Average customer rating:
- The Company of Strangers
- In the Company of .... Well-Developed Characters
- When Your Spy is a Mathematician, Everything Adds Up in the End
- Not his best but a good way to find out if you like him
- failed again.....yawned and yawned until eyes too teary to read
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The Company of Strangers
Robert Wilson
Manufacturer: Harvest Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
 General | Mystery | Mystery & Thrillers | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0156027100 |
Amazon.com
Robert Wilson, whose award-winning A Small Death in Lisbon broke him out as an international thriller writer in the Ambler, le Carré, and Furst tradition, scores with this exceptionally well-plotted novel of wartime intrigue in England and Portugal. Andrea Aspinall, a brilliant young British mathematician, is recruited by the British Secret Service and put through a rush course in spycraft before being sent to Lisbon, where she quickly falls in love with a disenchanted German agent and, in less than two weeks, manages to lose her virginity, unmask a conspiracy, and interrupt Germany's plan to build the first atomic bomb. The action covers a long time span--from the early years of Word War II to the era of glasnost, when Andrea, now an Oxford mathematician long retired from spying, encounters the man she once loved and lost. Karl Voss has become an East German double agent who's bent on revealing the Russian mole in England's service. The narrative wanders a bit, but the strong, spare writing and deft characterization set this apart as one of the year's better international espionage novels, one that should introduce Wilson to a bigger audience. --Jane Adams
Book Description
The stifling summer streets of Lisbon are teeming with spies and informers when Andrea Aspinall, an English mathematician turned spy, disappears under a new identity. Military attaché Karl Voss, experienced in the illusions of intrigue, arrives in Lisbon under the German Legation, though he is secretly working against the Nazis so that atomic and rocket technology do not find their way into Hitler's hands.
In the lethal tranquility of a corrupted paradise Andrea and Karl meet and attempt to find love. Tragically, a night of violence leaves Andrea the keeper of a secret that triggers a lifelong addiction to the clandestine world. From Portugal to England and finally Cold War Berlin, she gradually discovers that the deepest secrets aren't held by governments, but by those closest to you.
Award-winning novelist Robert Wilson transcends the genre of spy novels in The Company of Strangers, a thrilling page-turner yet also an imaginative and affecting tale of romance.
Customer Reviews:
The Company of Strangers.......2007-09-05
I think this book is better than the last few LaCarre books. And that's a pretty high standard.
In the Company of .... Well-Developed Characters.......2007-04-04
Excellent wartime and post-war thriller by Robert Wilson. His writing is a dimension above most spy-book scribes, his characters are vivid and well-developed and he doesn't rely on serendipitous, contrived plot wild cards that other writers seem to favor. For those of us who like to follow the action with a map of the city or countryside, wilson obligingly provides street names and landmarks. This book covers a lot of ground, from wartime Lisbon to post-Soviet Berlin and London. At times, it's a little hard to tell what's going on -- sometimes the spy versus counterspy versus double agent, etc. -- gets a little confusing. But by the tender ending (and like other reviewers here note: you can see it coming a mile away) you know that you have read and thoroughly enjoyed a supberb spy thriller.
When Your Spy is a Mathematician, Everything Adds Up in the End.......2007-02-15
Anne Aspinall is the daughter of an SIS (think MI 6) secretary who during WW2 is recruited to go to Lisbon to spy on the Germans. She's working for a Shell Oil manager, but her real job is to translate German technical manuals looking for info about their nuclear program. A situation occurs and she is forced into operations involving spies (German, English, Russian, American and independent operators) double agents, Portuguese fascist police (the PVDE under Dr.Salazar). She falls in love, things blow up and she and her lover both try to get out of Lisbon in one piece. She doesn't and ends up married to a Portuguese military man for 24 years. After her husband and son are killed in the Colonial Wars, she goes back home to England.
In England she comes to terms with her mother and ends up working for "the Company" again and finds herself involved with many of the same people she worked with in Lisbon many years before. Once again she is being used by someone but she's never sure who is using who and whose agenda is at the top of the list, or even who's making the decisions. All this comes to a head when she's sent back into East Berlin to look for an agent known only as "the Snow Leopard". He turns out to be her ex-lover who is now an agent (a double agent) of the East German Stasi. With her help he is able to deflect suspicion from himself and onto a dangerous rival.
