Book Description
Robert Jackall's Moral Mazes offers an eye-opening account of how corporate managers think the world works, and how big organizations shape moral consciousness. Based on extensive interviews with managers at every level of two industrial firms and of a large public relations agency, Moral Mazes takes the reader inside the intricate world of the corporation. Jackall reveals a world where hard work does not necessarily lead to success, but where sharp talk, self-promotion, powerful patrons, and sheer luck might. Cheerfully-bland public faces mask intense competition in this world where people hide their intentions, and accountability often depends on the ability to outrun mistakes. In this topsy-turvy world, managers must bring often unforgiving technology and always difficult people together to make money, an uncompromising task demanding continual compromises with conventional truths. Moral questions become merely practical concerns and issues of public relations. Sooner or later, managers find themselves wondering how to act in such a world and still maintain a sense of personal integrity. This brilliant, sometimes disturbing, often wildly funny study of corporate thinking, decision-making, and morality presents compelling real life stories of the men and women charged with running the businesses of America. It will interest anyone concerned with how big organizations actually function, or with the current moral malaise in our public life.
Customer Reviews:
bibliographic data : .......2005-11-06
Author: Jackall, Robert.
Title: Moral mazes : the world of corporate managers / Robert Jackall.
Publisher: New York : Oxford University Press, 1988.
Edition Date: 1988
Language: English
Notes: Includes index.
Physical Details: ix, 249 p. ; 25 cm.
Subjects: Business ethics--United States.
Executives--Professional ethics--United States.
Corporations--Corrupt practices--United States.
Objective, sad, but true.......2002-05-06
"Moral Mazes" is an extensive, award-winning and highly accurate sociological portrait of life in the modern corporation, an academic precursor, so to speak, of the "Dilbert" cartoon strip. Unlike many other writers on this topic, Jackall doesn't resort to Marxist rants, but rather, compares modern corporate culture to the "Protestant" work ethic most Americans are raised into.
Jackall's inquiry, based on in-depth interviews with managers themselves, is broad in scope, and it is hard to generalize. Within about 200 pages, he covers the social circles of the corporation, cronyism, bad decisionmaking and public relations, to name a few. He discovers that corporations, at the upper levels at least, resemble a king's court more than a meritocratic organization. The essential work of a manager is not "management" or "leadership," but constantly making the right friends and adopting the correct posture. Anyone who has worked in such a setting, or knows people in such a field, will be able to relate instantly, although it can be argued that Jackall did not need to spend years of ethnographic research to reach this conclusion.
This book is not for everyone, as Jackall must conclude that "ethics" as practiced by managers is nothing more than "survival" and ambition for one's own "advantage." While such a diagnosis may seem harsh, it is difficult to rationally explain recent events in the marketplace, such as the Enron scandal, without concluding that corporate executives have a moral compass that differs from that of the everyday person.
Contrary to what a layman may think, Jackall makes no moral judgments of his own, although readers most certainly will. The title itself can be misinterpreted by people not familiar with sociology. The "morals" Jackall discusses are not ethics (which he attacks in his intro), but Durkheim's "occupational morality." While he does study corporations, he calls the focus of this study the "bureaucratic ethos" (not "corporate ethos"). Anyone who's read history (or the local newspaper) already knows bureacracy can create its own rules, from governments (i.e., the Nazis and the Holocaust) to religions (i.e., Catholicism and child molesters).
Surprisingly, by portraying executives' lives as frought with anxiety, guilt, "senseless" work and no reliable means to measure their self worth, Jackall may cause an intelligent reader to actually feel sorry for them. Reading though his interviews with executives, there's little question that many executives began to regard him as a "Father Confessor" to admit their deeds.
At the same time, Jackall offers an alternative theory for why the American work ethic has all but vanished: if people are promoted based soley on their manipulative social skills, why would anyone want to subscribe to the old work ethic?
