Megawords: 200 Terms You Really Need to Know

Book Description

"Richard Osborne has done something very special here. He takes us on an exciting journey into the knowledge required to exist, survive, thrive, in the new millennium, in an interconnected global space that includes cyberpunk and cyborg, chaos theory and conspiracy theories, the postcolonial and the diaspora, hybridity and whiteness, the postmodern and the post-feminist, the digital and the Net, as much as older yet still influential terms like Enlightenment, empiricism, positivism, aesthetics, agency, nationhood and citizenship. Osborne writes with wit, wisdom, and insight, always wary of any approach becoming an orthodoxy. He shows how particular concepts arise at particular times with particular authors and intellectual personalities. The entries proceed by illuminating examples, engaging anecdotes, subtle cross-referencing, wide historical contexts." - John Docker, author of Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A Cultural History

Written by the author of the international bestseller Philosophy for Beginners, Megawords provides definitions for the key terms every student in the humanities and social sciences needs to know.

Customer Reviews:

An unusual dictionary/reader.......2005-05-19

As a non-english speaker I found this work most helpful in making clear difficult theoretical terms that I came across. It also shows how the ideas came to the place that they are in now. It is good for the historical as well. Highly recommended

Handy Reference.......2003-06-02

In a clear, concise way, this book explains the meanings of both simple terms (like city, myth or nationhood) and more complex theoretical terms (like poststructuralism or postmodernism). I only wish that each entry had one or two bibliographic references to well-known authorities on each subject.

Megawords: 200 terms you really need to know. (Books). (book review): An article from: Youth Studies Australia

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Megawords: 200 terms you really need to know. (Books). (book review): An article from: Youth Studies Australia
Sheila Allison
Manufacturer: Australian Clearing House for Youth Studies
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Youth Studies Australia, published by Australian Clearing House for Youth Studies on December 1, 2001. The length of the article is 1086 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Megawords: 200 terms you really need to know. (Books). (book review)
Author: Sheila Allison
Publication: Youth Studies Australia (Refereed)
Date: December 1, 2001
Publisher: Australian Clearing House for Youth Studies
Volume: 20 Issue: 4 Page: 57(1)

Article Type: Book Review

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Megawords : 200 Terms You Really Need to Know

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Megawords : 200 Terms You Really Need to Know
Richard Osborne
Manufacturer: NY
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000MU8E8I

Book Description

More than 225 models to use or adapt—plus guidelines for creating your own.

Job descriptions that focus on results are essential now that businesses are demanding greater employee responsibility. In addition, the Americans with Disabilities Act requires that we redefine job essentials.

This book provides a formula for preparing job descriptions that emphasize results. It gives users:

• more than 225 model job descriptions in 24 categories, from accounting and finance to warehousing and distribution
• a firm grasp of the distinction between job duties and job results
• writing exercises, including explanations of do's and dont's

Customer Reviews:

Good tool books.......2002-08-27

This book provid lot of job descriptions sample for us!

It's good Job Description tool!.......2002-08-27

This book provid a lot of job description sample, you can get knowedge for him!

czzc.......1999-06-09

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Book Description

In this monumental work, Raphael Patai opens up an entirely new field of cultural history by tracing Jewish alchemy from antiquity to the nineteenth century. Until now there has been little attention given to the significant role that Jews played in the field of alchemy. Here, drawing on an enormous range of previously unexplored sources, Patai reveals that Jews were major players in what was for centuries one of humanity's most compelling intellectual obsessions. In this monumental work, Raphael Patai opens up an entirely new field of cultural history by tracing Jewish alchemy from antiquity to the nineteenth century. Until now there has been little attention given to the significant role that Jews played in the field of alchemy. Here, drawing on an enormous range of previously unexplored sources, Patai reveals that Jews were major players in what was for centuries one of humanity's most compelling intellectual obsessions.

Customer Reviews:

Ian Myles Slater on An Interesting Experiment.......2003-09-23

The "Kirkus Review" description (quoted as part of the Amazon listing) seems to miss the point. Although historians of both Alchemy and Judaism have been in agreement that the Jewish role in the development and spread of alchemy was either non-existent or tiny, the alchemical texts themselves insist otherwise. The main lines of development have been traced from Hellenistic Egypt, through the Islamic world, and into Christian Europe, with little or no need for Jewish sources or transmitters, and most Jewish historians have been satisfied (or delighted) to agree.