The third part of the story is a little too pat and the ending isn't anything you don't see coming down the road, but it's a 'good show' all the way and well worth your time.
Not his best but a good way to find out if you like him.......2007-01-19
Robert Wilson is at his best when he writes about Africa or Seville. Of the 2 books based in Lisbon, not this one but the other one (A small death in Lisbon) is better but the plot is somewhat unconventional so my suggestion would be to start with this one. Yes, it is yet another World War II story but the plot should keep you intrigued enough not to want to put it down.
If, after reading this one, you like his style then go and buy the other books as well. You won't be disappointed.
It really rates 4 stars and a half...but Amazon forces you to choose one or the other.
failed again.....yawned and yawned until eyes too teary to read .......2007-01-14
i've bought or borrowed every one of this author's books including this one, but like before, i failed again to keep my focus and concentration on it after page 70. like his other books, i just couldn't find anything interesting in this so-called 'intriguing', 'epic', 'los angeles times best book of the year'. like his other books, what i could do best was flipping randomly and trudging through it with my thumb. if you could call this novel and his other books espionage thrillers, then i might have always read them after i've taken my sleeping pills.
in this book, the author put one voss and one andrea characters in lisbon (where he resides now) again. but these characters were all so estranged to me, i simply couldn't get any emotional connection with these two characters. it's just like reading a textbook full of million meaningless words. every one of this author's books, to me, was a deadbeat, couldn't-care-less story. it seems to me that this author lives in an isolated cottage in portugal, doo-daaed everything up simply based upon where he lives now. well, i've decided to include this book in those stuff i've collected for the donation. by looking at the pile of the junk i accumulated in the garage for my next trip driving to salvation army, i suddenly realized that it's just like what i felt when i read this guy's books, a totally piled up words, putting together, senseless and deadbeat.
Customer Reviews:
Such good companions.......2007-01-26
This book by Mary Meigs is a wonderful companion to the wonderful film "The Company of Strangers" (American title: "Strangers in Good Company").
In 1988, seven women aged 65 - 88 and one younger woman were brought together in an old farmhouse in Quebec to film a movie. One of these women, Mary Meigs, wrote this account of the filming, which includes portraits of the other cast members, as well as members of the production crew. But this is more than a companion volume to a film. It is also a deeply moving reflection on being old, being joyful against great odds, facing death, not without fear, but courageously. It reminds me of my grandmother's admission: "Every morning, I get up feeling eighteen and then look into the mirror and am surprised to see an old woman staring back." This book reminds us that our skin wrinkles, our hair turns gray (or falls out!), our joints stiffen, but we are our young selves in our minds.
Mary Meigs, who passed away in 2002, was known as a writer and artist long before she was persuaded by Scott and Demers to be the lesbian in their film. [...]. Out of the closet long before this was acceptable, Mary taught English literature and creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, emigrated to Canada for love, and published three books prior to "In the Company of Strangers."
"In the Company of Strangers" is a gift to all of us who are or will grow old.
what more is there to say?.......2006-08-28
I concur with A. Reid's review on every point. This book is linked with the DVD by Amazon for good reason, it compliments the movie wonderfully. If you fell in love with the women of the film -- and in my case, Mary Meigs happened to win my heart the most -- then you owe it to yourself to sit down with this book to further your enjoyment. Life is good. This book and the film affirm this.
Modest Gem of a Book; Invaluable Companion to the Film.......2005-02-26
_The Company of Strangers_ (American title: _Strangers in Good Company_) is a Canadian docudrama featuring 7 elderly women and 1 younger in contrived desperate straits. When their tour bus breaks down, they're forced to fend for themselves in an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere. A sort of "reality series" precursor, coming several years before MTV's Real World, the film is not in the least suspenseful. We're not worried about whether or not these women will survive. We're just interested in watching them get to know each other and getting to know them better. It's a purely magical look into the histories and minds of these women.
