History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)

Book Description

Recorded history is a finely-woven magic fabric of intricate lies about events predating the sixteenth century. There is not a single piece of evidence that can be reliably and independently traced back earlier than the eleventh century. This book details events that are substantiated by hard facts and logic, and validated by new astronomical research and statistical analysis of ancient sources.

Customer Reviews:

Calculations are only as good as your numbers.......2007-08-03

Yes, we can all agree that mainstream history is nearly 100% BS due to politics, economics, ego, problems with dating techniques, and various conspiracies. Agreed. But, I've been researching the distinct possibility that human history (in terms of civilizations) are much more ancient than we've been told, so coming across this book was very interesting to me. I wondered how Fomenko could be wrong (if at all) because he is very persuasive in his presentations. Then it dawned on me. If at previous times in prehistory, due to the various catastrophies that are well documented (comets, asteroids, planetary disruptions, plasma discharge, pole reversals, etc) the Earth was in a different position in relation to the sun, different tilt on its axis, different orbit, different rotation (in terms of velocity and DIRECTION), and the continents were in different positions, then would this not cause the ancients to see the sky (constellations) differently? In other words, is Fomenko making erronious assumptions about the physics of the Earth in pre-history, which then corrupt his data with regards to dating the relevant astrology? The last event to seriously disrupt our planet occured roughly 3500 years ago, according to other good researchers, so is it possible Fomenko has been confused by this? The vastly different physics of our planet in the not so distant past may explain this confusion, which is not to say the "mainstream" version of history is correct; on the contrary. I am not an expert in these fields, but wanted to see if this idea could spark discussion.

Pants on fire?.......2007-07-19

Will people ever read before spamming? Yes, Jesuits could not rewrite world history alone, they had help. Anyway, Dr Prof Acad A.Fomenko does not point to jesuits as the driving force of world wide history manipulation in published volumes 1,2,3;, actually he barely mentions the poor devils. Check it with 'Search inside' feature, please. China is rarely mentioned either, in fact, Dr Fomenko is completely eurocentric. Right, his theory contradicts all mainstream schools of history, because in their actual state they are all built on blatantly erroneus chronology. You don't need a mysterious cabal (conspiracy) to falsify history, the falsification is its modus operandi. It is inherent to history(ians) to falsify (distort) events, as it is inherent to humans to boast as it is inherent to power (authority) to legimize itself by referrring to glorious past made to its own order. Dr Prof Fomenko and team have identified scores of instances of such manipulation in Russian, European, etc.. history, and delivered valid statistical proof thereof. His own 'reconstruction' is completely another story. Forget c14 as a valid method of dating. W.Libby has initially discovered a brilliant method of INDEPENDENT dating. Too bad, c14 method has become a joke after a forced marrige with dendrochronology with consensual chronological scale inbuilt. Radiocarbon method can't stand blind tests, but is so very productive as a rubberstamp.

Accepted History & Chronology Must Be Changed. .......2007-04-09

There is no doubt that history as most know it is a sham, & institution's version of History both University & Church is fradulent & inaccurate. Everything was established with an agenda, The real "Dark Ages" are now when we have access to incredible amounts of information past authorities & more important 'common folk' didn't have but our institutions & educators are slow to evolve because of what has ignorantly & arrogantly been taught for too long. This is on many subjects not just Chronology.

For anyone to question "Why would a Mathematician have anything credible to say of History?" The answer is from Dr. Fomenko's preface in the book: "It would be worthwhile to remind the reader that in the XVI-XVII century Chronology was considered to be a subdivision of Mathematics." These volumes could possibly be some of the most important works to date & should be read by everyone with an interest in History, especially professors & educators who have a duty to the public. I have read both books & must say that 'Chronology 1' has some very eye opening & revolutionary information. Even if these volumes are part true the implications are profound & opens the doors to further investigations & questions which must be done. I speak several different lanquages & must say the logic Dr. Fomenko uses with "inflection" of words & words being read from left to right in one region & right to left in another then written backwards, the removal of vowels & get down to basics of words, or different cities & locations having the same name etc. is correct. Vowel usage has always been optional & varied, actually complicating linquistics & study. The first thing one has to understand is that words never had a fixed spelling in history like we do now, the spelling of words was mutable & regional, as well as names & titles of people were vast, varied & changed, NOTHING WAS FIXED or understood linear. Matters of Life & Death as well as financial profiteering yesterday & today were & are made with ignorant, illogical & conspiratorial views of history & reality, it's time people get closer to the Truth & society collectively grow up.

Very Interesting.......2007-03-07

It is a good proposal and I believe it will mature into something even better in the future. I think it deserves to be read.

History as Science Fiction.......2007-01-10

Anatoly Fomenko has written a very intriguing book, full of pictures, charts, and computer 'proof' of his thesis: backwards of AD900 we don't really know what happened or when. Between AD900 and AD1600 there is more certainty, but there is still a lot of fuzzy ground, and things don't get reliable until we get past the 1600's where the printing press made it very difficult for the perpetrators of this timeline manipulation to change anything that had been committed to print. The Dark Ages did not happen. Books were burned for a reason. One organization has doubled the actual length of its existence by expanding the real chronology. Read why.

I had always wondered why Christ died about AD33 and yet men waited until the 11th century to form the Knights Templar, the Cathars, etc and go after the Holy Land by force. Why the 1000 year gap? Turns out there wasn't more than a 10-12 year gap and he proves it using astronomy. This also implies that the planet is not as old as we have been told, and current Christian and other creationist scientists are already championing that idea without being aware of Fomenko's book. The two groups, creationist scientists and the Russian mathematical analysts corroborate each other. Fascinating.

Of course, all this flies in the face of what we have been told traditionally is the 'proper' chronology of western civilization, and most readers will experience 'cognitive dissonance' in reading this book. It means that our history going backwards from AD1600 becomes progressively more incorrect and unreliable until it cannot be trusted at all... in the space of 700-800 years.

Naturally, the curious, open-minded reader will want to know WHO did this, WHY, and did any of the events we think of as really ancient ever happen?
Dr. Fomenko is a respected scientist/mathematician at Moscow State University who has already answered these questions to the satisfaction of his initially skeptical colleagues. Most of them are now believers, a few still refuse to believe (the usual diehards), and of course the western press has ignored Fomenko's work -- for obvious reasons when you read the book. The ones who perpetrated this chronology ruse have a lot to answer for. They are still with us. That's why this book is a well-kept secret.

I gave the book a 4-star rating because I was unable to check out some of his claims; those I checked were as he said. But if even 1/3 of his claims are true, this punches a big hole in what we think is our history, the meaning of western civilization, our educational process (for repeating the ruse as gospel), and the trustworthiness of the organization that perpetrated this ruse, well-intentioned or not.

This book relates to current research into a Young Earth paradigm, to John Keel's discoveries about our planet, and Fr Malachi Martin's insights (in his now out-of-print books). We are indeed sheep who are manipulated and kept ignorant -- for a reason. While knowing what these men have to say may be the "booby prize" (as in: 'what can you do with this knowledge?'), it will provide interesting reading. Didn't someone say: "...and the Truth will set you free."?? For you to judge if this book contains the truth.