Indeed, in influential writings on the psychological meanings of alchemical symbolism, C. G. Jung went so far as to reclassify the several Jewish alchemists cited and quoted in Alexandrian Greek documents as really Jewish Christians. (He had a theory that transmutation was a material metaphor for transubstantiation, which required a Christian origin before alchemy reached Islam.)

The late Raphael Patai amassed a huge amount of information, including alchemical manuscripts in Hebrew (translated with commentaries herein), and set about to consider the cases of supposed alchemists described as Jewish, and real alchemists supposed by someone to be Jewish, in detail. While many particular instances are unconvincing, the interplay he demonstrates between medicine and alchemy on the one hand, and alchemical and mystical circles on the other, does suggest that at least a minor theme in Jewish intellectual life has been ignored by modern scholarship.

The main problem with the book is that it really requires backgrounds in both Jewish and alchemical studies to follow and judge Patai's arguments. However, to be fair, it does not offer itself as a primer in either subject. You will have to look elsewhere, and there is ample bibliographic information.

A few examples of what it offers:

Harry Potter fans will here encounter the real Nicholas Flamel of Paris (a real man, if not necessarily really an alchemist), and his supposed Jewish source-book for the philosopher's stone. Patai does not seem to me to advance the argument much, but he does demonstrate that the legend is part of a larger body of material about Jewish books falling into Christian hands. He also has some useful comments on the obliviousness of English and European scholars to each other's writings on Flamel, and some deeply embedded errors of translation in English-language treatments.

Patai's argument for a genuine Hebrew original of the "autobiography" of the magician and alchemist "Abramelin" is interesting, but he manages to misrepresent Gershom Scholem's changes of mind on the subject. Scholem, in a note in "On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead" (German edition 1962, English translation 1991; pages 314-315, note 24 to "Tselem: The Concept of the Astral Body"), which Patai does not cite, explains that since first treating it as Jewish in 1925 he had found Renaissance Christian sources for the book's Jewish concepts and post-biblical Hebrew and Aramaic. However, it is worthwhile to have Patai's citations of the German version, in addition to that translated from French into English by MacGregor Mathers in 1898 (reprinted some years ago by Dover). (Also, some of A.E. Waite's reasons for rejecting the Jewish origin of the text, in his "Ceremonial Magic," such as the paternal blessing of children and the concept of guardian angels, are actually minor evidences for it!)

There is an interesting, and to my mind inconclusive, reconsideration of some the works formerly attributed to the Christian mystic Ramon Lull (various spellings), and their possible Jewish background.

Working notes of actual alchemists, including a multi-lingual dictionary of instruments and materials which is valuable evidence of cross-cultural influences in several directions.

All in all, a useful book for anyone already familiar with basic works on the history of alchemy, or with an interest in Jewish studies, and a good addition to a library with at least basic collections in both these subjects.

An Essential Resource.......2000-07-14

I was very pleased to find that, like Patai's HEBREW GODDESS, this book combines thorough and excellent scholarship with translations of rare sources that are otherwise impossible to find. Patai does not claim the Jewish Patriarchs were alchemists, but in his broad chronological exploration of the topic begins with the historical development of later attributions of the Alexandrian alchemist Miriam by Arabic and other alchemists to one of the biblical Miriams of the New Testament or to Miriam, wife of Moses. The Alexandrian alchemist Mirian, like Cleopatra, was considered by Zosimos and others to be one of the great founders. As one would expect, her identity was eventually attributed to legendary times by medieval practitioners. Her Jewish name implies to Patai and other scholars that the earliest historical Jewish practice of alchemy developed in the heterodox Hermetic and Gnostic schools of Alexandria during the second to fourth centuries of the Common Era. Patai's voluminous research thoroughly explores the Jewish-Islamic stream of alchemy through early and late medieval periods. It provides, for the first time, a basis for students of the Western mystery tradition to understand the Jewish-Egyptian-Spanish esoteric stream that derived from the Pythagorean and Gnostic school of Akhmim near Nag Hammadi and Thebes in Upper Egypt, which indirectly produced such mysterious literary figures as "Abramelim the Mage." A good supplement for Patai's absolutely essential work would be Peter Kingsley's research on the survival of Neo-Pythagroean and Hermetic tradition in Akhmim, from which the Arabic Hermetic scientists, philosophers, and alchemists derived their knowledge.

