Will and Ariel Durant shine again in their seventh book of their history of European civilization. The given detailed attention to Shakespeare, Elizabeth I, Henri Quarte, Phillip II, Montaigne and many others.

The prose sparkles with wit, verve, pith and an unflagging interest and love for the subject of history and the homeland of my ancestors.

Highly recommended.

7th volume in Durant's great Story of Civilization, this chronicles European history from the reign of Elizabeth I to the Thirty Years War, including the stories of Mary Queen of Scotts, Henry IV of France, and Cardinel Richelieu.

This is simply a fantastic presentation of the historical, theological, and philosophical background of the Reformation. This book apparently won the 1981 "Philip Schaff Prize of the American Society of Church History" award, and is certainly worthy of it. Ozment traces the course of scholasticism, mysticism, monasticism, the papacy, humanism, etc., all in a masterful way that shows how these diverse and complex movements culminated in the Reformation. The text is well documented, and, thankfully, uses footnotes rather than endnotes so one does not have to constantly turn to the end of the book to view the source of a citation. In my opinion this is one of the best works on intellectual and church history that I have ever read. Be warned, however, this book is not for the feint hearted. It is definitely a graduate level text, or for the serious student of the late Medieval and Reformation periods.

Ozment does a wonderful job of showing that the story of the Reformation does NOT begin with the posting of the 95 theses in 1517. Rather, the events of the 1500s were the culmination of a centuries-old search for truth. Ozment's account of the Reformation as something unfolding out of the Middle Ages is much more instructive than the standard view, which treats the Reformation as a starting point for this or that development. This book grounds Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and Ignatius firmly in the tradition of medieval scholastic, mystic, and ecclesio-political thought, as well as Renaissance humanism. Additional chapters are devoted to clerical marriage and resistance to tyranny, two legacies of Protestantism that Ozment finds particularly compelling. To top it off, the author has obviously done his homework; every significant interpretation by previous scholars receives due note here. I think this should the FIRST book anyone reads on the Reformation.

This book is an excellent summary of the critical period when the old feudal Europe was swept away, and the modern industrial Europe was born. It begins describing the philosophes of the ancien regime, and ends with the Communist Manifesto. In between, it builds the bridge between the two.

Breunig descibes each of the major European powers (England, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and of course France), how their status quo was disrupted by the French Revolution and Napoleon, then how their reactionary governments tried, ultimately in vain, to stem the tide of revolution that swept Europe in the 1820's through 1850. One fascinating passage describes how the post-Napoleonic European leaders, desperately sick of war, struck a careful balance of power among themselves to ensure a steady, yet fragile, peace. Yet while maintaining this, the sovereigns (or most of them) ruthlessly crushed their internal conflicts, sometimes willingly accepting help from neighbors and formal rivals.

This book is especially interesting to Americans looking to understand the relationships between European countries and the roots of modern Europe.

Charles Breunig does a masterful job of painting a picture of a growing, developing Europe, in what many believe was the most remarkable period in European history.

Breunig's scholarship and narrative style notwithstanding, the illustrations are excellent in providing a stimulating historical perspective.

One expects that the French Revolution would be the centerpoint, but excellent pre-revolution observations and post-revolution results are treated as well. Breunig shows how the Industrial Revolution, in resource rich England, was the begining and the various European Revolutions were the results. The section on Russia and its gradual revolution is excellent on several fronts, not the least of which as a partial explanation for the second revolution in the early 20th century.

"Revolutionary Europe" is an excellent reading experience for anyone from someone looking to be introduced to this exciting period to graduate student. Breunig's dry wit make this an enjoyable experience.

Anthropology grabbed me early and it has never let go. Why do people behave so differently from one another ? Why are they so similar too ? What would I have been if I had been born in Afghanistan instead of in Boston ? What would my life have looked like if I were an Australian Aborigine ? Why would I think what I think ? These and a myriad other questions intrigue me like no others. Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist, often strikes the theme of "I want to be somebody else, therefore I am." This resonates very well with me. Finally, though, you can only be whatever you are. Travelling, working abroad, making friends among different peoples---these help you answer some of those questions, but only in part. Reading ethnographies, village studies, autobiographies, or novels can also provide some answers. When such books are excellent, you plunge into somebody else's world and emerge changed---you have almost known what it is to be somebody else. When those books are about lives that began many decades before yours, you open a corridor to the past, as well.