Story of the World, Volume 1: Ancient Times Audiobook CD: From the Earliest Nomads to the Late Roman Empire, Revised Edition (7 CDs)

Average customer rating:

Great Home School Tool
Boring for 9-year old
Never leaves the kid out of the equation
So-so
audio book

Story of the World, Volume 1: Ancient Times Audiobook CD: From the Earliest Nomads to the Late Roman Empire, Revised Edition (7 CDs)
Susan Wise Bauer
Manufacturer: Peace Hill Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio CD

General | Ages 9-12 | Children's Books | Subjects | Books

Ancient | History & Historical Fiction | Children's Books | Subjects | Books

General | Education | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

General | Education | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 1933339047

Book Description

The Story of the World CD audiobook is a collaboration between Jim Weiss, whose voice is "liquid gold" (CNN TV), and Susan Wise Bauer, whose writing has been described as "timeless and intelligent" (Publishers Weekly). These spirited readings of the first volume in Bauer's history series bring to life the stories and records of human history from ancient times to the present.

Written in an engaging, straightforward manner, this volume of the popular Story of the World series weaves world history into a storybook format. The first volume begins with the ancient nomads and ends with the last Roman emperor.

This audio CD edition may be used along with the print books, as a supplement to a traditional history curriculum, or independently. 6 audio CDs.

Customer Reviews:

Great Home School Tool.......2007-10-11

This product is a great tool for the history curriculum I was using in my home school program. Very detailed.

Boring for 9-year old.......2007-09-19

We took this CD on a road trip with our 9-year-old son. He thought it was boring and very repetitive. Because of this, he was not willing to listen to it. I am sure that there is very useful and interesting information in the book, but perhaps it is more appropriate for a younger child.

Never leaves the kid out of the equation.......2007-09-13

This author never forgets she's writing for a student. At every turn, she's offering connections and thought-provoking questions that invite the child into the ancient history world.

Colorfully written with lively action, this book offers a valuable classical education in ancient history for the home schooled or afterschooled child.

So-so.......2007-08-29

My nine-year-old son thought that this was boring. Very repetitive and talks down to a kid. Kind of patronizing.

audio book.......2007-08-23

The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child: Volume 1: Ancient Times: From the Earliest Nomads to the Last Roman Emperor, Revised Edition (Story ... the World: History for the Classical Child)

The Venture of Islam, Volume 3: The Gunpower Empires and Modern Times (Venture of Islam Vol. 3)

Average customer rating:

deep, rich, well considered and comprehensive

The Venture of Islam, Volume 3: The Gunpower Empires and Modern Times (Venture of Islam Vol. 3)
Marshall G. S. Hodgson
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Middle East | History | Subjects | Books

General | World | History | Subjects | Books

General | Religion & Spirituality | Subjects | Books

All Titles | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books

Religion & Spirituality | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
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ASIN: 0226346854

Book Description

The Venture of Islam has been honored as a magisterial work of the mind since its publication in early 1975. In this three-volume study, illustrated with charts and maps, Hodgson traces and interprets the historical development of Islamic civilization from before the birth of Muhammad to the middle of the twentieth century. This work grew out of the famous course on Islamic civilization that Hodgson created and taught for many years at the University of Chicago.

In this concluding volume of The Venture of Islam, Hodgson describes the second flowering of Islam: the Safavi, Timuri, and Ottoman empires. The final part of the volume analyzes the widespread Islamic heritage in today's world.

"This is a nonpareil work, not only because of its command of its subject but also because it demonstrates how, ideally, history should be written."—The New Yorker

Customer Reviews:

deep, rich, well considered and comprehensive.......2000-06-17

This review really applies to all three volumes. Hodgson's work is not for those new to Islamic studies, and his writing style is complex. Few are the sentences that lack at least one subjunctive clause. But his adoption of key Arabic terms in his narrative; his broad geographic sweep, from Andalusia and the Sahel through Nile and Oxus to India and Indonesia; and his comprehensive consideration of political, social, religious, cultural, and economic aspects of civilization make for a series as broad and deep as this student of history could want. It took me several years to read the whole set, as only recently did I have enough interest in the artistic and philisophic (falsafah) traditions.

Crosley: Two Brothers and a Business Empire That Transformed the Nation

Average customer rating:

a msut read for radio fans
The Crosley Empire
Crosley: Two Brothers and a Business Empire That Transformed the Nation
Industrial pioneers
Crosley

Crosley: Two Brothers and a Business Empire That Transformed the Nation
David Stern , Michael A. Banks , and Rusty McClure
Manufacturer: Emmis Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

Business | Professionals & Academics | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

Accessories | Automotive | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Classic Cars | Automotive | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 1578602912

Book Description

Set in the vibrant Industrial Age and filigreed with family drama and epic ambition, Crosley chronicles one of the great untold tales of the twentieth century. Born in the late 1800s into a humble world of dirt roads and telegraphs, Powel and Lewis Crosley were opposites in many ways but shared drive, talent, and an unerring knack for knowing what Americans wanted. Their pioneering inventions — from the first mass-produced economy car to the push-button radio — and breakthroughs in broadcasting and advertising made them both wealthy and famous, as did their ownership of the Cincinnati Reds. But as their fortunes grew, so did Powel’s massive ego, which demanded he own eight mansions and seven yachts at the height of the Great Depression. Rich with detailed reminiscences from surviving family members, Crosley is both a powerful saga of a heady time in American history and an intimate tale of two brilliant brothers navigating triumph and tragedy.

Customer Reviews:

a msut read for radio fans.......2007-08-27

Great read for a radio fan or anyone interested in early 20th century business moguls.

The Crosley Empire.......2007-08-23

I bought this book for my brother who owned a Crosley years ago, but I read it before I gave it to him. Great book! One of the best I have read in a long time.

It was a great history lesson and you do not have to be a Crosley buff to enjoy it.

Would highly recommend.

Richard Flory

Crosley: Two Brothers and a Business Empire That Transformed the Nation.......2007-08-11

The person for whom I purchased the book absolutely loves it!! It's the story, the pictures and presentation that just makes reading it so enjoyable. I'm very glad that I made this purchase.

Industrial pioneers.......2007-07-23

I'm sitting in a home full of computers, MP3 players, dvd recorders and players, a satellite TV box, and scores of electric appliances that are smarter than I am. Reading of a time when consumer electronics were unknown, and the primary electric appliance was a lightbulb, is like looking into the dark ages. Well, not quite. But you know what I mean.

The Crosley name is one that I've heard around my home throughout my life, but with the exception of a Crosley radio on a shelf, my knowledge of the company or the men that founded the firm was fuzzy at best. The authors have done an outstanding job at fleshing out Powel and Lewis Crosley and the world they lived in and revolutionized.

Many a novel I've read non-stop, but this is the first biography that I've done an "all-nighter" with.

The authors had no axe to grind, the times were well fleshed out, and one's faith in the ability of someone to think it up and do it, is reaffirmed. It was chock full of interesting information and facts, and I found myself checking Google satellite maps for locations mentioned in the book (Yes, the Arlington St. location still exisits and the satellite pic catches the executive tower, one-time home of WLW).