A Cynical Autopsy.......2001-02-23
Robert Jackall strings together a series of worse-case scenarios gleaned from a very limited control group of corporations. He skillfully manipulates language (e.g., calling loyalty to one's boss 'fealty') in order to deliver what he thinks is an indictment of bureaucracy. He does have some interesting things to say about the press, but this occurs near the end and comprises less than a page of material. Save your time. Read something worthwhile like Thomas Sowell's classic "A Conflict of Visions." Jackall's book is not worth the read.
Throughly depressing but an absolute must read.......1998-10-07
This book ought to be required reading for all MBA candidates and would be corporate middle managers as an intro into the sad and dysfunctional but real corporate world. In numerous scenes that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has worked at a Fortune 200 firm the book recounts numerous instances of failed and misdirected management. Depressing because it reveals the underbelly of corporate America and capitalism but readable in its accurate portrayal. Occasionally at times slow (particularly towards the end when he presumably is tired of writing) it does a clinical autopsy on management. Like watching a train wreck you are compelled to keep reading even as you realize the denouement. If you think that ignorance is bliss - give this a miss - on the other hand, if you are a frustrated idealist and need proof that in order for evil to overcome good, good only has to do nothing, it is worth the investment. An excellent primer on why we need ethics courses but more importantly ethical actions.
Book Description
"The tourist Venice is Venice," Mary McCarthy once observed--a sentiment very much in line with what most of the fourteen million tourists who visit the city each year experience, but at the same time a painful reality for the 65,000 Venetians who actually live there. Venice is viewed from a new perspective in this engaging book, which offers a heady, one-city tour of tourism itself. Conducting readers from the beginnings of Venetian tourism in the late Middle Ages to its emergence as a form of mass entertainment in our time, the authors explore what happens when today's "industrial tourism" collides with an ancient and ever-more-fragile culture. Giving equal consideration to those who tour Venice and those who live there, their book affords rare insight into just what it is that the touring and the toured see, experience, and elicit from each other.
Customer Reviews:
Superb contemporary history.......2006-11-10
This is an easy read, and a surprisingly thoughtful, careful, and broadly informative book. It dives deeply into the endless, diverse difficulties of modern life in Venice, but with excellent historical context. Its history of Carnival, and its revival, for example, is the best I've read. It's blemished by two or three uninteresting pages of symbolic/semiotic analysis, but these minor problems are vastly overwhelmed by impressive reporting, review and research on important issues of the day.
The Bermuda-Shorts Triangle.......2005-08-28
If the City of Venice (Italy) ever decides to build a model of Las Vegas, will the model include a little replica of Las Vegas' Venetian Hotel, itself a model of Venice? It's the kind of question I might address to the authors of Venice: The Tourist Maze, this entertaining and rewarding account of what may be the most touristed city in the history of the planet.
You might suppose there is nothing new in a critique of Venetian tourism. Venice first licensed tour guides in 1219 (and right there is a factoid I did not know until I read this book). Any number of others have left accounts of tourism in Venice, and quite a few have left accounts of accounts.
Davis and Marvin do a creditable job of trying not to replow old ground. There's almost no mention of Mary McCarthy, Jan Morris, Viscount Norwich, and other visitors who have done so much to inform and entertain. There's only a bit of Henry James; almost none of Proust and only a glancing reference to that most famous of all sex tourists, Thomas Mann's Gustav von Aschenbach. Instead, they give their primary attention to tourism as an activity, from the standpoint alike of the provider and the consumer. You might almost call it an account of "the enterprise of tourism," except this makes it sound, misleadingly, like yet one more business book.
There is a whiff of the lamp about the presentation, although it never gets overpowering: the chapter on the gondola is called "the floating signifier," which is, I guess, the kind of joke you are bound to get when academics try to have fun. They say they "take advantage" of a notion of one "Appadurai" (who?), although he never makes it to the bibliography. A more obvious progenitor is Dean MacCannell, whose "The Tourist" is one of those rare books to make fancy theory both interesting and plausible. A still better source, though surely unintended, would be the trdition o;f the mystery novel, where the hard-boiled detective sees the great city from the underside (indeed I am a little surprised that they don't say a word about Donna Leon, the Arthur Conan Doyle of the Venetian murder mystery).