This book is a look by one of those women into the process and the experience of making that film.
Selected by the associate director to represent Lesbian, septuagenarian Mary Meigs insisted on remaining an individual--and a fascinating individual at that. Writer, painter, activist and former professor of creative writing at Bryn Mawr, Meigs trains her artist's eye on her surroundings. The book she created is an interesting artifact in its own right. Meigs muses about age and gender and sexual identity, but in an unobtrusive way, wrapped up in a descriptive prose style that reminded me somewhat of a more grounded Annie Dillard, as when of the filming process she says:
"We are spectators and recipients in the great magic show. Disembodied hands holding Styrofoam cups appear just as the words -water- or -coffee- form in a head; invisible spirits place chairs under our bums (Cissy's word) just before we fall backward into space, or coats on our backs, or scarves around our necks on a nippy morning. The same hands are also held out to be draped with the same coats, scarves, extraneous handbags and hats, to be hidden in secret places, away from the camera's prying eye. Umbrellas, parasols, bee helmets materialize, according to the weather. On hot, still days we stand knee-deep in meadow grass, looking like extraterrestrials, helmeted in green gauze while the black flies peer in greedily from outside. Through a green mist I see us lined up, eight mediaeval women warriors, waiting for our marching orders."
The magic for Mary is in the mundane--the smile of this woman, the smell of that place. Meigs does an outstanding job of conveying that and, with her self-effacing manner, hinting at its relevance.
But while _In the Company of Strangers_ can stand on its own, it really shouldn't. It is a magnificent companion piece to the film. To those who have fallen in love with the women in the movie, it offers an opportunity to see a little more, to find out what happens next. In the process, it reveals a few secrets, demystifies a scene or two. But it doesn't diminish the magic. It completes it.
If academia has not already embraced the pair, I believe it will. Women's Studies. Gay and Lesbian Studies. Canadian Studies. Whatever they are calling or will someday call the culture of aging. These have a lot of homes. And I personally believe that a lot of homes will be better off for having them.
Customer Reviews:
Strangers in Blood.......2006-06-11
This book has a high "fog factor" and is difficult to read. It uses academic jargon and long sentences. The structure is complex and confusing. That is not to say that the book is inconsequential; indeed, the subject matter is quite important. It is simply difficult to access it through this book.
The back cover accurately describes the book as looking systematically at the families and offspring of the upper echelon of the Hudson Bay Company and the North West Company. Unfortunately, this was a male-dominated business and a male-dominated period in history. Men kept the written records. The author of "Strangers in Blood" relies heavily on anecdotal accounts of individuals, complete with many direct quotes. Thus, this is a book that follows the men of the fur trade. Their wives and offspring become adjuncts. The book partially compensates for this by providing information on societal pressures within the fur trade, as well as in Canada and England at the time. It also addresses the policies of the fur companies relative to dependents.
The book characterizes and contrasts family connections in the Hudson Bay Company and the Northwest Company. The presentation is roughly chronological from the late 1700 to the mid 1800s. The 1821 merger of the two companies is a focal point. Chapters and subchapters move back and forth between the two companies; as well as between various topics of gender and types of family relationships. The focus is on individuals, with every page containing a confusing array of proper names. The names of key individuals (men) reappear constantly until the reader longs for a wall chart to keep them straight. The author has even provided a few small pieces of such a chart and they are helpful.
One comes away with the feeling that the men of the fur trade took more responsibility for their families than one might expect. They usually tried to place their offspring, both male and female, in a position to start a life of their own. That included at least some education; an apprenticeship for men, and marriage for women. Fewer men stayed committed to the mothers of their children but some of the relationships were life-long.
From the early 1820s on, one man, George Simpson, had great influence over the fur trade and the people involved with it. He directed the Hudson Bay Company through the merger with the Northwest Company and for forty years afterward. He influenced the tenor of the fur trade and everything connected with it. Ms Brown shows his impact to be more negative than positive. Simpson, the clergy, and English women all arrived on the scene at about the same time. The result was increased racism, emphasis on class, and moral disapproval of "country marriages." These semi-formal unions with Indians and mixed-bloods were prevalent in the fur trade up until that time. The problems of integrating the descendents of the fur traders into society continue in Canada today.
