètes et applicables, et par conséquent aimables et défendables.

Le développement de ce livre est composé de 4 parties :
1- Les racines de l'anarchisme,
2- Les anarchistes notables (Godwin, Stirner, Proudhon, Bakounine, Kropotkine, Chomsky, et autres), et les différentes formes d'anarchismes,
3- Les faits et lieux de l'anarchisme (la commune de Paris, la guerre d'Espagne, mai 1968, etc.),
4- Les positions défendues par l'anarchisme (du point de vue de l'économie, l'écologie, l'éducation, les médias, l'éthique, etc.).

Cet ouvrage peut aussi bien constituer une excellente introduction à la compréhension de l'anarchisme, qu'une synthèse limpide pour ceux qui auraient lu des auteurs anarchistes anciens ou récents de façon éparse.

La conclusion, qui est une citation de Noam Chomsky, est honnête et lucide. Elle place la liberté, l'anti-autoritarisme et le bien-être humain (de tous les humains) au sein des préoccupations de l'anarchisme.
On est à des années lumières de la froide et stupide imposture intellectuelle, chère notamment à Madame Thatcher, qui consiste à prétendre qu'il n'existe pas d'alternative au capitalisme et au libéralisme économique. A travers cette sentence définitive s'exprime une insulte à l'intelligence et à la créativité humaine!

A lire, pour au moins s'informer et s'ouvrir des horizons de réflexions. Voire plus si affinités...car d'après Baillargeon "Il revient aux anarchistes de proposer des visions (valable pour la culture, la politique, la société) et de les diffuser dans une perspective non dogmatique et dans un esprit de tolérance, d'espoir et d'invitation à la discussion."

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Summary: L'economia del Terzo Mondo tra il XIX e il XX secolo

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Summary: An intermediate pronunciation course

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Summary: This is a great book. The editor obviously loved doing this job. You can see how much time he spent and the translations are fabulous. Even the footnotes are fun to read. I liked the introduction too, and the index is really comprehensive and useful.

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Summary: Introduzione all'antropologia dinamista

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Summary: Are there any "laws of nature" that influence the ways in which humans behave and organize themselves? In the seventeenth century, tired of the civil war ravaging England, Thomas Hobbes decided that he would work out what kind of government was needed for a stable society. His approach was based not on utopian wishful thinking but rather on Galileo's mechanics to construct a theory of government from first principles. His solution is unappealing to today's society, yet Hobbes had sparked a new way of thinking about human behavior in looking for the "scientific" rules of society.

Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Auguste Comte, and John Stuart Mill pursued this idea from different political perspectives. Little by little, however, social and political philosophy abandoned a "scientific" approach. Today, physics is enjoying a revival in the social, political and economic sciences. Ball shows how much we can understand of human behavior when we cease to try to predict and analyze the behavior of individuals and instead look to the impact of individual decisions-whether in circumstances of cooperation or conflict-can have on our laws, institutions and customs.

Lively and compelling, "Critical Mass" is the first book to bring these new ideas together and to show how they fit within the broader historical context of a rational search for better ways to live.

Summary: The most important thing to realise about this book is that "... no material changes have been made since the issue of the second edition in 1893". As if the date were not bad enough, the author has taken the decision to not write about mathematicians who were still alive at the time of writing. Thus the 19th century is not fully covered, or rather I should say scantly covered.
The first 100 pages or so are concerned with early geometry and somehow it just seemed deadly dull. The last 50 or so pages seemed to be just listings of mathematicians who had done stuff, and was equally dull. It is the centre section of this work which is worthy of mention. It is not just the chronology of events that is important; one needs a feeling of the personalities and problems of the mathematicians involved. The author supplies these with great skill. Thus the core of the book is sound, interesting and authoritative.
Perhaps my only objection to the style involved is the use of quotations in French and Latin. Whilst a century ago the reader may well have been fully conversant with Latin and French, I doubt that this is the case now. Whilst I understand the author's natural desire to present the material without the additional "distance" of a translation, I think a full page of Latin is going rather too far! I think that the modern reader would, like me, prefer to skim over these foreign language parts, rather than dive in and translate them. Even the simple Latin phrase "urbi et orbi" took several dictionaries to decode (meaning "to the city and to the world", ie to everyone). Thus one feels that the author had something important to say at one of these foreign language quotations, but whatever it was got missed by the reader.
Whilst in its day this history was no doubt well received, I feel that it is dated by its date! The language used is very clear and readable, it is just that I think a more modern version, fully covering the 19th century and at least the first part of the 20th century, if such a history exists, may now be preferable. Having said that, I have a horrible feeling that the mathematics of the 20th century may be so obscure and abstract as to be unintelligible to the non-mathematician.
Leslie Green CEng MIEE