But forget about the theory: some of their best stuff is the nuts-and-boats practical. There is an admirable sketch-history of the gondola and its monster offspring, the vaporetto. And I particularly liked their discussion of the economics of the "artisan." They explain that Murano glass "works" because the craft is showy and dramatic, but that Burano lace-making does not "work," because the craft is not showy, and because real Burano lace is prohibitively expensive. Papier-mache masks work especially well, because the price is right, and the technology is accessible to any schoolchild. By the way it appears that those fancy designer masks (confession: I have one on the living room wall) are no part of the tradition of Venice: masks at the /carnevale/ were for the most part mass-produced.
The climax comes, inevitably in a discussion of the other Venice, the Venetian Hotel at Las Vegas (but why can't I find it in the index?). They provide an entertaining account, appropriately fascinated and appalled, of the Venetian as the private obsession of Steve Adleson who has lavished on it (so they say) the sum of $1.5 billion. They seem not to have noticed that from a business standpoint, the Venetian seems to have been a rousing success. If tourists still flock to the real Venice, they seem to descend at a comparable rate on our little Venice in the desert.
Been There, Lived That, Right On!.......2004-10-02
As an inveterate traveler, I usually find that books about places I have visited leave me sorry I read them - travel guides are often so filled with tourist hype or stereotypical portrayals or out-dated analysis. But, this is not a travel guide: it is a thoughful and well-researched critique of Venice as both a tourist city and a (struggling to remain) actual city.
Over the years I have related to Venice in three ways: a member of the day-trip brigade (with two children in tow); a more serious tourist making a five day stay of it; a long-term (six month) resident in one of its working class neighborhoods. From all of those perspectives, this book speaks to my experiences.
But, more than a souvenir of my times there (see the excellent discussion of the role of souvenirs in a tourist city), this work has opened my mind to other ways to see my beloved city. I now see the city and its people with new eyes, for the authors' critical eyes and ideas challenged me to experience Venice once again anew.
If, as I would claim, I love Venezia, then I would also want to engage my heart and soul in the challenge they pose for the future of the city: not the worries about "sinking into the sea" but the worries about becoming "lost in the tourists."
And did you know that tourists have been coming here for over 500 years (yes, fellow Americans, that is before any tourists invaded North America), and that tacky souvenirs have been available for at least 300 years? Lots more to know as well as ponder in this work.
Venice, the Tourist Maze.......2004-07-19
A must for the regular visitor of Venice. Davis and Marvin show clearly how the historical center and the outskirts (!) are sacrifized to the needs of mass-tourism. They describe how the the city is transformed sytematically into a historical theme-park in which the remaining locals have only a stage-role. And 'resistance is useless': the inhabitants are able to slow, not to stop the process.
The book predicts an ominous future of this cultural heritage site. Food for thought.
Customer Reviews:
Through the Magical Path of the Labyrinth.......2003-10-29
This last book by Jeff Saward, the well-known photographer and labyrinth historian, is a well illustrated and documented work based on his research on the field since the 1980s.
Through an extensive historical analysis of such an archetypal symbol - from the pre-historic Spanish petroglyph labyrinths to the modern revival - the author shows and describes almost all the labyrinths known up to the moment.
Although with some lacks (especially on literary labyrinths) this book, with its catalogue of the worldwide known labyrinths - the most comprehensive list ever since - is a useful (and an indispensable) tool to the beginner and the expert alike.
Amazon.com
This is not one of those pencil mazes you worked on as a kid. The entire book is one addictive maze. Each page spread is a room leading to other page/rooms. Your goal is to find the shortest route to the center and back while solving the puzzle in the center room--if you can figure out what the puzzle is. But then, each room is a puzzle filled with clues to decipher. Read the text and examine the gorgeous illustrations carefully. Beware--not every clue can be trusted. If you're an online gamer, consider this a Web site you can carry wherever you go.
