ET Books

This book brings together the main approaches to understanding religious language--as emotivem as truth-telling, as poetic, and so on. Major positions are examined at a high level of philosophic scrutiny so that the book is very useful, perhaps essential, for anyone who wants to know just what is being said when specifically religious language is employed. Ferre's own analysis of such language has, for this reviewer, some unsatifactory features, but the book can hardly fail to to stimulate and seriously inform.

This is a great book on how to fish for largemouth. It covers everything, tackle, presentation, location, fish habits. It covers rivers, lakes, reservoirs, even farm ponds.

I was getting skunked one summer, and spent a couple of hours reading the chapter related to seasonal fishing patterns. Went out and hit the deep edge of the weedline, and there they were.

This is THE book I count on for fishing knowledge.

Ricardo Hausmann y Liliana Rojas-Suarez hacen un excelente trabajo de recopilación y nos brindan este libro que sin duda se convertirá un clásico y texto elemental en el tema de las crisis bancarias. Dado que este fenómeno se acentuó en la década de los noventa, creemos que es una publicación muy recomendable como base para estudiantes, profesionales e investigadores.

This book contains three things. Shelley's translation of Plato's dialogue _The Banquet_ (or _Symposium_), the first and still the greatest English version; Shelley's courageously anti-homophobic essay _A Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Athenians Relative to the Subject of Love_; and an introduction by editor John Lauritsen. The five stars are for Shelley.

The _Symposium_ presents a group of Athenian aristocrats who share privilege, contempt for democracy and the leisure needed for philosophy. After one banquet, the slaves gone, they compete to make the best speech in praise of love. The most memorable speeches are by Aristophanes, Socrates and Alcibiades.

Aristophanes creates a comic myth in which men and women were once joined, sharing a body and a soul (and, each androgynous creature having four legs and four arms, getting about by tumbling). The gods became jealous of these creatures' happiness and split them up, creating the two sexes we know today. But men and women stayed together, each with the partner with whom they had shared a soul. So Zeus scattered them, forcing the male and female soulmates apart. And still men and women search amongst each other, looking for that one perfect soulmate.

Socrates' speech concerns love between men and boys, arguing that in their highest forms these loves have no sexual element. Alcibiades arrives late and drunk, and refuses to speak in praise of anything but Socrates himself. The party then breaks up.

The _Symposium_ is Plato's most theatrical dialogue, with vivid characterisation, deft comic touches and soaring poetic language. Shelley was also fascinated by Alcibiades' anecdote about Socrates standing lost in thought, oblivious to sun, cold, thirst or pain, motionless for three days. Shelley's translation is literally accurate (despite some minor errors) but also accurate in the higher sense of being a brilliantly poetic rendering of a brilliantly poetic work. Shelley called Plato's original "radiant", lamenting that his own words were a "gray veil" over the brightness of the original. But his modesty was unwarranted: his is one of the great English prose translations: fresh, clear and indeed radiant.

Shelley's _Ancient Athenians_ essay is just as remarkable. It attempts to explain how [some] ancient Athenians could have thought love between men, including sexual love, was "higher" than heterosexual love. In doing so he presented a pioneering case against homophobia. The courage of Shelley's stance in his 1818 essay, as in so many things, is simply astonishing.

Shelley's argument was that homosexuality flourished in
ancient Athens, and was considered nobler than heterosexual relations, because of the suppression of women. Athenian society didn't educate girls or women, and excluded them from the city's intellectual, artistic and political life. Therefore, Shelley argued, it was harder for male-female relationships to be equal partnerships, or to include the life of the mind, or indeed much beyond the housekeeping mundane or the purely sexual. Though he argued against condemning homosexuality he was also, as a proto-feminist, arguing that the social conditions that (he thought) foster homosexuality are unjust and undesirable.

Lauritsen's introduction misreads both texts in claiming them as gay classics. Plato's text has Socrates promote intergenerational same-sex relationships, though ideally without sexual practice or the body. Alcibiades' speech is homoerotic in its praise of Socrates, but crucial to that praise is that Socrates is celibate, even when tempted by the beautiful Alcibiades himself. Later, Plato will withdraw this limited tolerance, banning homosexuals from his "ideal" republic. As Karl Popper observed, Plato was a sign on the road that led to Fascism, Nazism, Communism. The _Symposium_ is a treasure of world literature, but too problematic a text simply to be celebrated as a gay classic.

Shelley's essay is also classic but not "gay". (Setting aside the fact that "gay" places someone within a culture that didn't exist in Shelley's lifetime.) Shelley argued that homosexual relationships can be loving and noble, and should not be condemned unless there is brutality or other things that would be equally undesirable in a heterosexual relationship. But he argues as a sympathetic outsider (with bisexual male friends), who also wrote essays defending the political rights of Ireland, deists and Catholics, without being Irish, or a deist or Catholic.