There is some bumpy writing, as noted in a few other reviews. I blame not the authors, but the editor. The boys really like their cliches. Lawyers are always "Sharpening their pencils," people come and go "Exit Stage right/left, Enter stage right/left;" and so many variations of "Masses not the classes" permeated the text, I wondered if they had some sort of Bolshevik thing going on.

That aside, this guy will be giving several copies of this book for Christmas this year - and I can't think of a better testimonial to the book.

Crosley.......2007-05-31

This was one of the most intersting biog. I have read in a long time. It is hard to believe the brothers could jam that much into just one lifetime and then it was all gone. I heartly recommend this book if you have an interest in one of our most exciting periods.

Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate (Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture)

Average customer rating:

Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate (Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture)
Elizabeth Hill Boone
Manufacturer: University of Texas Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Mexico | Americas | History | Subjects | Books

Aztec | Ancient | History | Subjects | Books

General | Occult | Religion & Spirituality | Subjects | Books

Time | Physics | Science | Subjects | Books

All Titles | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

ASIN: 0292712634

Book Description

In communities throughout precontact Mesoamerica, calendar priests and diviners relied on pictographic almanacs to predict the fate of newborns, to guide people in choosing marriage partners and auspicious wedding dates, to know when to plant and harvest crops, and to be successful in many of life's activities. As the Spanish colonized Mesoamerica in the sixteenth century, they made a determined effort to destroy these books, in which the Aztec and neighboring peoples recorded their understanding of the invisible world of the sacred calendar and the cosmic forces and supernaturals that adhered to time. Today, only a few of these divinatory codices survive. Visually complex, esoteric, and strikingly beautiful, painted books such as the famous Codex Borgia and Codex Borbonicus still serve as portals into the ancient Mexican calendrical systems and the cycles of time and meaning they encode.

In this comprehensive study, Elizabeth Hill Boone analyzes the entire extant corpus of Mexican divinatory codices and offers a masterful explanation of the genre as a whole. She introduces the sacred, divinatory calendar and the calendar priests and diviners who owned and used the books. Boone then explains the graphic vocabulary of the calendar and its prophetic forces and describes the organizing principles that structure the codices. She shows how they form almanacs that either offer general purpose guidance or focus topically on specific aspects of life, such as birth, marriage, agriculture and rain, travel, and the forces of the planet Venus. Boone also tackles two major areas of controversy—the great narrative passage in the Codex Borgia, which she freshly interprets as a cosmic narrative of creation, and the disputed origins of the codices, which, she argues, grew out of a single religious and divinatory system.

Persians: Masters of the Empire (Lost Civilizations)

Average customer rating:

A very good introduction to the Persians
Excellent work on history of Persia

Persians: Masters of the Empire (Lost Civilizations)

Manufacturer: Time-Life Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Early Civilization | Ancient | History | Subjects | Books

General | Ancient | History | Subjects | Books

Mesopotamia | Ancient | History | Subjects | Books

General | Middle East | History | Subjects | Books

Iran | Middle East | History | Subjects | Books

General | World | History | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 0809491044

Customer Reviews:

A very good introduction to the Persians.......2000-11-14

This book is part of the Time-Life series: Lost Civilizations. It examines Persian history and civilization from ancient Elam through the conquest by the Arabs in 642. The book has a wealth of information on its subject, along with a large number of beautiful and interesting pictures.

My one complaint against this book is that it largely ignores the religious aspect, devoting only one small sidebar to Zoroastrianism. If you are interested in the ancient Persians, then this is an excellent book to own.

Excellent work on history of Persia.......2000-01-22

I am glad to have bought and read this book. It is quite informative and interesting to read. The pictures are excellent and the writing is plain. The book treats the origins and development of the Persian (Iranian) Empire before the coming of Islam. It celeberates the archeological efforts and historical research that have brought this important part of human's history and planet into light. I only wish that the title of the series was not Lost Civilizations but First Civilizations. Egypt, Persia and India are very much alive. These books can make very good gifts.

Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time

Average customer rating:

For a limited audience
Interesting
Needs to be shortened
The Relation of Einstein and Poincare through the Response to Set Theory
Slow start

Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time
Peter Galison
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Astronomy | Astronomy | Science | Subjects | Books

General | Science | Subjects | Books

History of Science | History & Philosophy | Science | Subjects | Books

Relativity | Physics | Science | Subjects | Books

Time | Physics | Science | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 0393326047

Book Description

"More than a history of science; it is a tour de force in the genre."—New York Times Book Review

A dramatic new account of the parallel quests to harness time that culminated in the revolutionary science of relativity, Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps is "part history, part science, part adventure, part biography, part meditation on the meaning of modernity....In Galison's telling of science, the meters and wires and epoxy and solder come alive as characters, along with physicists, engineers, technicians and others....Galison has unearthed fascinating material" (New York Times).

Clocks and trains, telegraphs and colonial conquest: the challenges of the late nineteenth century were an indispensable real-world background to the enormous theoretical breakthrough of relativity. And two giants at the foundations of modern science were converging, step-by-step, on the answer: Albert Einstein, an young, obscure German physicist experimenting with measuring time using telegraph networks and with the coordination of clocks at train stations; and the renowned mathematician Henri Poincaré, president of the French Bureau of Longitude, mapping time coordinates across continents. Each found that to understand the newly global world, he had to determine whether there existed a pure time in which simultaneity was absolute or whether time was relative.

Esteemed historian of science Peter Galison has culled new information from rarely seen photographs, forgotten patents, and unexplored archives to tell the fascinating story of two scientists whose concrete, professional preoccupations engaged them in a silent race toward a theory that would conquer the empire of time. 40 b/w illustrations.

Customer Reviews:

For a limited audience .......2007-07-22

Galison has written a very uneven story. It begins with a long, confusing 50 page introduction that assumes a considerable knowledge of the theory of relativity from the reader. This is followed by an often boring, pedantic 150 pages describing late-19th century efforts to synchronize clocks. The connection to relativity is described and justified, but not enough for the length of this section. The level of scientific and historical knowledge alternates between mid-level technical to detailed historical esoterica; e.g., Galison discusses the "Dreyfus affair" as if the reader would know all about it. The final 100 pages consist of a dense discussion of the philosophical and historical implications of Poincare's and Einstein's different choices concerning their approaches to relativity.

This book will be of interest to readers very involved in the history of science. The measurement of longitude is better described by Dava Sobel. Galison does a terrible job with relativity: his discussions on the subject tend to be confusing rather than enlightening. Unless you are particularly interested in the failings of Henri Poincare, or a detailed discussion of the overlap of synchronize timekeeping and the theory of relativity, skip this book.