Book Description
This is not really a book. This is a building in the shape of a book....a maze. Each numbered page depicts a room in the maze. Tempted? Test your wits against mine. I guarantee that my maze will challenge you to think in ways you've never thought before. But beware. One wrong turn and you may never escape!
Customer Reviews:
Unusual.......2007-01-18
This is a must in any library, whether you like mazes or not. Beautifully done.
One of the best puzzles ever, but also one of the toughest.......2006-07-13
A puzzle not for the faint-of-heart -- there is NO solution available to brute force and you are not expected to solve it in an evening. It's an exciting, detailed trip through a fiendish den of riddles and allusions with an untrustworthy guide, and I've used it as a great conversation piece with smart people. (Somewhere I have whole notebooks filled with sketched maps and riddle notes, the combined efforts of my theatre group ...) Highly recommended for those who love difficult, DIFFICULT puzzles.
nice but ... no answers.......2005-01-04
The format of this book is interesting: each numbered page is a room. The reader's goal is interesting: find the path from the first room to the 45th room and back. The text follows a person (the narrator) guiding a small group of visitors around the maze-building. The drawings are all pen & ink (no color). The task & setup are fun, but ...
Here are my issues: (1) The narrator is a bit nasty -- nothing unsuitable for young children, but certainly not pleasant. (2) You absolutely MUST solve at least one riddle to find a path from room 1 to room 45. (3) There is no way to know whether you have found the correct answer to a riddle -- or for that matter, the shortest path.
My daughter & I have enjoyed reading this book together. It was intersting & fun. You'll enjoy it more if you aren't expecting a 5-star book.
I met them at the gate though I usually wait inside..........2004-07-29
This book is truly one of the most amazing creations I've ever held in my two hands. The dialogues, the pictures, the clues, riddles, symbolism, historical references...it's all fantastic. I've been working on this for over three years now with my best friend and several others, and although we solved it over a year ago, we still keep going back to this book. Everytime you open it up, there's something new to discover. And the more research we do, the more incredible it becomes. It truly lives up to its' title as the World's Most Challenging Puzzle. We're still trying to dicipher clues in some of the rooms, although we have theories about nearly all of them, and some hard facts on quite a few.
If you want to discuss anything about the Maze, please feel free to e-mail me...we're always interested in new opinions
Finally! The Answer is out there!.......2004-04-15
I first found this online 7 years ago, and it has tormented me ever since. I thought I was alone, but the reviews here tell me how many others there are. My ray of sunshine came when I searched the net for the answer, and found it. You don't have to cheat! (I cxan't beleive it either.)
Amazing riddle . . . the best "choose your own adventure" book EVER.
Book Description
Step back in time and experience all the wonders of Laura and her pioneer life.At the heart of this book are chapters revolving around Laura's nine Little House books, each exploring in detail the stories, houses, landscapes, journeys, foods, activities, and crafts of her pioneer life. Meticulously researched, lovingly written and beautifully illustrated, The World of Little House is for anyone who has ever read and loved the Little House books.
Included in this glorious volume are
*floorplans of Laura's little houses
*a timeline showing events in Laura's life and the United States
*a biography illustrated with historic photographs
*a family tree showing four generations of the Ingalls and Wilder families
*a guide to all the Little House sites and museums
*a selected bibliography of books about Laura and Little House
*reproductions of Garth Williams' original covers
*over 150 full-color illustrations
*over 20 Little House recipes, crafts and activities
*embroidered satin ribbon marker
Customer Reviews:
The World of Little House .......2007-06-02
I bought this book for use in my classroom. I am an elementary school teacher. There is a thematic approach to teaching using the Little Huuse stuff. Reading, History, Report Writing, Social Sciemce, Art. and anything else you incorporate. This book is the best place to start planning.
One of the best Little House boks!.......2007-01-25
This book is a great buy for a fan of Little House On The Prairie books or the television show. It really gives you an idea how Laura and her family lived. There are great pictures of the really Laura and her family. The layouts of her homes is very interesting. And it has great things to try that were done in Laura's time. (I have not tried any of them, but kids would love them.) It really makes The life of The Ingalls clan clearer. Most of all you really learn about her world and how it changed in her time. Trust me... it is a must.