The Jewish Alchemists: A History and Source Book. (book reviews): An article from: The Journal of the American Oriental Society

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The Jewish Alchemists: A History and Source Book. (book reviews): An article from: The Journal of the American Oriental Society
Y. Tzvi Langermann
Manufacturer: American Oriental Society
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
ASIN: B00096Q9QO
Release Date: 2005-07-28

Book Description

This digital document is an article from The Journal of the American Oriental Society, published by American Oriental Society on October 1, 1996. The length of the article is 919 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The Jewish Alchemists: A History and Source Book. (book reviews)
Author: Y. Tzvi Langermann
Publication: The Journal of the American Oriental Society (Refereed)
Date: October 1, 1996
Publisher: American Oriental Society
Volume: v116 Issue: n4 Page: p792(2)

Article Type: Book Review

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The Jewish Alchemists: A History and Source Book

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The Jewish Alchemists: A History and Source Book
Patai Raphael
Manufacturer: Princeton Univ Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000PWHDHG

Book Description

This is the book you need to master science and engineering mathematics with the HP 49 G calculator. Volume 1 includes: basic calculator operation, real and complex numbers, lists, functions and programs, vectors, matrices and linear algebra, graphics, and solution to equations. Each chapter concludes with applications to science and engineering problems.

Customer Reviews:

A great manual for beginners like me.......2007-09-23

This book's author clearly loves and respects HP graphing calculators. The book has what the hard copy manual and online documentation should have but don't: explanations that start at the beginning, which was important for me, because I have never before used a graphing calculator. I suspect the people who wrote the HP material assumed their audience consisted solely of people with some relevant experience. The reviewer who claims that you can find 99% of this material on HP's website is exaggerating, but even if he were strictly accurate, it wouldn't matter. The author provides the sentences that make everything clear.

The author uses RPN mode rather than the usual algebraic mode. The RPN mode is fine with me, but might be a problem for someone not used to it. I am using an HP 50g, which has some differences from the HP 49g, but not enough to damage the usefulness of this book. The book has a few typos, but no more than the first edition of any book of this kind. My only real complaint is that the binding is too cheap for a book that will regularly be propped open so that you can read it while you have your hands on the keyboard.

If you are a beginner with graphing calculators, I highly recommend this book. No one could reasonably ask for better. If you are an experienced user, maybe not. HP's online material may be enough.

Great Book.......2007-04-14

This is fine book for anyone new to the HP 50g wanting to fill in the gaps from the skimpy HP manual: basic operations, plotting, solving matrices, equations, simple programming... Since an HP 50 is just an upgraded 49, everything still applies, give or take a keystroke. As Vols 1 and 2 are officially out of print, if you like HP calculators, get both books while they'll still available.

Just what the doctor ordered........2007-03-10

One of the reviewers above gave a pretty negative review citing that this material was covered elsewhere in the hp user manuals and on hp's own site. That may be true. What the other reviewer failed to mention was the fact that HP includes a very stripped down version of the 800+ page actual manual and this book, and it's sister volume, are a godsend. The calculator is easy enough for most utility, but these manuals quickly help you get down to doing your required operations much more easily. I can't recommend these books enough, as I've found them extremely helpful in the TI dominated environment of my College. I've got the HP-50g btw, thought I should mention that, as these manuals instructions cover this calc well enough.

Rehash of HP documentation.......2006-10-19

I was hoping for lots of new sample programs, and new or more complex examples than what is available in the offical HP manuals. However, almost everything in this book is copied from existing HP documentation and promotional material. Most of the examples are verbatim copies of the stuff already in the HP manuals. Very little in the way of new code, or even new examples of using the builtin utilities and commands. If you have access to the .pdf versions of HP's manuals and tutorials (available at the HP calculator web site), you'll have 99% of what these two books have.

Amazon.com

Curzio Malaparte spent most of World War II as an Italian consul to other fascist states: Germany, Romania, Finland. His novelistic account of the war, surreptitiously written, presents the conflict from the point of view of those doomed to lose it. Malaparte's account is marked by sharp, lyrical observations, as when he encounters a detachment of German soldiers fleeing a Ukrainian battlefield: "When Germans become afraid, when that mysterious German fear begins to creep into their bones, they always arouse a special horror and pity. Their appearance is miserable, their cruelty sad, their courage silent and hopeless." Bleak and hopeless indeed, Malaparte's is a remarkable testimonial.