Interesting.......2007-04-05

The goal of this book is to provide the context for a momentous shift in physics; the change from Newtonian conceptions of absolute time to the modern theories of relativity/spacetime. For Galison, the key seems to be the shift from an abstract notion of absolute time to an operationally defined definition of time based on signalling between clocks. This change is part of the enormous change from classical physics to modern physics that occured following the turn of the past century. Galison's aim is to show the broad connections between this event and a series of parallel phenomena in contemporary science, technology, and even politics. Galison concentrates on 2 key figures; the great mathematician and physicist Henri Poincare, and his younger and even greater contemporary Albert Einstein. Galison shows very well that issues of time, defintions of universal and local time, and methods of assessing time were broadly important in the late 19th century. The expansion of European empires, the huge increase in international maritime trade, and the development of dense railway networks required more accurate standardization of time and correlation of times at different parts of the globe and within different countries. These practical issues brought questions about defining time and debates over methods of defining time to the fore. Much of this debate required attention to setting conventions for time measurement. At the same time, major issues of physics and philosophy had started to undermine the historic view of absolute time. Galison shows that both Einstein and Poincare were quite deeply embedded in these practical issues. Poincare as a major figure in French science dealt directly with many of these issues on both a national and international scale. Einstein, through his work in the Swiss patent office directly encountered many of the emerging technologies related to time measurement. Both were interested not only in physics related to time but also to philosophical speculation related to time. Einstein would ultimately push physics across the threshold of a truly relativistic account of time though Poincare came very close. While some of this book is redundant, Galison certainly presents a convincing case for the interconnection between the physics of Einstein and Poincare, and the other time related concerns of this period.
While Galison doesn't address this issue specifically, his account is relevant to the famous account of scientific change developed by Thomas Kuhn. It is hard to see the decisive paradigm shift described by Kuhn in Galison's account. Indeed, much of this account seems to vindicate the conclusion of the historian of physics Kragh (Quantum Generations) who sees late 19th century physics as quite dynamic and considerable continuity between the physics of the late 19th century and what came after.

Needs to be shortened.......2007-02-24

I am in complete agreement with several other reviewers that the book is overly long and redundant. It should have been edited to at least half its size. The last chapter is totally unnecessary. This is a shame because the basic material provides a unique perspective on the history of Relativity that is convincing and illuminating. I don't find fault with the technical level as some other reviewers and I believe the connections between Einstein's and Poincare's work is well made.

The Relation of Einstein and Poincare through the Response to Set Theory.......2006-04-17

The twentieth century is dead, and in this essay we view the remains. This is not, of course, to say that that century's influence is gone. Far from it, and that is why we view the remains. How they got that way is the cautionary tale embedded in this brief survey of some of the chief intellectual monuments of the twentieth century. New historical research shows that virtually no discipline has remained immune to the "natural" mathematics developed at the turn of the century in order to cope with the supposed "paradoxes" generated by set theory-not economics, not physics, not biology: apparently no area of inquiry has escaped being made part of the "natural" mathematics project. This mathematics asserts that mathematical formulations are inherently anomalous; the evidence of this is that they generate paradoxes. Therefore, the idea that mathematics is an aspect of human perception, must be made a part of mathematical formulations even though it plays no internally consistent role in any "natural" mathematical formulation.

The role of "natural" mathematics in the disciplines has gone unremarked for the very reason it was influential in the first place. Whether the researcher was the physicist Albert Einstein, the economist Piero Sraffa, the logician Kurt G?del, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, or the biologist Motoo Kimura, scientists in non-mathematics disciplines felt they were unable to express their ideas mathematically. This is the chief revelation of the new historical research, and a remarkable and unexpected (given the exalted reputations of these figures) unifying feature of twentieth-century intellectual history. These thinkers had to search for appropriate mathematical terms in the latest mathematics of their day. They were unprepared to cope with the idea that flaws in the mathematics lodged errors in their theories. The current reexamination of the mathematics of the disciplines-which will turn out to be the chief intellectual enterprise of the early twenty-first century-began with the revelation of the faulty approach taken to set theory by some of the chief proponents of "natural" mathematics.

It should be noted that this unification of twentieth-century ideas on the basis of the "natural" mathematics they share, was not the unification sought by twentieth-century thinkers themselves. It has gone pretty much unremarked that twentieth-century thinkers sought to unify the disciplines on the basis of relativity. It has gone unremarked largely because the project was abandoned when physics developed terms of art so recherch? that the data and concepts of other disciplines could not be matched to them. The approach was swiftly abandoned, and suppressed out of embarrassment. As we shall see, bringing Einstein's work into alignment with "natural" mathematics-something which has not been possible until now-allows us to begin asking the kinds of questions which will in the end reveal precisely and in detail, the influence of "natural" mathematics with which we still live and in which we still express our scientific ideas.

With the appearance of the general relativity theory, it became increasingly difficult for other disciplines to "map" their own terms of art to those of relativity in an internally consistent fashion. But we know now that it was attempted very high up in the western intellectual hierarchy, as Galbraith has shown in his work on Keynes. Ernst Mayr, at one time the doyen of evolutionary studies, claimed during the 1950s that evolution could be seen as a genetic theory of relativity. However, in his later writings that concept went the way of the dinosaur and today he is a figure of fun; no one bothers to investigate what he meant by the term, which is rather too bad, since it may turn out to be one of the few interesting ideas he ever had. Today, of course, we say that it's impossible: there are no quarks in biology, no leptons in economics and certainly no charm in mathematics. You can't get, logically, from any concept in any of those disciplines, to any concept of the Standard Model. We smile at the naivet? of Keynes for even attempting what until very recently we considered quite impossible.

Keynes did not have a very good grasp of relativity, or, seen through the lens of Sraffa's Production of Commodities By Means of Commodities (1960), even a very good grasp of economics. But it is not altogether fanciful to see internally consistent links between the relativistic world and the biological or economic worlds. After all, light is one of the postulates of relativity, as it is in biology, and humanity is part of biology, and economics the study of one aspect of humanity.

Links like that, however, didn't arouse the competitive instincts of early twentieth-century intellectuals. What did arouse them was the idea that Einstein's special relativistic argument had wound up at the top of the heap of argumentation. His rhetorical strategy is what proved so seductive. We are starting to take that apart now in the twenty-first century, as I shall show and as Andrea Cerroni has shown. However, at the time of its appearance (although Einstein was frustrated at how long it took to gain recognition even after the publication of the 1905 papers), what impressed intellectuals was the special relativistic argument qua argument-above all, the relativistic "event," what today we would call a spacetime point. To them it was a matter simply of ignoring the subject matter-the materials-of the argument, and just looking at the argument as an internally consistent structure. It was gorgeous-it had no flaws. What was even more impressive was that it required Einstein himself to point out the limitations of special relativity. If you could come to terms with his argument, then you could configure the terms of your own discipline so that they mapped to relativity in an internally consistent way. Then you would have a relativity theory of economics, or biology-or even mathematics!

It must be noted that we are still enamored of the explanatory power of the Standard Model, despite its having turned into something like a Christmas tree. For this reason, historians of ideas pay little attention to the idea that the fundamental ideas of relativity are simply shared by the other disciplines. We are still in an early stage of the examination of the influence of "natural" mathematics. The apparently bad experience of earlier attempts to unify the disciplines, along with disciplinary hubris, still makes us leery of revisiting the settled questions of the various disciplines. And there is nothing wrong with respecting the boundaries these disciplines have set up for themselves. In fact, it allows us to take the chief current ideas of different disciplines one by one, examining them on their own terms in light of the latest mathematical historical research. This examination begins to reveal their shared ideas, and the overarching concerns of twentieth-century thinking. In the course of this examination, we shall see that we have begun to free ourselves of many received ideas.

One of the most important goals of the discussion which follows, is to briefly introduce specialists to major monuments outside their disciplines and to provide reasons for specialists to familiarize themselves with these works which, initially, may seem to be remote from their concerns. Why should a chemist read Sraffa, or an economist read Kimura? Hopefully, the linkage of these writers through "natural" mathematics, will provide, above all, the stimulus for specialists to reexamine ideas in their own fields which they take too much for granted.