A great way of going back to my child time.......2004-08-19
I love all these book and this one is not exception
Charming Book.......2002-12-02
This charming book is a must for Little House addicts. The partial family tree is interesting (though did Grandpa Ingalls really give two of his children the same first name? That struck me as odd). The book contains lots of recipes and activities, and a nice summary of the Ingall's family travels.
A few minor caveats, however:
Except for a brief introduction and the timeline at the end, the book follows the LH books, NOT Laura's actual life. So it isn't all factually accurate.
WHile a few of the "Little Houses" still exist, most are long gone. So the author's floor plans are imaginary, and they don't always follow the descriptions in the books. (For example, when Pa added the bedrooms onto the claim shanty at the beginning of "Little Town on the Prairie", Laura describes it as "building the other half of the house," meaning, to my mind, that the rooms should have been side by side; the same size as the original shanty room. THe author here shows them as being one behind the other, and taking up only half the legnth of the shanty.)
The recipes, while interesting, seem less historically accurate than the ones in the "Little House Cookbook." (Almanzo's "Long Winter" pancakes probably wouldn't have had eggs in them.)
And there are a few other minor factual errors, both in relation to Laura's real life and to her life as portrayed in the books.
Still a very worthwhile purchase for anyone interested in the book series.
Nice Companion to the Little House Series.......2000-07-26
This is a nice companion book to the Little House series. The book is filled with diagrams of what the houses that Laura and her family lived in may have looked like, simple activities suitable for children, recipes for foods that are described in the Little House books, and other background information about the books and Laura's life. Each chapter revolves around one of the nine books in the Little House series and the book contains an introduction about Laura Ingalls Wilder. The back of the book contains a time line of different world events that were going on during Laura's lifetime. This is a nice book to read after you have read the Little House series.
Book Description
Possibly the greatest literary enigma in history, the Synoptic Problem has fascinated generations of scholars who have puzzled over the agreements, the disagreements, the variations, and the peculiarities of the relationship between the first three of our canonical Gospels. Yet the Synoptic Problem remains inaccessible to students, soon tangled up in its apparent complexities. But now Mark Goodacre offers a way through the maze, with the promise of emergence at the end, explaining in a lively and refreshing style what study of the Synoptic Problem involves, why it is important and how it might be solved. This is a readable, balanced and up-to-date guide, ideal for undergraduate students and the general reader.
Customer Reviews:
Accessible but doubtful.......2006-01-24
This book was admittedly expensive for its small size. However, the author provides a good introduction to the Synoptic Problem, allowing a person who is not familiar with the related scholarship to have a good grasp of the topic.
However, the content and arguments are biased towards one particular theory. As a student of philosophy, I personally find some of the reasoning of the author in favor of his position to be highly suspectible and weak.
Nevertheless, I benefited from reading this book, though I am sure there are better and more strongly argued scholarship on this topic
Book Description
Deeply researched, World as Laboratory tells a secret history that’s not really a secret. The fruits of human engineering are all around us: advertising, polls, focus groups, the ubiquitous habit of “spin” practiced by marketers and politicians. What Rebecca Lemov cleverly traces for the first time is how the absurd, the practical, and the dangerous experiments of the human engineers of the first half of the twentieth century left their laboratories to become our day-to-day reality.
Customer Reviews:
Psychology Beyond Skinner.......2007-02-06
I greatly enjoyed and appreciated Ms. Lemov's review of the evolution of behavioral psychology and the analysis of its weaknesses. As a student of B.F. Skinner at Harvard in the 1950s, I have had a lifelong interest in this subject.
First, Ms. Lemov exposes the basic risks and dangers of "behavioral engineering" and "control" in democratic societies. She also reveals the inadequate appreciation by behaviorists of the distinctions between the nature of humans and that of other animals. This failure was a fatal flaw in the behavioral concepts. Most significantly, if one accepts the concept of the need for "social engineering," the behaviorists never provided a persuasive set of social goals that should be attained by such methods. What is the point of social engineering and control with no clearcut ends in mind?