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Summary: Saggi sullo squilibrio e gli scambi internazionali

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Summary: Living in a world of three dimensional space makes it hard for us to conceive fourth dimension and it gets even harder to visualize the fifth and higher dimension. Superstring theorists predict the existence of 10th and 26th dimensions in universe; hence it seems reasonable for many of us to understand how it would be like to be living in fourth dimension. Thomas Banchoff is one of the leaders in the study of higher dimension using computer graphics; he has illustrated fourth dimension using basic geometrical approach such as slicing the spatial dimension, observing the shadows of structures, comparing the folded and foldout versions of polytops and description of configuration of spaces. This book is useful for someone who appreciates geometry, but for a reader who likes to visualize the fourth dimension he/she may read Clifford Pickover's Surfing through Hyperspace, which does a better job in illustrating fourth dimension.

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Summary: Reviewing this from the perspective of a lay reader who just wants to understand better how economic forces work (or don't work} this is a well put together and well written work. The cross referencing helps to understand some of the more obscure concepts and the style is crisp and clear throughout.

Summary: A very accessible book, which gently grounds the reader in the history of graph theory and networks without any pain, and then illustrates the applications and subsequent discoveries of this field through a number of diverse examples - the Internet; Hollywood; corporations; medicine.
There are 40pages of notes in the back of the book which open up a whole world of discovery on how networks can alter thinking and understanding in so many fields of interest.
Given that networks are such a visually appealing topic, it would have been nice to have had more illustrations in this book.

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Summary: Most of Barnard's career was spent in executive practice. A Mount Hermon and Harvard education, cut off short of the bachelor's degree, was followed by nearly forty years in the American Telephone & Telegraph Company. His career began in the Statistical Department, took him to technical expertness in the economics of rates and administrative experience in the management of commercial operations, and culminated in the presidency of the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company. He was not directly involved in the Western Electric experiments conducted chiefly at the Hawthorne plant in Cicero, but his association with Elton Mayo and the latter's colleagues at the Harvard Business School had an important bearing on his most original ideas.
Barnard's executive experience at AT&T was paralleled and followed by a career in public service unusual in his own time and hardly routine today. He was at various times president of the United Services Organization (the USO of World War II), head of the General Education Board and later president of the Rockefeller Foundation (after Raymond Fosdick and before Dean Rusk), chairman of the National Science Foundation, an assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury, a consultant to the American representative in the United Nations Atomic Energy Committee, to name only some of his public interests. He was a director of a number of companies, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was a lover of music and a founder of the Bach Society of New Jersey.

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Summary: Entering the 21st Century

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Summary: Selected Papers from the Proceedings of the First, Second, and Third University of Utah Conferences

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Summary: A good analysis of the history of welfare in Britain and it's effects on society that isn't blinded by abstract socialist ideology and dogma, but rather takes a very pragmatic look at the successes and failures of welfare over the past few hundred years.
What makes this book particularly interesting is that the modern welfare state is put into historical perspective, as the author himself points out: few people today are familiar with what came before the post-WWII welfare state. Also good is the comparison of the performance of our modern welfare state with other European nations which have traditionally been considered more socialist than Britain, but which it turns out have far more mixed systems than pure state-run Britain.

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Summary: This book is a fascinating beginning to understanding memory and how our schemas affect the way we view the world. Bartlett's book is an interesting read although sometimes hard to get through and his ideas have not grown outdated and remain as relevant now as when this book was published. This book is an absolutely must have for those interested in or studying Psychology.

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Summary: The classic manual on all aspects of research and writing

Summary: Rapporto da un ospedale psichiatrico

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Summary: La pizza
La pastasciutta
La minestra
La focaccia
Il risotto
La polenta
L'insalata
Il fritto
L'arrosto
Il contorno
La torta
Il dolce al cucchiaio
Il gelato

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Summary: 1. 1939
2. 1940
3. 1941
4. 1942
5. 1943
6. 1944
7. 1945

Summary: 1. La prima guerra mondiale
2. Tra le due guerre
3. Le conquiste tedesche
4. Le sconfitte dell'Asse
5. La vittoria alleata
6. La guerra fredda
7. La guerra permanente
8. La guerra moderna

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Summary: The Idea and Reality of British and French Colonial Expansion, 1880-1914

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