Piero Sraffa's Economics of "Natural" Mathematics

Production of Commodities By Means of Commodities is still the most advanced work of economics and one of the chief artifacts of the twentieth century. How does this famous work relate to relativity? We know now that Sraffa read books by Whitehead, Einstein and discussions of quantum mechanics. By the time he came to these works, "natural" mathematics was well under way. The "paradoxes" were so well accepted that their origins-the exploration of which is the means by which Alejandro Garciadiego reveals their flaws-had been buried. What we don't know is the extent to which Sraffa went beyond a general understanding of the terms he read and was able to use them in their own context as terms of art. By the time he started working, had he imbibed enough "natural" mathematics through other means that what he read merely confirmed him in his procedures and terms? It appears, by the way, that Wittgenstein never read a word of Einstein-at least I have seen no documentation of it, although there are comments on relativity in his remarks on the foundations of mathematics and other places.

Sraffa was not, I think, sufficiently aware of the polemical program of "natural" mathematics to be on his guard against it, and so he did not set himself the task of looking into its terms. Nevertheless, he may have sensed that something was amiss, and may have simply been trying to express his misgivings using the received terms of art of economics. Examining Production as a form of protest may, in the end, make a lesser but more useful figure of Sraffa. That certainly seems the way we are beginning to examine twentieth-century mathematics itself. It is an approach which allows works which, otherwise, are strangers to each other, to "talk" to each other.

Sraffa, of course, tried his hand at unifying economics and physics, without much success. He regarded relativity as standing for the proposition "that for every effect there must be sufficient cause, that the causes are identical with their effects, and that there can be nothing in the effect which was not in the causes: in our case, there can be no product for which there has not been an equivalent cost, and all costs...must be necessary to produce it." These commonplaces were, of course, a serious misreading and later a misapplication of relativity, further compounded by an even later putative rejection of the misreading. But if, as appears to be the case, the mature works of both Einstein and Sraffa are linked by their common expression in "natural" mathematics, then we must undertake an evaluation which has not previously been possible. We can consider the following statement by Sraffa to be his formulation of a spacetime point:

[F]or circulating capital, at the same moment that its value passes into the product, in most cases, also the material substance which is the bearer of that value, either passes into the product (raw material) or anyway passes out of the process of production (e.g. fuel). On the other hand, for fixed capital, the transfer of value from, e.g., the machine to the product, appears as a purely abstract process, which takes place without any corresponding transfer of material substance: that value is passed is undoubted, for the machine decreases in value while the product increases, but the machine remains complete in all its parts, with its efficiency unimpaired for the time being, and ready to resume operation in the next year. In order to see how this abstract process takes place an abstract point of view is inevitable.

What is the geometrical expression of this statement? By way of contrast to his previous statement, this statement introduces a term of art, the term "abstract," by means of which it seems that all the other terms in the statement become terms of art as well. Consider, for example, that we cannot understand the word "capital" as used here, as having any of the meanings we previously associated with it, but instead, only the one Sraffa gives it in his argument. Since this opens up the possibility that that argument is the "natural" mathematical argument, we can in turn subject it to questions relating it to relativity as another expression of "natural" mathematics:

1. What are Sraffa's assumptions here about light? about biological theory (considering Production deals with agricultural production)?
2. What is the economic "event" here, regarding that as a spacetime point?
3. Does the approach here reflect the "natural" mathematics as of the 1942, when it was written, or the developments of physics of the same period? We think of the "developments" of "natural" mathematics as ridiculous, rather like the "development" of phrenology. However, its practitioners were-and are-busily scribbling away. Did Sraffa "keep up" with this nonsense and "incorporate" it?
4. What are Sraffa's mathematical assumptions in this statement? Are they entirely Euclidean, or Euclidean at all? Remember that Einstein adopts strict Euclidean ideas as the assumptions of special relativity, along with the constancy of the speed of light.
5. Does the train experiment in Relativity map logically to the Production "event"?

We shall have occasion to give Einstein's formulation of a spacetime point as this same train experiment, and open up the possibility of setting Einstein's and Sraffa's statements side by side as expressions of one idea, or different aspects of one question. In this latter statement of Sraffa, what "paradox" is he trying to express, what "paradox" is he trying to avoid?

Kurt G?del's Insufficient Examination of "Natural" Mathematics

It is clear now that Garciadiego's book on the set-theoretical "paradoxes" is a dagger pointed straight at the heart of G?del's theorem. Above all, this devastating book demolishes not only Jules Richard's paradox, but also, the rest of the book shows that the various paradoxes which so entranced Bertrand Russell and his contemporaries, weren't paradoxes at all-they weren't anything at all, they were nonsense, letters pulled out of a bag. For example, he shows that the famous "paradox" of Cesare Burali-Forti simply does not exist. In the context of an attempt to prove the Trichotomy Law, Burali-Forti tried "to prove by reductio ad absurdum that the hypothesis [involved in his own argument] was false and this method required supposing the hypothesis true and arriving at a contradiction. The employment of the hypothesis, as an initial premise, generated the inconsistency. But once the hypothesis is seen to imply a contradiction it is thereby proved to be false." It is disconcerting to reflect that these two items are already sufficient to dislodge much of twentieth-century mathematics. It is doubly disconcerting to note that G?del approvingly cites Richard's paradox in his 1931 paper. G?del accepted the false but widely held tradition that Richard argued that truth in number theory cannot be defined in number theory. It turns out that what is undefined in Richard's argument (as he himself pointed out) is the number crucial to making the argument. However, G?del added to Richard's argument the idea that provability in number theory can be defined in number theory, and came up with mistaken result that if the provable formulae are all true, then there must be some true but unprovable formulae. G?del depends, for an internally consistent distinction between truth and provability, on the idea that there is some logical content to Richard's "paradox." Because that "paradox" has no logical content, we are left not with an argument, but instead with a question: what is G?del's argument? This change in attitude toward G?del's theorems, is one of the first revolutions wrought by the historical inquiry into "natural" mathematics-but it is not the last. Above all, as we shall see it allows us to link G?del's ideas in an internally consistent way, to those of other twentieth-century thinkers, the goal of our present inquiry.

And special relativity? In fact, we know very little about G?del's study of relativity through the years, apart from his rather uninteresting later relativistic studies, and Solomon Feferman in his editorial notes to G?del's Works is quite dismissive of some of G?del's restatements of relativistic ideas-in fact, he is rather dismissive of some of G?del's restatements of G?del's own ideas. When did G?del first read the 1905 papers, or did he ever read them? There were discussions of relativity in the Vienna Circle, but he seems to have shied away from them; physics, he evidently felt, was clearly Einstein's domain-he could never be Number One there. What exactly did he read by Einstein? What was his first reaction on hearing of special, or general, relativity? We just don't know. On this crucial subject, there is very little documentation for the cases of many important twentieth-century intellectuals (except, perhaps, Duchamp, who freely confessed that much of what he learned about science he gathered from conversation-apparently he never read a word by Einstein).