For anyone interested in the history of psychology, this book is a "must read."
James M Gregg,
Potomac, Maryland
On Mind Manipulators.......2007-02-04
This book tells the fascinating history of experiments to control human behavior and follows the careers of the brilliant and often idiosyncratic scientists who ran the labs and the experiments, beginning at the turn of the 20th Century with the Milgram experiments. These demonstrated that ordinary, normal people could be successfully ordered to shock and torture others on command. She also describes the CIA programs of interrogation and brainwashing that led inexorably to Abu Ghraib. This is compelling--and troubling--stuff, and it raises a lot of questions.
While the human engineers never quite managed to program their human subjects totally, they were at least partially successful. Now we have evolved to massive advertising campaigns that drive our economy, focus groups that help produce political spin, and manufactured divisive wedge issues that manipulate our voting patterns.
All of this suggests that we are susceptible to the kinds of human engineering Lemov so aptly describes. Indeed, the book made me wonder whether some of this human engineering has embedded itself in those corporate cultures where a zealous pursuit of profit makes it ok to market products that needlessly injure, sicken and kill (think unsafe cars and drugs), or to lie, cheat and steal (think Enron). This is one of the many crucial issues that Lemov illuminates.
5 stars for the subject matter - but only 3 for the content.......2006-07-25
Considering the incendiary nature of the topic (social control, brainwashing, forcible interrogations, chemical coercion) the euphemistic title of this book says much about how the content is treated. Mice, mazes and men - sounds harmless, no outrage there. Yet the history of how American behaviorists extrapolating from the techniques of B.F. Skinner (who oddly receives little mention) & Joseph Mengele (whose failed sleep-coma experiments were copied in the CIA's MK-ULTRA program) receives no mention at all.
Reading along through all the chapters, the actual "what can I take with me" information is very light, although the lengthy descriptions of many of the behaviorists' personal histories are more than sufficient. For all the talk about rat maze experiments and their importance, few are actually discussed in detail and fewer still are the facts actually learned from these.
In Part Three, "Files: Out Of The Laboratory" much is made of how -large- the files on human cultures collected at Yale were, and how -exhaustively- they were cataloged - but few examples are given of the data itself, who the data-gatherers were, and what protocols these data gatherers followed in their world travels, if anything.
And what practical techniques, exactly, did the modern beneficiaries of all this Cold-War experimenting (public relations, advertising, pollsters, marketing, government, the State Department) get out all of this? Entire books have been written on the techniques of persuasion used by each of these groups yet in "World As Laboratory" the reader walks away with very little in terms of concrete, practical modern-day examples.
The "thriller" part of the book, of course is Chapter 10's "The Impossible Experiment" documenting the CIA's brainwashing and drug experiments which rank among the most putrid of shames ever perpitrated upon American citizens by their own government. Yet, while related subjects such as Stanley Milgram's experiments are given great coverage, the equally important (and horrifying) Stanford Prison experiments are glossed over in just a couple paragraphs.
If you're wondering how Rebecca wraps this all up in her Conclusions, one need only refer to title of the book again - ultimately, the author is sympathetic, and even slightly admiring, of the scientific amoralists portrayed in the book. And although she tries to reassure the reader that attempts to create a Manchurian Candidate were unreliable and inconsistent at best, one can't help but feel that Rebecca is (mildly) rooting for the wrong team.
Lessons from Questionable Experiments.......2006-03-30
You want people to do your bidding; it's only natural. And governments, of course, would like other governments to do their bidding, but they'd like to have their own people do their bidding, too. How can this sort of influence best be strengthened? Well, perhaps it would be best to go to the people who study stimuli, responses, drives, and so on, to see what makes people tick. And if the researchers have a good idea of what influences people, then surely they are the ones to consult about actually doing the influencing. It has already been done, of course, and historian and anthropologist Rebecca Lemov has documented the history of such research and attempts at control in World as Laboratory: Mice, Mazes, and Men (Hill and Wang). It is an extraordinary story about very smart guys doing experiments, some of which were quite stupid and some which caused a great deal of suffering (to both animals and humans) to see how subjects could be made to learn the right way to behave. Lemov demonstrates that this was not some ivory tower effort at great remove, but a movement whose results are still with us.