Finally, I even want to complain about the title. "Strangers in Blood" is an English legal term for relationships that exist "in blood" but the law refuses to admit as legitimate. This book is about a much broader range of relationships. The author recognizes the problem in the final chapter. Someone in the publishing process should have insisted on a better title.
Book Description
Human beings are the only species in nature to have developed an elaborate division of labor between strangers. Even something as simple as buying a shirt depends on an astonishing web of interaction and organization that spans the world. But unlike that other uniquely human attribute, language, our ability to cooperate with strangers did not evolve gradually through our prehistory. Only 10,000 years ago--a blink of an eye in evolutionary time--humans hunted in bands, were intensely suspicious of strangers, and fought those whom they could not flee. Yet since the dawn of agriculture we have refined the division of labor to the point where, today, we live and work amid strangers and depend upon millions more. Every time we travel by rail or air we entrust our lives to individuals we do not know. What institutions have made this possible?
In The Company of Strangers, Paul Seabright provides an original evolutionary and sociological account of the emergence of those economic institutions that manage not only markets but also the world's myriad other affairs.
Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, history, psychology, and literature, Seabright explores how our evolved ability of abstract reasoning has allowed institutions like money, markets, and cities to provide the foundation of social trust. But how long can the networks of modern life survive when we are exposed as never before to risks originating in distant parts of the globe? This lively narrative shows us the remarkable strangeness, and fragility, of our everyday lives.
Customer Reviews:
Cooperation with no one in charge.......2007-06-13
A fascinating look at "the grand experiment"; why is it that human beings are the only species where genetically dissimilar individuals rely upon each other for task sharing and task completion? The author begins by quickly examining the production of a shirt. The cotton may be grown in India, from seeds from the U.S., and fibers spun in Portugal, put together with a collar from Brazil, and then distributed worldwide where a whole different set of instruments and people are involved. The author explains the concept of tunnel vision among humans that explains part of this process. Our individual actions play a part in a complex task whose outcome we may not experience or even care about. The cotton grower in India, or the seed distributor in the U.S. does not know of, or even care about my preference of cotton shirts.
In order to make his investigation complete, Paul Seabright examines not only the individual factors in humans making the `grand experiment' possible, but also examines the societal structures that are necessary and the processes that build them. We learn of the risks of nature and the natural benefits of both risk sharing and the opposing feature of specialization. I offer as an analogy that a town wouldn't want all of its eggs in one basket, and at the same time it wouldn't want all its baskets to have only eggs.
By continuing his study to include "The Flair of Great Cities", "A Price for Everything [the monetary system]", "Families and Firms" and other topics, the author attempts to examine the totality of the system that allows the "grand experiment" to succeed.
The same systems and natural laws that have allowed humans to cooperate and achieve tremendous accomplishment through cooperation have also allowed humans to cooperate and achieve tremendous destruction. As observed by the author, no species is as efficient as we when it comes to violence and mass murder, i.e. war. Most likely the author has shown that there shall always be a regression to the mean, with alternating periods of expansion and growth coupled with murder and destruction among humans.
Great subject, decent book.......2007-06-08
This book addresses the question how trust between strangers is possible to the extent that we have build a whole social and economic system on it. It reflects the renewed interest in social sciences for an evolutionary perspective, and shows how fruitful and overdue the combination of the two is.
Seabright goes back to our history as hunter-gatherers and shows how it equipped us with both reciprocal and selfish tendencies. He then discusses institutions that govern the major areas of our social and economic lives; markets, politics, cities, firms, money etc. and the way these institutions exploit and channel our calculating and reciprocal inclinations.
As is clear from the examples, the book ranges wide. This makes it both interesting and confusing. It is fascinating to see familiar topics be evaluated from a different perspective. But the fact that the institutions under discussion are so different, each with their own economic and social peculiarities that make them work the way they do, means that it is not always easy to follow the main thread of the story. The connections and bridges between the chapters are sometimes contrived. Also, since each chapter would warrant a book in itself, inevitably one now and then gets a bit restless because of the questions skimmed over, and claims made too fast.