This leads us to ask the same sorts of questions about G?del's paper as we do about Sraffa's book. Is there an assumption about light in that paper? This seems a very odd question, even an inappropriate one, to ask about a mathematical argument. However, G?del provokes it with this remarkable statement in his paper: "Numbers cannot in fact be put into a spatial order"-this is the infamous footnote 8. What does he mean by a fact? by space? What are the Euclidean assumptions, if any, of the paper? What, in special relativistic terms, is a G?delian event? Is G?del's theorem an argument at all, and if so, is it, not a metamathematical argument or even a piece of formal logic, but in fact a straightforward physical theory? Is the paper nothing more than a retelling of Einstein's train experiment?

Motoo Kimura's Search for a "Natural" Mathematics

It may well turn out, based on an improved understanding of "natural" mathematics, that it was not Einstein who developed the special relativity theory, but instead, Mendel and Darwin, because the rhetoric of geometry-the "natural" geometry-in both Mendel's paper and Darwin's Origin is what we now recognize as demonstrably similar to the geometry Einstein sets forward in the train experiment in Relativity. Only an understanding of "natural" mathematics makes this linkage possible. Just as Einstein sets it forward to articulate the physical event, so Mendel and Darwin use it to articulate the biological event. It is in biology, of course, that we are most justified in asking for an internally consistent discussion of light. Do Darwin and Mendel, and later Motoo Kimura, have light as an assumption in their arguments, and what is that assumption? Are their assumptions Euclidean? Or better yet, if Einstein were to posit a relativistic biological event, how would he express it? Or is he expressing it? Is selection the relativistic event?
These are not questions necessarily restricted to special relativity. This is because Kimura is a statistician. His increasingly sophisticated use of statistical concepts led him to a mathematical apparatus which, in The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution, looks remarkably similar to the mathematical apparatus of, say, Richard Feynman's QED. The modern discipline of statistics grows out of "natural" mathematics. Are the similarities internally consistent? Is Kimura's random drift-responsible, in his view, for most mutation, rather than selection pressure-an exception to selection, or is it an exception to relativity? What is his biological event: substitution? mutation? selection? something else? Is the neutral theory a biological theory, or a physical theory? This latter question arises in considering a comment drawn from Kimura by a critic. In response, Kimura says: "Just as synonyms are not `noise' in language, it is not proper to regard the substitution of neutral alleles simply as noise or loss of genetic information....It seems to me to be more appropriate to say that strictly neutral alleles are absolutely noiseless." These metaphors are physical ideas. Of what?

The basis for unfolding the context of the terms of art of these different disciplines, is the understanding that they emerge from a shared "natural" mathematics. Neither Kimura nor Sraffa came to their disciplines from mathematics, and they felt they needed a mathematical expression for their ideas. Kimura learned French rather late just so he could read Gustave Mal?cot-who pioneered the use of "natural" mathematics in biology-and Sraffa went, like Diogenes, through mathematician after mathematician searching for the mathematical expression of his ideas. We still need to clarify the doctrinal influence on Sraffa of two "natural" mathematicians-Frank Ramsey and Abram Besicovitch-as opposed to the technical assistance they gave him. At any rate, Ramsey spent much of his brief career exploiting a quixotic and quite baseless assumption of difference between types of "paradoxes"-which were not paradoxes. Did he put Sraffa in the picture on the problems with the set-theoretic "paradoxes?" Almost certainly, no. Was Sraffa in a position to ask about them? No. Did Ramsey himself bother to find out about them? No.

Historical research is revealing the difficulties in the chief ideas of "natural" mathematics. For example, L.E.J. Brouwer promulgated what he called an "infinite ordinal number." Supposedly this notion had been ratified by Georg Cantor's well-ordering of the ordinal numbers. But it turns out that Cantor never did so, never claimed he had done so, and never used the term "infinite ordinal number." As Garciadiego says: "[G. G.] Berry maintained that Cantor had virtually proved the existence of the well-ordering of the ordinal numbers by showing that ordinals of the second class are well-ordered....but Cantor simply indicated that `we shall show that the transfinite cardinal numbers can be arranged according to their magnitude, and, in this order, [they] form, like the finite numbers, a `well-ordered aggregate' in an extended sense of the words.'" Nevertheless, Brouwer's term worked its way into the discourses of ?mile Borel (the mentor of Mal?cot), Andrei Kolmogorov, Haskell Curry and John von Neumann, and is, regrettably, at the heart of contemporary probability and computational theory; computer science is replete with "natural" mathematics-what false results is it thereby giving us? It is likely that we can put most twentieth-century disciplines in the form of Richard's "paradox," see how they partook of "natural" mathematics, and reveal their flaws. Now that we are more familiar with the idea that the project of the twentieth century-regardless of discipline-is "natural" mathematics, it is probably best to approach any idea in a twentieth-century discipline with two questions: what "paradox" is it trying to avoid? what "paradox" is it trying to express?

It should not be surprising if biology turns out to be a branch of physics. Most of Gregor Mendel's published papers are in meteorology. Charles Darwin began as a physicist seeking to describe reality and that concern is recurrent. He first sought to do so in the context of cosmology and geology and only later turned to biology, as we see when he presents his physical ideas in a book no one reads anymore, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs (1842). For Darwin, the identity of physics and biology is due to the progressivism of reality. Nature-encompassing all the disciplines-is the continuum of that progressivism; paradox supposedly flowed from the tension between perfection as an assumption and progressivism as a conclusion. Both Mendel and Darwin seem to have turned to biology because it offered more, and more internally continuous, physical data than cosmology or geology. Of all twentieth-century researchers, it appears to be Kimura who took his discipline closest to relativity. Is that true? Both Darwin and Kimura set their work in the context of physics. Darwin says "that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." Kimura's gloss on this passage is to remind us that although mutational "random processes are slow and insignificant for our ephemeral existence, in the span of geological times, they become colossal." Indeed, perhaps a clue to understanding Sraffa's use of "natural" mathematics, can be found in this comment on Marx by David Riazanoff, the editor of his notebooks: "If in 1881-82 [Marx] lost his ability for intensive, independent intellectual creation, he nevertheless never lost the ability for research. Sometimes, in reconsidering these Notebooks, the question arises: Why did he...expend so much labor as he spent as late as the year 1881, on one basic book on geology, summarizing it chapter by chapter." What was G?del's or Sraffa's theory of geology? We in turn hunt among concepts such as "fixed law," "gravity," "random" and "geological times" for the necessary internal links between geology, physics and biology...but perhaps these words have fallen apart and we cannot use them anymore. It appears, in any event, that if physics was the monarch of twentieth-century science, during the nineteenth century, the resort was to geology to test all theories. Perhaps we don't understand twentieth-century thinkers very well because they're not twentieth-century thinkers: they're nineteenth-century thinkers.

Another idea is also beginning to take shape: there are no "paradoxes," at least as far as we know. Researchers, it seems to me, have resisted looking into the set-theoretical paradoxes because it leads us further and further back in time and so implicates more and more important ideas. If the set-theoretic "paradoxes" are not paradoxes, are the earlier paradoxes (for example, the liar paradox) really paradoxes? And more importantly, to what extent are the earlier mathematical expressions in the various disciplines, simply projects to "avoid" or "solve" these paradoxes, which in turn may not be paradoxes at all? To what extent is the history of objective discourse, a falsely based "natural" mathematics having no logical object? To what extent can we say to everything we currently consider to be internally consistent: what is your argument?