The book starts with rat experiments. Regardless of how you feel about putting rats through such trials, the astonishing fact is that rats were so wonderfully controllable that the researchers assumed that if they just knew the right conditions to administer to humans, they could, as Lemov writes, "... explain the full range of human behavior and make it predictable and therefore controllable." Scientists were sure that if they could make rats do something, they could make humans do it, too. Then they could explain such phenomena as love and union organizing, looking at internal states in an objective, perhaps mathematical way. Some of the most benign experiments on humans were the Hawthorne experiments, which found that just paying experimental attention to humans helped their morale. Other experiments were less benign. Psychiatric patients got LSD or induced comas, without their permission or knowledge. Some got a recorded message like "You killed your mother" piped into their ears thousands of times. However, turning people into ciphers might be easy, but it also isn't very useful. Despite the interest and funding of such organizations as the CIA, researchers kept coming up against a very real problem in getting people to do what the researchers (or government) wanted them to do, or reveal what they wanted them to reveal: a real change in behavior does not happen without full and willing cooperation. There is one mention in the book of Abu Ghraib, but no reader will be able to avoid thinking of it frequently.
The bizarre experiments thus had a hopeful lesson. Brainwashing can be simply done, but it is useless simply to brainwash a person if you expect to control that person. You could create a vegetable, but that was useless; when researchers tried to instill, rather than erase, behavior, as one veteran of the CIA's MK-ULTRA program wrote, they failed eventually because "...the subject jerked himself back for some reason or the subject got amnesiac or catatonic." In all these grand plans for controlling people for society's good, no one could overcome the great obstacle that not only are people not rats, they are individuals, and no one plan is going to accomplish change for them all. Lemov shows that besides this failure, there is a legacy of such scientific effort: focus groups, consumer research, political polling. It isn't nearly as close to control as the scientists described here wanted to get, and let's be glad of that.
fascinating insight into American intellectual/psychological history.......2005-12-16
Although I have no exerptise in the history of "human engineering" or the evolution of American psychological thought, I was intrigued by the cover (I admit it!) and the subtitle "Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men."
"World as Laboratory" turned out to be a fascinating look into how scientists have tried, over the last several decades, to categorize and shape human behavior. It's a substantial book, but not so technical that it makes no sense to the layman.
Customer Reviews:
A new favorite book: Through the Moral Maze.......2006-01-14
Dr. Kane's book thoroughly reviews the major obstacles of relativism and plurality to experiencing a life of joy, happiness, and fufillment in our present era. Nonetheless, his book is full of optimism and hope in both humanity as a whole and in each individual's capacity to contribute to society in a positive way. He offers philosophical insight and support to the idea of a higher realm, which encompasses objective worth and objective truth, to which we all should aspire. After outlining his approach to leading a ethical lifestyle within the moral sphere, he describes how this ideal lifestyle approach applies to such issues as politics, education, multiculturalism, religion, and everyday behavior. Overall, Dr. Kane's book is a promising and inspiring testimonial to society's ability to achieve moral progress if it fully embraces just one simple concept: the End's Principle, already present in most cultures and religions in some format. For anyone who wants to believe in our ability to progess and make the world a better place, I strongly recommend this book.
Review of "Through the Moral Maze".......2005-12-29
Dr. Kane provides a compelling discussion of some of the most difficult philosophical and religious issues that greet us at the dawn of the 21st century. As the world grows smaller with the advancement of communication technologies we see cultures, religions, and political ideologies getting larger than their borders and forcing us to think about diversity and pluralism in a new way. Can there be universal ethical consensus given the wide variety of belief systems that seem at times to be fundamentally contradictory? Can our political structures evolve to face the new challenges of our times, or are they destined to become distinct in the mad race of globalization? Kane offers persuasive answers to these questions and more and invites readers into dialogue and deliberation concerning issues that are all to frequently dominated by dogma and partisan ideology. Kane's readable style appeals to those unfamiliar with philosophical jargon but simultaneously maintains the intellectual rigor one would expect in this type of intellectual endeavor. I highly recommend this book to people who are concerned for society and want to think pragmatically about solutions for the dawning of a new era.