But with a subject matter like this one cannot write a non-interesting book, and Seabright has not. All in all he has written an accessible and well-written introduction to an exciting new field in social science.
Political Biases?.......2005-10-29
"The Company of Strangers" is heavily dependent upon author Seabright's interpretation of human evolutionary history and sociology and hence the material is sensitive to his world-view. Thus his universal use of "she" and "her" instead of the conventional "he" and "his" for anonymous third persons alerted me to the likelihood that his version of political correctness played a role in his views. Then his comments early in the book on WWII, "... that many individual soldiers even on the Allied side were involved in ... atrocities ..." set me to questioning all of his judgments. He goes on (in the interests of colorful writing?) to describe "A mother (who) sees her son return at the end of a war ... (but) what can she say to another mother ... whose daughter's corpse lies in an unmarked grave ... after rape and torture by a platoon of advancing soldiers drunk with lust and fear?"
It seems that Seabright has no personal experience of war. I did serve for many mean-lives (I was very lucky, for a while) in an infantry rifle platoon in WWII and after my luck ran out, I spent a year in an army hospital with other wounded soldiers where we talked candidly of our war, and I can say that criminal behavior among the men in service who fought in that war was, if anything, less common that among civilians. Moreover, I am sure that the British and French soldiers -- and (excepting some SS units) the German soldiers I fought -- were equally well behaved.
Thus I found the book interesting and erudite but laced with Seabright's politics and therefore to be taken with reserve.
Opens a great question, never quite closes it.......2005-07-29
This book is organized around a fantastically interesting question. How did human groups develop the social capacity for exchange? A simple answer about the evolution of cooperation (etc., etc.), suitable for the broadest of outlines, will not really do the trick. The development of exchange and economic relationships did not move in step with the gradual or the punctuated changes in human evolution. This book's idea is that institutions and social conventions must have been crucial. They had to build on and interface with the evolutionary baggage humans brough to the organized societies of the pre-historic world, but they added something of their own on top of it.
Having opened that question the book never really nails it shut. In part that's because it is intent on serving two distinct purposes -- of addressing this question, and of popularizing various strands of economic literature. Most of the content is about the latter, but the literature in question deals with fundamentally modern (on an evolutionary scale) institutions like banking, business firms, states, labor markets, etc. Having been convinced that hey, yeah, there's something to explain here, I thought it was a disconnect to jump to accounts of the things to be explained. Naturally, some comments are included about how these things might have taken shape from proto-forms, but that stuff -- which *is* what the book sets out to address -- is completely speculative (and never presented otherwise).
If you're into this sort of thing, the substantive chapters are redeeming enough, though a nontrivial portion of the material (e.g., the self-organizing capacity of markets, at their best; the importance and durability of reciprocity as a gut instinct people follow even when it can't help them) has been well covered for years or decades in similar popularizations.
So that's pretty much the value. Still, it would have been not just good but great if that interesting question had been settled, or even addressed consistently.
A Bioeconomic Masterpiece.......2005-07-11
Despite the rough treatment handed to Edward O. Wilson's call for a unification of biology and the social sciences some three decades ago, and despite the hostility still aroused by the notion of "sociobiology" by some traditionalists, the process of integrating social science into natural science appears to be in full swing. Paul Seabright's new book is a welcome and important contribution to this process.
The idea behind sociobiology is that there are many social species, and our understanding of ourselves will be enhanced by analyzing the similarities and differences between human and non-human social systems. The main title of Seabright's book, "In the Company of Strangers" isolates a unique characteristic of human sociality: while several species evolved a highly complex and decentralized division of labor, humans are the only species with extensive cooperation among unrelated individuals.
The maturation of sociobiology since E. O. Wilson's call to arms has included several key strands of research. One is a broadened concept of sociality, in which it is recognized that from the emergence of multi-cellular organisms to the rise of Homo sapiens, major evolutionary transitions have required novel mechanisms facilitating the cooperation among the complex parts of biological wholes. It is now routine, for instance, to note that the disciplining of an aberrant cell in an organism, an ovipositing worker in a bee hive, and a shirking worker in a business enterprise are modeled in a similar manner. A second contribution is gene-culture coevolutionary theory, important because human sociality has been far more cultural than that of any other species.