Ronald Blythe's AKENFIELD is one of the best ethnographies that I have ever read, and I have read a lot. It certainly does not fit the academic mold and perhaps never figured in many anthropology course reading lists. More's the pity. Blythe, from East Anglia in England, wrote this beautiful, penetrating study of an East Anglia village in the 1960s. It is constructed almost entirely as narratives by the inhabitants, ranging from WW I veterans to housewives, young farm laborers to schoolteachers. Bellringers, blacksmiths, and the vet--the list of characters is comprehensive. Blythe gives description when needed and added a short, almost lyrical introduction, but has worked the interviews into a seamless whole. Arguments could be made that AKENFIELD is more social history than anthropology, but this is a barren field to sow. As the years go by, all anthropology turns into social history, as the world changes and leaves memories of what used to be. I would say that this book is one of the handful that inspired me to write anthropology, that encouraged me to avoid the jargon-strewn wastelands of academic strivings. I have never been able to reach the heights of AKENFIELD, but it has stayed with me for thirty years. Who could give this book enough stars ?

Ronald Blythe's Akenfield is a book about the past. And approaching the past always involves both sadness and exhilaration. The latter because, rightly or wrongly, we see ourselves in the past, feel at home there, and know the pleasure of its kinship; the former because we know the past is irretrievably lost, its faces vanished, its words and songs and experiences, its life and laughter, its sharp pain and flashes of joy irredeemably gone.

This is the experience of the reader in Akenfield. And this is the book's blessing. Even after thirty years, Blythe's book about the people who live in a small rural village in Suffolk, who told him candidly and completely the history of their lives and their village, restores to us a world we still know, but barely. It reminds us of an England that--along with single-family farms, hedgerows, village pubs, and rural silence--has seen its time pass, and its depth and flavor lost.

But neither the book nor the people whose lives are captured in its pages should be romanticized. That would be injustice. Akenfield is peopled by characters from farrier to farm student, from ploughman to pig farmer, from saddler to schoolmaster, who without adornment or pretension tell the stories of their lives, of its bitterness and struggle, along with its victories and unexpected moments of pleasure. We hear the voices of the nurse, the schoolteacher, the poet, the wheelwright. We hear the magistrate, the apple-picker, and the gravedigger.

These are the voices--and the lives--of the generations that came before us. Voices of the Great War and after, of the growing middle class between the wars, of the incursion into rural existence of electricity, the telephone, the main road to Ipswich and then London, of the Second World War and the soldiers' return. They are familiar, they are friendly. They are also heartrending, and the lives they tell--particularly of conditions in agrarian English society in the early 20th century--can be appalling.

Yet this is also a magical work, a work of art--one invaluable to any ethnographer but transcending ethnography or anthropology because of its simple humanity. The book's preface refers in passing to the Domesday Book of 1086; and, because Blythe insists on remaining a recorder instead of an author--because he transcribes the words of others instead of describing what they say--he has created consciously or not a documentary history of life and society at the end of our last millennium as similarly important as we received from the Normans at its beginning.

Akenfield is a remarkable, enduring achievement; it surely stands as one of the finest examples in English history of the living, breathing spirit of late 19th- and early 20th-century culture.

In this brilliantly-researched study, Peter Busch examines the Conservative government's policy towards the US war against Vietnam for the years 1961 to 1963. The author, who formerly worked at the Public Record Office at Kew, has thoroughly mined newly available records from Britain, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Germany. He also shows how British policy towards Vietnam related to wider policy towards South-East Asia, especially towards Indonesia. In both cases, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan ruled out negotiated settlements and preferred to use force.

Busch shows how Macmillan fully backed President Kennedy's aggressive military build-up in Vietnam, 'a clear breach' of the Geneva agreements, while advising him to conceal it. Macmillan pretended to be a peacemaker, while actually supporting the US war. He aimed to keep Britain's 'great power' status and prove its value as a US ally.

As co-chairman of the International Control Commission set up by the 1954 Geneva Conference, the British state abused its role in order to support the illegal, dictatorial Diem regime in the south. It backed up Diem's unwarranted claims that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was responsible, 'whether there was evidence or not', for starting the civil war in the south. It used these claims to rule out the DRV's call for reconvening the Conference to negotiate the peaceful reunification of Vietnam.