Completely relevant for our times.......2005-12-24
I highly recommend Kane's work to anyone who holds a deep passion for life, ethics, diversity, and most importantly extracting meaning from a world that seems to hold such a term as more poetic than substantive.
"It demeans the search for truth in religion to say that what we have in our scriptures and revelations are merely "myths," or "pretty stories," or "edifying symbols," with no foundation in reality-meant only to galvanize us to lead good lives. But it also insults the intelligence to say that our readings of these same scriptures and revelations are literally and completely true as they stand, knowing how deep are the mysteries they convey and the uncertainties of interpretation and transmission through generations of fallible humans."
From his clear discussion of ethics and aspiring toward meaning through objective glory and love, through his most compelling final chapters on respecting and valuing a plurality of perspectives and views on life while also holding firmly to beliefs in objective truth and value, Dr. Kane provides powerful insight to readers, religious or not, who wholly reject the narrow fundamentalist views of religion and objective truth that hold strength today, yet find great frustration in reconciling their respect for the views of others with their own deep faith in their own; and he writes very clearly as well, which is why I plan on recommending this book even to my much less 'academically inclined' family and friends. The world is often painted as being divided between blind fundamentalists and equally blind hedonists who desire a life that just 'feels good' and laugh at the thought of finding anything more meaningful; Kane shows that you don't have to give up your 'spritual center' nor your belief in finding meaning in life in order to appreciate the fact that there can be many paths towards it. Read this book, it'll brighten your day and your life, as it did for me.
Book Description
Take an amazing, magical mystery tour around the globe and through time. Each of these 28 elaborate, all-in-color mazes is an entertaining little whodunit and "what happened" that presents one of history's great unexplained events. How were the pyramids built? What happened to the lost island of Atlantis? Who made the Easter Island sculptures? Why do planes keep disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle? Become a detective, search for answers in many dangerous places, and solve the challenging mazes to get at the truth. Stop at Stonehenge and find a path to the top of three stones. Go through Mayan ruins to reach the temple. Try to get a glimpse of the Loch Ness monster. Climb Mount Ararat to locate Noah's Ark. Check out a UFO that's crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. These mazes provide a world of fun and mystery.
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Virginia Woolf: Feminism, Creativity, and the Unconscious (Contributions to the Study of World Literature)
John R. Maze
Manufacturer: Greenwood Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
 20th Century
| British
| World Literature
| Literature & Fiction
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| British
| World Literature
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| British
| World Literature
| Literature & Fiction
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General
| Literature & Fiction
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Feminist
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ASIN: 0313302839 |
Book Description
John R. Maze presents a penetrating psychoanalytic reading of Virginia Woolf's novels from first to last. Underlying their elegant, imaginative, mysterious texture there is revealed a network of sibling rivalry, incestuous attraction and exploitation, sexual repulsion, bizarre fantasies, anger, and fatal despair. Woolf's feminism and pacificism, based on her conscious insight into an authoritarian society, were given passionate conviction by her resentment and irrational guilt over her half-brothers' sexual aggression against her as a vulnerable girl. This found its place in repressed animosity toward her idealized mother, whom she blamed not only for failing to protect her, but also for trying to impose the Victorian female sexist orthodoxy. Deeper still was the childhood conviction that her mother was complicit in the fantasied genital injuries--exacerbated later, she felt, by the males in her life--which prevented her from having children, as her envied sister had. Maze's approach not only reveals the intimate processes of Woolf's imagination, but yields a deeper and richer reading of her texts. An important study for all students and scholars of British 20th-century literature, feminist literary criticism, and critical theory in general.
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