Seabright's book exemplifies a new breed of economic analysis, seeking answers to fundamental question wherever they are best found, ignoring disciplinary boundaries. A transdisciplinary approach to economics life is nothing new. Adam Smith, for instance, not only wrote The Wealth of Nations, but also The Moral Sentiments, which is perhaps the greatest work of psychology prior to William James. But this tradition was all but buried in the early years of the Twentieth century, only recently to be rediscovered.
Seabright provides elementary, but nonetheless richly fascinating, introductions to such standard economic topics as the division of labor, prices, money, and firms, and addresses such perennial economic problems as unemployment, poverty, environmental destruction, and economic instability. The novelty is that he consistently does so from a long-run evolutionary perspective. This is decidedly not a book on economic policy. Even such traditionally central questions as capitalism versus socialism, the balance between competition and regulation, and the distribution of wealth and income are mentioned only in passing.
The innovation in this book lies in its treatment of the psychological prerequisites of modern economic life. As Seabright notes, "[M]odern society is an opportunistic experiment, founded on a human psychology that had already evolved before human beings ever had to deal with strangers in any systematic way." (p. 4) This psychology has two elements, one of which is well known and the other relatively novel in behavioral science. The well known is what Seabright calls "rational calculation," by which he means a capacity for logical reasoning, information processing, and technique mastery that far exceeds that of any other of Earth's creatures. The novel is what he calls "reciprocity," which is "the willingness to repay kindness with kindness and betray with revenge, even when this is not what rational calculation would recommend." (p. 27)
Two terminological issues are important to set straight from the outset. First, by "reciprocity" Seabright means what has been called "strong reciprocity" (Bowles and Gintis, Nature 415 Jan 2002). The "strong" adjective is meant to distinguish the behavior from the self-interested notion of reciprocity common in the biological literature. Second, Seabright follows a long tradition in economics of considering reciprocity to be non-rational, using the term "rational" when one means "caring only about oneself" as though the terms were synonymous. There is nothing "irrational" about such other-regarding elements of strong reciprocity as returning kindness with kindness and retaliating against someone who has harmed one, even when these behaviors involve net material costs.
Seabright's treatment of human society is innovatory because both biologists and economists have long maintained both that humans are selfish when dealing with non-kin, and their cooperation can be explained by long-term self-interest. Moreover, there is a long tradition, especially on the Left, of faulting capitalism for promoting greed and selfishness, which is at best a partial truth, since market economies at least tolerate, and probably promote, strong reciprocity. Experimental economics, as described by Seabright, has shown that most people are indeed reciprocal and in fact neither economic nor biological models of self-interested cooperation are rarely plausible when they involve groups of more than a few individuals.
Seabright also analyzes the "dark side" of strong reciprocity, which is the tendency to exhibit hostility to "outsiders" in the name of "insider" cooperation. "Cooperation within a group," he observes, "can make the group more lethally aggressive in its dealing with outsiders... [the] systematic killing of unrelated individuals is so common among human beings that... it cannot be described as exceptional, pathological, or disturbed." (pp. 209,53). He concludes that "what Adam Smith famously described as the human propensity to 'truck, barter and exchange' has always coexisted uneasily with a rival temptation to take, bully, and extort." (p. 233).
This book is highly readable and will be accessible to a wide audience. It is, however, weak on details, eschews formal model building and extended analytical argumentation, and hence will serve only as a stepping-stone to the field for those interested in the economy as a dynamically evolving system.