Macmillan helped the US counter-insurgency effort, setting up the British Advisory Mission in 1961. British forces also trained Diem's troops in Malaysia. In 1962, the British Ambassador to Saigon urged the USA to 'crush and eradicate the Viet Cong'.

The British government only dropped Diem when it discovered that his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, was willing to discuss peace with the DRV. It then backed the US coup against Diem that sabotaged the chances of peacefully reunifying Vietnam.

Busch concludes that the British government did not pursue peace. "Britain supported the American policy in Vietnam wholeheartedly. The British only wanted to 'sell' this policy in a different, less confrontational way." Plus ca change! This superb book vindicates all those who opposed the US aggression against Vietnam.

This book is an excellent addition to the literature on the Vietnam war, providing us with a new perspective. It is full of novel information but still easy to read, which is quite an achievement. It is particularly interesting -- given the current political situation -- to learn how eager the British government was to support Kennedy's Vietnam policy. This is a real revelation.
The book's approach is truly international, and the research is more than impressive. Among the archives the author used are the national archive of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US, and of course Britain.

This is the best travel book there is ....I too have had the same book for 9 years and its information is still the best....I wish they would do an update....

I've been using this book since 1984. The small size and clear maps make this easy to carry. My current copy is so dog-eared and I've been looking for it's update. By chance, I ordered the Travel & Leisure Paris and found it to be the same format, similar size and with the same clear maps (copyright 1997). For those of you looking to update your Paris guides the new book could be a good substitute for an old favorite. I leave for Paris again in 2 weeks, and I'll pack the new book along with the old for further comparison.

A very sophisticated piece of work. With great insght into many medical/historical perceptions and social mechanisms!
Absolutely Stunning!

P.S: Looking forward to another one.

A disquieting and destabilising experience is what I was left with after reading Butchart's Anatomy of Power. On beginning the book, I at first thought that it was just another social history, albeit incredibly detailed in its probing of what doctors did in the name of science. But, as a I read on, the commanding thesis of the work took ever greater shape, and by the end I was as convinced as Butchart is of the argument that without the socio-medical sciences there can be no bodies at all. This leaves one with a real dilemma in terms of what to do in terms of liberation and the struggle against oppression. While the book doesn't answer this key question, it surely poses it with a greater degree of lucidity and insight than many other books about Africa, colonialism and liberation.

Highly recommended!

Daniel Kuhlmann, Stockholm

I am a former Russian journalist and a documentary filmmaker who has also worked at NASA in the US.

"The Anatomy of Russian Defense Conversion" touches on many more subjects then just Russian Defense Industry. This is a very thorough, informative and important work that analyses the history of US and Russian Defense Industries, weapons exports and conversion, and possibilities of transformation from a militarized to a civilian economy in the new millenium.

The book also reflects on the current state of defense industries in the US and Russia, and "brain drain", or loss of intellectual capital in Russia and other countries after the Cold War.

I found reflections in Arkady Yarovsky's chapter "From the Culture of War to the Culture of Peace" very contemporary, especially in the light of recent events in the Middle East:

"Our time is unfortunately still characterized as "the culture of war." The culture of war is evident first and foremost in the hostilities between people and states, between nations and faiths, and in the inability to solve conflicts by peaceful means... Humanity has made it into the third millenium because the lust for power has been restrained by fear of nuclear war, but this restraint is not to be counted on permanently... The danger hidden in the separateness of people of different countries, unfortunately, remains a legacy for the next century... If humanity renounces the legacy of the culture of war, it can start down the road of cooperation, peaceful creation, and enlightenment. This is the only road leading to the culture of peace."

One can imagine that I, as a small child living in San Antonio, Texas, next to three Air Force bases and an Army base, living through the Cuban missile crisis, thought about the threat of the Russian military. I also met my parents' wonderful emigre' friends, and to this day have had warm relations with Russian people.

This book tells of the enormous cost to the Russian people of building and maintaining their war industry for so many years, a militarized economy where people got second best. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, defense industry just about shut down, but civilian industry has not grown great enough to support the population. There are horrendous unemployment, and terrible health and social problems. There is some danger that the path of least resistance for Russia, if we neglect the situation, could be to re-start weapons production, for export at first.

In my opinion, the United States also, to a lesser degree, has neglected the manufacture of quality consumer goods, importing them instead, and has let its physical economy deteriorate, despite much activity in the financial sector. We, too, have been insufficiently careful of the environment. This book provides some idea of what these trends could lead to, if carried to extremes.