Lauritsen arguments for claiming Shelley as "gay" are astonishingly shonky. One, amazingly, is that Shelley was good-looking. But ... what about good-looking heterosexuals? Or Shelley's facial boils? More Lauritsen "evidence" is that Shelley stood naked when Trelawney first met him. But in public school culture then as now it was "manly"; not to fuss about being naked in front of other men; also, Shelley had been bathing, and he'd expected to pass women on the beach but didn't know Trelawney was there. Lauritsen mentions missing diary pages to suggest a cover-up. But he should know that the diary in question is Claire Claremont's and surrounding evidence indicates that the missing pages concern a pregnancy, an entirely heterosexual scandal. And Lauritsen says, meaningfully, that Shelley kissed friends at school, but should surely know that in that less emotionally constrained age men kissed to indicate friendship, not trouser turbulence. And so on.

Instead, Shelley was something more radical. Fascinated by androgyny, he asserted the right to enact masculinity as it suited him; ridin', shootin' and boatin' with Byron and Trelawney, and gentle and "womanly" with women and some male friends. Shelley unhitched the link, as Lauritsen does not, between gender performance and sexual orientation, in that sense being an ancestor of more fluid current thinking on sexuality. The idea that a man who is prepared to drop the male "armour" is necessarily homosexual is a 19th century conservative idea: it's ironic that some gay activists later took it up.

But despite reservations on Lauritsen's claims, he deserves our thanks for making Shelley's two magnificent tests available again. Shelley might be bemused to find himself claimed as gay, but he'd be pleased to find his works still enlisted in the struggle against bigotry and in the cause of love.

Cheers!

Laon

This sensitive and intelligent reading of Plato's famous dialogue on love is entirely in French.

It is an excellent French lesson for intermediate to advanced French learners who can read along with any standard French (or even English) translation to better follow the French.

The Banquet is Plato's exposition, in dialog form, of his theory of love which has influenced Western Civilization more profoundly than almost any other work. (Nietzsche said even of Christianity that it "is warmed over Platonism for the masses.")

Such great and disparate writers as Saint Augustine, Hafiz and Cervantes were deeply influenced by Plato. The philosophy depicted in The Banquet permeates Western Civilization so completely that you will think you are reading a modern book about love. You are: the great classic works are as modern as their newest translations!

This book is an excellent, in depth look at the techniques, tools and verbs used in pâtissière. As it is written completely in french, a good dictionary and the 501 verb book were essential. It is clearly laid out with an excellent technical terms section, a section with pictures and descriptions of tools used, as well as in-depth descriptions of materials (flour, sugar, milk etc.) plus many more useful sections. I would highly reccommend this for book for pastry chefs wanting to work in french kitchens.

Cette traduction de la signification du saint Coran, révélation sacrée des musulmans, a été faite avec une précision extraordinaire par un imminent penseur et un connaisseur des deux langues: arabe, francais. Le choix des mots a été trés asticieux et permet une approche du contenu spirituel de ce livre.
Lisez le si vous voulez accéder directement aux versets qui guident plus d'un milliard de musulmans dans le monde qui suivent les pas du Messager Mohammed.

The Color Keyboards of Le Corbusier are a work of genius by one of the masters of Modern architecture. This is a fantastic reprint of his 1931 and 1959 color chords that Le Corbusier created for the Swiss company Salubra. This is the second reprint and Ruegg was certain to get the colors as close as possible to the originals (the first reprint was a bit "off" in it's colors).

What makes this work so pertinent and important is this is an incredible tool for putting colors together that make our homes (offices, schools, shops, workplaces, etc) look absolutely fantastic. By using the color keyboards and the cutout viewers supplied by Le Corbusier you have a new world of colors opened up to you - colors combinations most people would never have thought of. Le Corbusier supples palletes of blues for Space, blues for the Sea, tans for the Beach or Desert, greens for the country, Browns for the Forest, two palletes for Masonry and several others. Wherever you plan to build there is a pallete of colors that will compliment your site. This gives you the main body of the house color and two secondary colors to choose from. Along with these primary and secondary colors you now have a wide choice of trim colors that come into selection using the cutout viewers. You may now choose one, two, or three trim colors (depending on the viewer you use and how large and complex you want your color "chord" to be.) Once you sit down with the color chords and begin playing with them it will soon become obvious just what a genius Le Corbusier was. His choice of color chords is incredible in its ability to make architectural features seem very human and personal and alive all at the same time. The inventor of the Modulator thought of architecture on very human terms.

Once you have picked your color chord you have full sheets of each color you've chosen (supplied in a second book) to take to your paint store for them to make exact duplications. Choose what architectural features you want painted what color and off you go. The results are absolutely incredible. This is the book that Eichler used to pick colors that made his neighborhoods "fit together" as an organic whole.

This book is well worth the price if you want to make your home stand out as unique, beautiful and fully human. You will see why originals of this book sell for $5,000.

Fast shipping, very good service. i am very happy with my order. i must have this book, because I spend my childhood in this same building Briey-en-Foret (France). I am so happy this building still exist :-)

VERY GOOD AND AN ODD BOOK.
SAINT MARTIN IS A VERY GOOD KNOWN PHILOSOPHER.
IT'S A KIND OF HARRY POTTER FOR PEOPLE WHO LIKE HISTORY PHILOSOPHY AND MORAL.