ERA Reviews

Nat Willis-- a man of his times, a man for our time? I loved this roguish tale! Baker has slavishly peeled away layer upon layer of this most American onion, this slice of the American pie, this antibellum antihero whose antics and excesses are still a hoot in our 'modern' society. Couldn't put it down. Expensive, though-- and too bad the pictures weren't bigger.

De Santis is the preeminent scholar on this period of American history. His book, in all its earlier editions, has been a standard
in this field for many years. It would be difficult to improve upon this book. If it has a shortcoming, it is that the book is too brief. Many readers will find that an attribute rather than a detracting feature. It is an excellent introduction to the period, giving a fine cross-section of the multiple issues of this most complex time in American history. One could easily make the case that this era is the most forgettable, least interesting, and therefore most difficult to grasp intellectually of any era in American history. Considering that argument, one could also reasonably conclude that there has yet to be written a genuinely comprehensive yet readable account of this period. Until one is written, De Santis's book will suffice.

A thorough, if somewhat dry (makes the wall street journal look like a Sweet Valley High novel) treatment of modern semiconductor fabrication processes. This text is intended as a detailed overview of the processes involved in semiconductor design, particularly MOS technologies. In this regard it works well, through it shouldn't be considered a reference manual for the wafer fabrication engineer. A good summary for people who, like myself, work in the semiconductor industry, but do not deal with the details of fabrication processes on a daily basis.

The emphasis here is upon the "class" tensions within the slave South and between the North with its "wage labor" and the South with its slave labor. Far too many historians in recent years have been afraid to use the concepts of "class" and "capitalism" for fear of being tainted with the brush of Marxism. But these are clearly terms and concepts the abolitionists and the pro-slavery thinkers themselves used in their attempts to make sense of their world. Ashworth does an admirable job of employing these concepts while avoiding the pitfalls of dogmatism and economic reductionism. He draws inspiration from Antonio Gramsci's concept of "hegemony" to provide his class and material analysis with a balance that emphasizes the complexities of human motivation.

The author clearly reveals the points at which the slave system was in inner conflict and shows how the southern attempts to provide an intellectual defense of slavery were doomed to fail because of the conflicts and tensions within the southern class system. He goes on to detail the ideology and the foundations of the Jacksonian Democrats, the Whig Party, and the Republican Party and in the process gives the reader a balanced perspective on the forces that led to the Civil War. This is a book that should be read by anyone interested in why the two sections of the country were so different and came to think of themselves as different peoples.

Calmly and with much use of statistics, Tadman utterly smashes any idea that the master-slave relationship might have been truly paternal or any good at all for the slaves. This book starts slowly but leads to a strong, harsh conclusion: slave owners had virtually no regard for their slaves' family lives or happiness. It includes many good tables and historic illustrations.

This book was very enlightening and insightful on the practice of law in the 40's, 50's and 60's. It brought to life an era of controversy and injustice within an evolving America. It helps to explain these disruptive years of anti-communism and racial injustice amid the political struggles of a partisan society.

This is a great astrology book for anyone who is still a little fuzzy on the character traits or the 12 suns signs. I've read a lot of sun sign books but this one clears up many misconceptions and gives a much more indepth look at each sign. Each chapter includes over ten pages on basic characteristics as well as sections on Career & direction, what each sun sign is like in a parenting role and in childhood. It's easy to read and understand. I definitly recommend it to anyone at all curious about astrology, for serious study or just for fun!

Steve and Cathy Marks have written a book that has been needed for a long time. For those of us into Swinging or curious about it they have answered a lot of questions about how, where and what to expect. Thank you very much for raising our understanding and comfort level.

This is a difficult book. People will find it repetitive and others will find it narrowily sourced. Yet the book offers an important account of a change of transcendent importance. People have often talked about the rise of modern individualism in the prologue and aftermath of the American revolution. Sobel, however, offers a much more radical thesis. What the years from 1740 to 1840 saw was the rise of a radical new sense of SELF. Previous our inner persona had been passive and communal. People often went through lives believing they did not have choices. But in the triumph of the American revolution and the rise of a new market society, the self became ostentatiously active and individualist. The very concept that we use to see ourselves is a relatively recent invention. (pp. 3-7) Sobel's specific contribution is to examine dreams. Recent research on dreams suggests that elements of dream correlate with the amount that one is individualist. Studies of dreams in Nazi Germany suggest that people started supported the Nazis in their dreams before they supported them consciously. (p. 10) At the time Sobel's study begins dreams were of particular importance to people as signs or portents, though by the end of our period they were viewed as comparatively unimportant.

The rise of the self is not the unmitigated triumph of individualist freedom. Quite the contrary, for concepts of the self are often defined in hostility, and increasingly hatred of the abstracted, reified "Other." Increasingly many whites viewed themselves in opposition to blacks. Yet at the same time blackface reflected the envy of proletarianized whites for what they saw as the laziness and abandon of African-Americans. (p. 97) Blacks in turn often viewed whites with hatred, yet had to keep their opinions to themselves for fear of violent retaliation. Meanwhile men faced the struggles of increasing dependence by emphasizing their own individuality while idealizing women and children (pp. 160-63). The costs of these idealizations was to deny women part of their sexuality (p. 225), to depoliticize them as part of the politicization of public life. At the same time men were placed in a peculiar new emotional world: on the one hand the more "emotional" style of African-Americans seeped into evangelical religious practices. On the other hand, crying, once an expected mark of masculine true emotion in the eighteenth century, was now seen as a sign of effeminate weakness (p. 142). As a consequence modernity is built upon a sense of otherness that is based on racial and gender inequality.

A very important hypothesis, with many stimulating implications. I would like to point out some demurrals. Sobel's work is based on roughly two hundred dream memoirs which, while impressive, is only a fraction of the American population. Moreover, this sample is often tilted to the minority of evangelicals and relatively small religious sects which concentrated on the production of such works. Similar problems of proportion arises from the somewhat untypical women Sobel studies who wrote down their paths to individuality. Much of Sobel's chapter on whites images of slaves deals with the even smaller minority of Quakers who were able to reject slavery and achieve a certain sense of empathy and maturity. This account does not deal so much with the many whites in the North who rarely if ever saw blacks and yet relatively little qualms in supporting slavery. Back in the sixties Orlando Patterson criticized James Baldwin in the New Left Review for failing to recognize the strong sense for many Americans that blacks are not existing, the sense of absence from their lives. (A process, of course, encouraged by segregation.) This deserves as much emphasis as the neurotic obsession about the other. More could be said about the economic and social background Still, this is an important work that clearly is deserving of more research. One wonders how E. Roger Ekirch's upcoming history of sleep will deal with this problem. We applaud our capacity for moral choice, yet its origins are afflicted with hatred.

Throwing Chairs & Raising Hell is a must for political junkies who want to know how organized politics can save liberty. It is also a must for individuals who have a desire to seek public office or to remove some clown from public office.

The book is in three basic parts. Part One is a history of L. Keith Bulen's leadership as a political leader - a man whose plan turned Indianapolis into a thriving city from what was once called Indy-no-place. He jumped started the careers of such statesmen as Senator Richard Lugar. He held key positions in the campaigns of President Ronald Reagan & much more.

Part Two is a series of essays from such as President George Bush and other leaders from the Nixon through Reagan eras. Part Three is a campaign plan setting out the essentials for any citizen to seek and win public office.

Campaign management, political philosophy, backroom strategy, loyalty, tradition, hard work, volunteerism, and much more are covered in this book.