Perhaps the involvement of United States companies in Russia, could lead to more of a recognition here, of the importance of the physical economy. Hopefully, both countries could also work to put industry on a healthy environmental footing as well.

There is awareness of the problem of Russian defense conversion, at high levels of our government. I hope this book helps educate people and sustain that interest.

I purchased a pocket size copy of this book in Rome on holiday It was great help to understand what we were looking at and we could see how it did look in the past. When we got home it was great helping us understanding and labeling our own pictures. I even included past pictures next to the ones I had taken to complete my own album. It is great when watching our videos and people ask what different buildings are.

Marylou

Ancient Rome: Monuments Past and Present is a very interesting book. It is very useful in visually learning about the monuments of Rome such as: the Colosseum, the individual buildings in the Forum, the Circus Maximus, Hadrian's castle, and other ancient ruins. The pictures and models are very useful in comparing and contrasting the present to the past. However, this book is not ideal for finding extremely in-depth information on each ruin, only the general is covered. I would definately recommend this book for someone visiting Rome or a curious intellectual striving for more knowledge in a fun way.

The word Holocaust is most often associated with Europe's Jews and Germany's Nazi murderous policy for making the world "Juden frei" [free of Jews]. However, there is another "race" of people the Nazi's declared as inferior, "untermenschen," Europe's Gypsies. Although they were assigned the historical label of Aryan by Nazi anthropologists, Gypsies were officially decreed to be undesirable for the Nazi World Order. When Germany's Wehrmacht invaded and then occupied Poland, the SS began rounding up the Romany people (Gypies) after all the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto had been moved to Auschwitz to be worked and starved to death or simply gassed and then incinerated.

Alexander Ramati tells the story of the Gypsy Holocaust in his exhaustively well researched book. AND THE VIOLINS STOPPED PLAYING follows the fate of a Romany family which had taken up a nearly middle class life in Warsaw, Poland. The children attended school, and 17 year old Roman Mirga had one more year of study before he graduates from high school. Indeed, this is the true story taken from Roman's diary and notes of how his family together with 500,000 Gypsies suffered the same fate as Europe's Jews under Germany's expanding program of ethnic cleansing throughout the European continent.

The Mirga family had became intergrated, if not assimilated, into the Polish society of the 1930s. Roman's family were musicians who entertained the public in a Warsaw night club (favored by German officers) and coffee houses. When the German army invaded Poland, everything would become changed forever. At first, the Gypsies were ignored by the Germans as the SS herded Poland's Jews into the Warsaw Ghetto or simply murdered them outside of the towns and villages where they had lived. But after most of Poland's Jews had been eliminated it was the Gypsies' turn, and the Mirga family realized that they had to flee for their lives.

It was turning winter as our Warsaw family of Gypsies join their tribe wintering along the Bug River. They try to convince the tribal leader, called the Shero Rom, that the Germans intend to round them up and treat them the same way as the Jews. The Shero Rom does not believe these Bareforytka Roma (big town Gypsies), and will not even begin to consider a plan to move his tribe to safety in Hungary in the middle of winter. The Mirga family becomes worried about their chances for survival. Eventually, word gets to the community from a similar tribe that the Germans have begun a Gypsy round up and several of their kind have been killed.

Like other Holocaust stories, this one too has a very unhappy ending. However, along the way the reader is treated to a rare and authoritative glimpse inside the Romany culture and social structure, made mysterious by centuries of bigotry and social isolation. Most of Europe's societies tolerated but shunned the esoteric Romany people. Landless and rootless, Gypies wandered the landscape, providing entertainment and skilled craftsmanship during their wanderings. Ramati's book evenly explores both the positive and negative aspects of the Romany people while the story is told of their exodus, capture and then suffering cruel medical experiments and then murder at Auschwitz.

As both anthropology and Holocaust scholarship, Ramati's AND THE VIOLINS STOPPED PLAYING deserves wide readership. It provides a refreshing examination of who the Romany people are and why they deserve not only to be tolerated and allowed to live in peace and dignity, but to be respected for who they are and what they value.

A great book about World War II, is a great story about the gypsies, who are not known for there suffering. I will tell you I hate reading books unless they are extremly intresting, and let me tell you, this book is Awesome with a capital "A" baby. There is a great love story too. If you can't buy it here, check your local library. The name sounds really corny, but after you read it, you will want to give Alexander Ramiti a Pulitzer.