And relativity? In taking even a retrospective glance at the works of only three twentieth-century figures in relation to relativity, we are free to put ourselves very far in the future, at a time when an internal inconsistency has been found in relativity itself and that theory is an historical artifact. Then the three look to be, not attempting to map their work to relativity, but rather, using the inherited concepts of their respective disciplines to critique relativity, looking for an internal inconsistency which actually lies in the "natural" mathematics Einstein shares with them. Consider this passage from Lawson's accurate translation of Einstein's Relativity:

Are two events (e.g. the two strokes of lightning A and B) which are simultaneous with reference to the railway embankment also simultaneous relatively to the train? We shall show directly that the answer must be in the negative. When we say that the lightning strokes A and B are simultaneous with respect to be embankment, we mean: the rays of light emitted at the places A and B, where the lightning occurs, meet each other at the mid-point M of the length AB of the embankment. But the events A and B also correspond to positions A and B on the train. Let M1 be the mid-point of the distance AB on the traveling train. Just when the flashes (as judged from the embankment) of lightning occur, this point M1 naturally coincides with the point M but it moves...with the velocity...of the train.

This passage is by now so familiar that we think there can be nothing new to be seen in it. But there is: it is the term, "naturally coincides." This term ("f?llt zwar...zusammen" in the original German) leaps out at us because we are looking at it with twenty-first century eyes, not twentieth-century eyes; indeed, perhaps the most difficult cultural task now before us is simply to realize that we are not living in the twentieth century.

"Natural" coincidence is otherwise known as a spacetime point. Einstein has already spent twenty-odd pages of this very brief book laying out the assumptions which underlie the train experiment. He is very careful about being consistent with them, and he is a devoted and very strict Euclidean; he wished never to deviate from Euclid, a stance which reminds us that Sraffa wished never to deviate from Marx. But Einstein was not, it appears, quite careful enough. We know that he is assuming, along with Euclid, that the definition of the coincidence of two points is a point. However, we have never gotten (and never get, in any of Einstein's writings) a definition of a "natural" coincidence of two points. This alone prevents us from going on and this argument, which defined the twentieth century, abruptly ends.
We also have a problem if we try to resolve the issue ourselves. If we simply drop the term "naturally" we run into a situation in which Einstein has told us to assume two Cartesian coordinate systems, but now leaves us with one, since, following from the definition of the coincidence of two points, if two parallel coordinate systems coincide at one point, they coincide at all points and are one coordinate system, not two. We have been led to a contradiction.

A spacetime point is no longer a physical fact, it is an outmoded doctrine. This is the first occasion we have to note a logical mistake in Einstein's fundamental ideas. As it happens, we know how he came to make it. As pointed out recently, Einstein was enormously impressed by Poincar?'s Science and Hypothesis (1902). Alarmingly, we have very recently been told that Sraffa "studied intensively" this same book. That's not a good sign; indeed, it makes us wonder if Sraffa's idea of the "abstract" is the same as Einstein's view of the "natural." What they were totally unprepared for was the "natural" mathematical point of view Poincar? was trying so hard to sell them. As Garciadiego points out, Poincar? used the book to set out "numerous inconsistencies arising from set theory....Poincar? was hunting for `paradoxes' because he was trying to discredit both Cantor's theory of sets and Russell's logicism." But there were no paradoxes.
The young Einstein faced both a well-developed mathematical debate and a polemic. He had no idea of this. Note that at no time did Einstein ever question the status of the set theory, or other paradoxes, or the historical approach developed to deal with them (neither did Kimura or Sraffa). Instead, he felt comfortable expressing the relativity of simultaneity through "natural" mathematics without ever examining it, with disturbing consequences for his theory. In Poincar? he read and accepted the idea that "the mind has a direct intuition of this power ["proof by recurrence" or "mathematical induction"], and experiment can only be for [the mind] an opportunity of using it, and thereby of becoming conscious of it." In geometry "we are brought to [the concept of space] solely by studying the laws by which...[muscular] sensations succeed one another." These ideas were developed in order to deal with paradoxes which did not exist. Thus, they had no object-they related to absolutely nothing. Poincar? is such an unreliable guide that we have to look very skeptically at the work of anyone who was influenced by him. This idea of "succession" was vital if the "standstill" to which the "paradoxes" had brought mathematics, was to be overcome. As we shall see, this logically empty notion was applied with damaging results.

We now understand, however, why we never find "natural" coincidence among Einstein's postulates or definitions or among his conclusions: those are not its job. Its job is to float free of all context-depending on shared prejudices or simple uninquisitive ignorance in order to stay afloat-serving as a facilitator of arguments which cannot be carried out logically. Thus, we see exactly why the term occurs where it does in the relativity of simultaneity: it "allows" one point to "succeed" another, in conformity with the demands of "natural" mathematics. For the first time, we see Einstein-not as our contemporary-but rather, as a figure out of the past. He is hobbled by that by which we distinguish all figures out of the fact: by the infirmity of his intellectual appartus. Where is "natural" coincidence in G?del? in Sraffa? in Kumura?

Slow start.......2006-01-20

This book gets off to a somewhat slow start, but is definitely worth the read. The connections in history and the physical adventures of scientists and technologists in the 19th Century are fascinating.

What Life Was Like in the Lands of the Prophet: Islamic World, Ad 570-1405 (What Life Was Like)

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Easy and Fun
Two decent chapters and one boring one

What Life Was Like in the Lands of the Prophet: Islamic World, Ad 570-1405 (What Life Was Like)

Manufacturer: Time-Life Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Early Civilization | Ancient | History | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0783554656

Customer Reviews:

Easy and Fun.......2007-01-21

Doing research for a historical novel, and tiring of very long analyses with tiny print, I picked this one up at the library and immediately lost myself. It's great. Not quite detailed enough to be a serious reference, but the excellent bibliography will point you in the right direction. Tons of gorgeous pictures give the feel of the period, and a lengthy section (towards the end) paints the daily life of the famous Ibn Khaldun, whose writings are tapped as the primary source for that section. If you are looking for a good introduction to the mindset, daily life and framework of a certain period in history, I can think of no better starting point than these books.

Two decent chapters and one boring one.......2002-02-02

This one started off more interestingly than some of the past ones, focusing on the life of Mohammed himself and how he came to write the Koran and to start Islam. That was very interesting to read since I knew little about it, and it seemed like something important.

The next chapter, though, moved ahead a couple of hundred years and boiled down to who-conquered-whom, which seems to be about typical for the middle chapters of these books. So you've got some guys in Spain and some guys in West Africa fighting over the throne of Islam in the Middle East. It got tedious very quickly.

The concluding chapter (there were only three) was an improvement, dealing with the lives of doctors and tradesmen in Cairo during the prime of the Islamic Empire. That was a little more interesting, particularly dealing with the Islamic Renaissance, since the doctor followed the teachings of Galen.

Book Description

In Boardwalk Empire, Atlantic City springs to life in all its garish splendor. Author Nelson Johnson traces "AC" from its birth as a quiet seaside health resort, through the notorious backroom politics and power struggles, to the city's rebirth as an entertainment and gambling mecca where anything goes.

