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A fun and informative book if you are already interested in the topic, while others will find it dry and missing out on the potential for a more overtly spatial history of the teahouse. With all the rich material you find in the book it would not be difficult to compose such a book.
The long opening chapter is a fantastic survey of the overall landscape of platform capitalism. While I don't necessarily see the value of all distinctions made there, it is a very useful overview.
Useful overview of all of Uber's scandals: nice bite sized sections that can be read when you have a minute free, but for same reason harder to put together into a broader whole.
Wonderfully refreshing sutra, can see why this is treated as such a unique text in the tradition. Burton Watson's translation is as always with his work, a delight to read.
Provides a helpful overview to intellectual history as it is understood by the Cambridge school.
Nice to have as a reference text if the text is important in your religious practice and the terms and concepts section is handy, but a rather strange book in terms of structure. The new translation of the sutra provided is informative but I'm not sure “boundless” is necessarily an improvement over “emptiness” and certainly reads less smoothly than either Suzuki or Conze translations. Still, I learnt a fair deal.
The translation reads smooth but I can't judge the quality. The afterward offers an interpretation quite far from the contents, and depends heavily on other Shinran texts and presumably more modern Shin views. Would have benefited from better overview of this text in context of Shinran as a historical figure.
Old 1970s work is a survey work that is encyclopedic in its coverage and very dense but covers virtually everything. Great for an overview. Divided into section for pure land schools, Zen, Nichiren and Lotus schools, then a nice final chapter on the activities of older Nara based schools and Shingon, Kegon, and Tendai.
Wonderful book surveying the wild history of Oomoto movement in Japan and especially the fascinating character of Deguchi Onisaburō. Surely so much more could be written about this and surprised this is one the only books on the topic.
Nice work with some great chapters of wide interest and others that are probably most helpful for those with a deep technical background.
Great translations and detailed notes. Great to have the works together in translation. No fault of translators but these five major works plus some misc. materials has a lot of repetition.
I was pleasantly surprised by this older work. A wonderfully clear presentation of the central problem of Japanese Zen's relationship to society and moral reasoning. Provides an overview of some of the major critiques and defenses and has two chapters with the authors own suggestions on how to address moral questions with the “material” available to Zen approaches. For more detail see later work by Ives.
This book is, like many in the “Learning...” series is a very compact introduction to the language. It is primarily, it seems to me, targeting readers who are familiar with at least one other programming language and need only become accustomed to the syntax of this new language. For this audience, which fortunately includes myself, this book is a decent and very compact introduction to all the most common elements of the language.
There are plenty of examples but they seem to get less obvious and assume more of the reader as the book goes on. The most annoying element of the book is that the author seems to delight in teaching you the 5 least common and most difficult ways of doing everything before telling you the easiest and most common way of doing something. This ought to be reversed.
Taruc was the former head of the Huk rebellion, both during WWII and as one of its key military leaders during its uprising in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Taruc gave himself up after being expelled from the party for his refusal to completely submit to party discipline, his willingness to consider peace terms to end the uprising, and if he is to be believed, its increasingly dogmatic Communism. Following his capture, he was denied the pardon he was promised by Pres. Magsaysay and was still languishing in prison while he wrote this work.
In some ways it is a classic anti-Communist text, written by a former Communist (at least formally, Taruc was a Socialist Party member before it merged with the Communists in 38) who decries Communist excesses and dogma from the perspective of someone who was at the very center of its leadership. He goes into considerable depth in describing the violence and atrocities of the Huks, especially in its last phase and also provides an interesting analysis of its final failures after it peaked around 1950.
However, Taruc was never the former true-believer who turned against the party, in the form of Koestler, for example. Taruc was somewhat religious, stubbornly undogmatic, and of a different form of pragmatism than that of the party. As a charismatic populist leader not well versed in Marxism, he was known to have frequently clashed with the party leadership long before he was expelled by it for his treasonous peace overtures. He was an agrarian reformist who believed deeply in the cause of Socialism with a nationalist character and, at least in this work, gives the impression of having remained closer to the military and economic realities of the flagging cause of the Huks in its last years.
The translation from French comes across as clean but the style and approach of the original assumes a bit too much from a non-French audience in places. If you are looking for a general work on Jesuits, look elsewhere, but if you are interested in a fresh take on some of the most important Jesuit minds of the past few centuries these chapters are great to consult.
China Miéville loves to play with fantastic ideas and is one of the great writers of highly political sci-fi. His books are dotted with passages of pure genius. He seems to delight in practicing vocabulary words no one uses anymore which some of us find fun, though some will find it pretentious - like a little boy who has discovered a dictionary published a century ago.
In this case, he plays with ideas of language and the limits of communication when the traditional relationships between signs and their signified don't follow for an alien race. There are moments that this works and provokes thought, and there are other times where he doesn't follow through on how limited a world really would be if his radical propositions were followed consistently through to their impossible end.
It was an entertaining read, and always hope the next will live up to its potential.
What other book comes close to this for learning python and tackling its breadth? Very smooth and rewarding.
As is often the case, I really love the Norton Critical Editions with their inclusion of supplementary texts and criticism both from the time and contemporary.
A good attempt at a synthesis with lots of interesting anecdotes worth reading. Sources include a large number of US, British, French, and some Japanese archival docs, as well as others, and a lot of memoirs and other early postwar reminisces some of which are unpublished or took the form of letters to the author.
I can really appreciate how hard it is to bring this all together given the geographic and linguistic scope of the target. It really calls for a collaborative effort, especially in order to better bring in a larger number of voices since this work inevitably has a larger number of Western (and especially military voices) and only some voices from among those who experienced the occupation and its aftermath. However, given the restraints, there is a lot of meat in the book that is really worth looking at.
The section on saving POWs was a bit too long for my liking but will certainly be of interest to many Western readers. Somewhat weak attempt to tie the early postwar situation into an argument about military occupations and US in Iraq. Not enough space to really go into the issues and felt like an afterthought. I also felt the author struggled with the question of where to stop telling the story in each location - since each of the early postwar crises continue for years if not decades after the initial postwar experience.
Of great interest to anyone studying early postwar East Asia - and could well accompany Bayly's & Harper's even more dense Forgotten Wars, which is published around the same time. Whereas Spector's book gives you more of a collection of rich snapshots to accompany the politics of the aftermath of the Japanese empire, B & H's book gives a very detailed narrative of the political and violent struggles that follow. There is room now for another book which focuses more closely on the social and cultural legacies and changes that followed the collapse of the Japanese empire on a large regional scale.
Incredibly readable and lucid. Wonderful to see how it engages with mainstream ethical philosophy in the US while explaining and contrasting it with his own approach.
Rather lazily written intro to programming through ruby. Bizarre examples and sample code that one gets bored of sorting through.
Beginners won't find it very difficult, but there isn't enough time spent on flow control or classes or basic OOP concepts for it to be that useful.