Average customer rating:
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The Company Of Strangers
Robert Wilson
Manufacturer: Harcourt, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books | Classics | Comic | Contemporary | Literary
Spy Stories & Tales of Intrigue | Thrillers | Mystery & Thrillers | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0002326698 |
Average customer rating:
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In the Company of Strangers
P.D. LaFleur
Manufacturer: BookSurge Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 1419608916
Release Date: 2005-08-09 |
Book Description
An aspiring Presidential candidate commits a murder one night after being threatened with blackmail to derail his ambitions. He is unaware of being observed by a man gazing through a telescopic lens, who reports the episode to the police. Unable to confirm evidence of a crime, the matter is forgotten for months. Once it gets resurrected, the politician's main political backer attempts to dispose of the witness and sanitize the situation. The plot is tricky, fast moving, and with the surprise ending, the witness's former perceptions of his previous employer and mentor are turned upside down.
Customer Reviews:
Fast Paced.......2006-05-16
The book is fast paced and I didn't want to put it down once I started. The characters and places were described so well I felt like was a long for the ride.
Book Description
This book is a new and original voice in Christian spirituality. A valuable and practical resource for both clergy and laity, a balance vision of the renewal of public life and how the church can contribute to it.
Customer Reviews:
Public education for democratic renewal.......2001-03-24
In The Company of Strangers, a strikingly relevant book even after nearly twenty years, noted educator Parker J. Palmer describes public experience as our "life among strangers with whom our lot is cast, with whom we are interdependent whether we like it or not." And the educational process is one "which brings us out of ourselves into an awareness of our connectedness." At its core, public education recognizes the fundamental dignity of a "relationship rooted in our common humanity." Public education then, unlike private forms, will consciously underscore the shared primary elements of social experience without giving preferential treatment to limited secondary characteristics based on wealth, economic status, race, religion or ideology.
"In this process," Palmer continues, "opinions become audible and accountable and individuals learn that private viewpoints have implications for the common good. Under the pressure of accountability religious discourse may be forced to reach for the essentials which unite us." In contrast to withdrawal from public participation into private enclaves of conspicuous consumption or of opting to participate only as a convinced crusader invincibly armored to fend of responsible dialogue, Palmer notes that "public life becomes the spiritual guide of our private life." Truth, he continues, "is a very large matter, and requires various angles of vision to be seen in the round." Such an assessment of public experience is, in my view, what makes American education a "very large matter," requiring each of us to renew the commitment to public education. In this way we may be drawn out of ourselves to the point where our angle of vision allows us to see and to respect the common ground we share with others.
Palmer makes public life appealing again........1998-02-19
Palmer depicts public life as pre-political -- a life of festivity
including block parties and theatre. He makes the point that without
public spaces in which strangers can learn to become comfortable
with each other, able to trust each other, a political life is an
impossibility. He makes a case for the significance of the stranger
in Christian and Jewish scriptures. He suggests that the mystery
of God is experienced in the mystery of the stranger, and that
living our religious beliefs in response to the stranger is a way
of encountering the mystery of God. He also sees churches and
synagogues as training grounds for developing the skills necessary
for public life. This is an inspiring book.
Average customer rating:
- AT LEAST IT'S NOT STAGED...
- mediocre
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The Company of Strangers
Gus Powell
Manufacturer: J&L Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Collections, Catalogues & Exhibitions | Photography | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
General | Photography | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
General | Photographers, A-Z | Photography | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
General | Travel | Photography | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 097016565X
Release Date: 2007-06-01 |
Book Description
Edited by Leanne Shapton, Jason Fulford.
Customer Reviews:
AT LEAST IT'S NOT STAGED..........2006-08-01
...as is most comtemporary color work (see CREWDSON) which makes an already elitist and rich man's game even more so with elaborate sets and million dollar prints the size of a house. but seriously, check out ROBERT WALKER if you are interested in this kind of colour street woyk. in the end, it's a worthy addition, why not?
mediocre.......2006-06-12
this is a decent book, but check out Robert Walker first - his new york stuff from the '80s being much stronger work if you can find it. powell's photos are rather shallow and mediocre compared with great street photographers and/or colorists of the past (eggleston, meyerwitz, shore, etc.) and present (walker, webb, manos). if you don't own those guys' books, get them first.
in this book's defense, it's well put together and published.
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STRANGERS IN COMPANY
Manufacturer: Fawcett Crest
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Similar Items:
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Caterina
ASIN: B000H9X4V6 |
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