Customer Reviews:

Great Read and A Breath of Fresh Air.......2007-08-22

We've all read books outlining the history and politics of such places as Las Vegas, New York and Hollywood. This book takes on a topic that is very rarely given any attention, the birth and life (and seedy underbelly) of Atlantic City.

I first visited AC when I was a boy in the late 1960's. My mother (now 85) always regaled me with stories of how glamorous AC was when she was growing up. I could never reconcile that image of the city with the one I saw, that of stark urban decay on the one side and the gleaming casinos on the other. The book lays it all out, from the earliest days to the politics that brought gambling to the east coast.

I read the book on a one week vacation in Brigantine Beach, the beach town right next to AC. I found the book in a beach house that my father-in-law had rented and read it in about 3 days. I found it fascinating. It is strange to say of this type of book that I couldn't put it down but it was virtually the case.

The book has it all, history corruption, politics, do-gooders, sex/affairs, the mob, entertainment, bootlegging etc., etc.

I was not aware that the book was being considered as the basis for an HBO series but I will be sure to watch it if it materializes. Read the book, you'll like it.

No World's Playground.......2007-03-19

I got interested in reading this book when it was recently announced acclaimed film director Martin Scorsese was planning to use it as the basis for a his new proposed HBO series.
Published by an obscure regional press, and written by lifelong Atlantic City resident and attorney Nelson Johnson, Boardwalk Empire is a rather dry accounting of the turn of the century creation and political shenanigans of this tourist Mecca. While the book traces the birth and growth of the city, its decline and resurrection with the introduction of legalized gambling, there is nary a mention of Steel Pier, Salt Water Taffy or Mr. Peanut.
It will be interesting to see how Scorsese breathes life into these historical characters and events. Someday a vibrant novel will be written about this fascinating beach city once touted as the "world's playground". Unfortunately, this book isn't it.

From corrupt crime bosses, to the influence of Republicans.......2003-07-15

Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, And Corruption Of Atlantic City by Nelson Johnson studies the history, politics, and personalities (both good and bad), that shaped and influenced Atlantic City during the years of the twentieth century. Ranging from corrupt crime bosses, to the influence of Republican politics, to the present day characterization of Atlantic City as a haven for entertainment and gambling, Boardwalk Empire is an absorbing, informative, and at times startling chronicle of an American city. Boardwalk Empire is a strongly recommended addition to Political Science and 20th Century American History collections.

A Shore Bet.......2003-05-29

I am pleased to be the first reader from Atlantic City to review this book. It goes without saying that it was of special interest to me. Throughout my life I have met several of the key figures in this book, so it was fascinating to learn more about their lives.

I enjoyed reading this book very much and would recommend it to anyone interested in Atlantic City. It was well written and researched. Nelson Johnson repeats facts when they become relative to another incident. This makes it much easier to keep track of the players and how one event or person influences another years later.

Johnson helps local residents understand why a unique racial tension still exists in this small northern city. This may not be apparent to readers unfamiliar with the area.

If I were to change anything about this book, it would be the last few pages. It ends with Nelson Johnson giving his opinion on the future of Atlantic City and how it can avoid its mistakes of the past. It is my feeling that this possibly belonged in a separate conclusion but not as the ending to the last chapter.

History buffs and political junkies will love this book.

NO GAMBLE.......2003-01-16

I have been interested in this most amazing city for about 30 years now. I thought that I had nothing else to learn about the city until I read Boardwalk Empire. Thank you Mr. Johnson for bringing a lot of new information to light in a most enjoyable fashion. Once started, it was hard to put this excellent book to rest. I highly recommend this book to anyone remotely interested in urban America. This book is a sure thing.

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Broken promises
A Confronting Read

Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire
John Pilger
Manufacturer: Nation Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1568583265

Book Description

World–renowned journalist John Pilger looks at five nations (Palestine, Diego Garcia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and South Africa) that have undergone long and painful struggles for freedom, yet are still waiting for its realization.

Customer Reviews:

Broken promises.......2006-10-07

"This book is about empire". With this opening eye-grabber, John Pilger has once again risen above the mundane pattern of today's "mainstream" journalism. The book is an account of how the US is forging its global empire, aided and abetted by such allies as Great Britain and Israel. And that's not counting the client rulers of nations like Afghanistan and South Africa. The edifice is "global capitalism" supported by buttresses of military might and bearing giant billboards displaying the shibboleths "freedom" and "democratic ideals". With scathing revelations delivered with strictly expressive prose, Pilger relates his findings with almost surgical precision.

He structures the book around five nations. The first, even after all these years, is likely to be beyond many reader's ken. It is a little island group in the Indian Ocean - the Chagos Islands. Inhabited for generations by the descendents of former slaves, they were summarily and illegally deported from their home to make way for a massive US Air Force base. The base provides a launching site for long distance bombers to reach anywhere in Asia. Two thousand people - those that haven't died from "sadness" have pursured a legal challenge to be returned to their home. The High Court of Britain has accepted their plea, but under US pressure, says Pilger, the British have ignored the ruling.

From the Indian Ocean, Pilger travels to Palestine, one of "freedom's" most shocking contradictions. Displaced from their ancient homelands, thousands of Palestinians were herded into grubby refugee camps. Those that weren't slaughtered by the invaders at the beginning of the occupation, that is. Pilger describes Israeli racist policies and their implementation, killing children, usurping land and water supplies and blockading the population from medical care. Israelis, he notes, often refer to their de facto prisoners in dismissive terms, allowing the Israeli army to invade and crush homes and farms. Orchards, a major agricultural factor in the Palestinian community, seem to be particular targets. Pilger explains how the US has built up Israel's military to the point where it is the world's third most powerful. Its major task is to keep Palestinian freedom in check, as well as smashing the economic base of a people with no state and no means of protecting themselves. Is it any wonder, he asks, that acts of desperation have resulted.

Pilger makes a rather swift pass through India to describe how "global capitalism" has intensified the separation between rich and poor. A few urban centres maintain a facade of prosperity, securely enclosed within well-protected facilities. From these sites, Indians who have transformed themselves into IT "help desk" call centres, provide "support" for US workers unfamiliar with their office computers. Outside those high-tech enclaves, much of the remaining population suffers in grinding poverty. The "democratic" promise of Ghandi's struggle has been overthrown by leaders eager to follow what they deem the US model of "free enterprise". The process has economically divided the nation worse than it ever was under the Raj.

The last two segments of Pilger's account vividly demonstrate the dual primary thrusts of empire - economic and military. South Africa, suffering for half a century under the truncheon of apartheid, emerged with a grand promise of freedom under Nelson Mandela. Finally freed after a generation within the walls of Robben Island prison, he exemplified what a crusader for freedom could achieve. The achievement proved hollow as Pilger graphically describes the Truth and Reconciliation hearings he attended. Police and army thugs, whose ranks reached to the highest level went free, absolved from punishment. Worse, none of the victims of their brutality received a jot of compensation. Far worse, was the selling out of South Africa's resources to the new wave of foreign investors from the UK and US. Part of the investment deal left any regulations about miner's safety in limbo or worse. Another part was the granting of mineral rights on any parcel of lan