Book Description

Curzio Malaparte was a disaffected supporter of Mussolini with a taste for danger and high living. Sent by an Italian paper during World War II to cover the fighting on the Eastern Front, Malaparte secretly wrote this terrifying report from the abyss, which became an international bestseller when it was published after the war. Telling of the siege of Leningrad, of glittering dinner parties with Nazi leaders, and of trains disgorging bodies in war-devastated Romania, Malaparte paints a picture of humanity at its most depraved.

Kaputt is an insider's dispatch from the world of the enemy that is as hypnotically fascinating as it is disturbing.

Customer Reviews:

Horror...beautifully written .......2007-10-01

I am truly shocked at the reasons people have given Kaputt a negative review: too icy? too removed? too horrific? What are we talking about here, Disneyland or war?

I have read many, many novels, memoirs, and essays on World War II and never have I encountered anything quite like Malaparte's accounts. The problem with this book, if there is a problem to consider, is how beautifully Malaparte describes absolute horror. The honey-like flow of his writing fades in and out like one's breath in winter. A particular scene of frozen horses, as another reviewer pointed out, will leave you stunned and emotionally wounded. For some reason everything in the book has a cold, yellowless-blue tint, so particular to the North, which makes what's happening all the more chilling.

I will say I could not, was absolutely incapable of, finishing the book all at once. Even for those with strong stomachs, the book is nearly indigestible. I had to shut the book, more than once, and ask myself, how does one get so far and deep into darkness? It truly doesn't seem possible. Yet one walks away from the book thinking, "I could have been one of those people---on either side of the fence." It is this that probably most upsets readers of this book.

I highly recommend readers to browse the NYRB collection for brilliant literature.

Perhaps the best novel of its kind in our time.......2006-05-19

I have been reading literature for almost 50 years and have been teaching it for many, many years. In all of these years I have not found a novel more powerfully written about the horrors, absurdity, and perhaps sheer insanity of WWII and war in general.D M Thomas' Pictures at an Exhibition, among a few others, like Grosssman's Life and Fate, comes closest, however.

This is not to deny the power of Homer, Euripides, Tolstoy, Mailer, Vonnegut, et. al. They are all great. But the beauty of Malaparte's images, his enormous power of description, the depiction of our inhumanity to one another and the animal world--the title of each of his sections is an animal, Horses, Mice, etc.--is stunning. Much of his enormous imact is created by a profound sense of irony, as when one of the Black Guard, a nordic "angel" follows him through the Warsaw Ghetto, or the deer with the Nazi flag stuck in its back at a Nazi dinner party, falling under the carving knife of Malaparte's "gracious" hostess, for example.

This is a book that should be read slowly and thoughtfully.
Malaparte's literary talent will elate you even if the subject matter horrifies you--as it should.

This is one of those little-known books that deserves to be universally read and seriously thought about and discussed. Malaparte was one of the great writers of our century and it is wonderful to see his brilliant work back in print.

Greatest Novel of the 20th Century.......2006-04-20

It is an exquisitely written novel about the complicity of high European culture in the atrocities of World War II, about responsibility, about guilt, about disillusionment, about human nature, and about self-consciousness. There is no novel like it in terms of its power and scope. The author is simultaneously an historical actor and narrative voice that does not forgive the author his own complicity. It may change your life, and if it does not, it will change your sense of what and how literature creates....

The everyday miseries of war.......2006-01-24

Curzio Malaparte is the pseudonym of Kurt Erich Suckert, born in South Tirol (part of Italy). As a reporter he travelled extensively through German-occupied Europe during the Second World War and did not shun the front lines. But he also had access to the "Big Names" of fascism, such as Himmler, Franck (the governor of Poland) and the son-in-law of Mussolini. But above all Malaparte remained an outsider with deviant opinions that landed him in Italian prisons a few times.

In a rather unemotional style (for most of the book) he describes the everyday horrors of war: sleeping in a house with a horse carcass rotting next to it, the upper ten of a city playing bridge while at the same time the Jews of their city are massacred. But also the dinner conversations at Governor Franck's place, in which the arrogance, absence of (self)reflection and total lack of humor of the other attendants are both stunning and revealing. And the 'beau monde' of Italy which is more concerned with the latest developments in the love life of Mussolini's son-in-law than with the fact that Italy is very obviously losing the war.

But Malaparte also describes the everyday miseries of war: a father who hides some small presents in his backyard so that his kids think in the morning that the English fighter planes were there to drop of presents rather than bomb the city to pieces. To me this was the most touching story in the book.

A well-written book with as a minor criticism that the story does not relly lead anywhere, but this is probably normal for an autobiography: real life very seldom leads to something.

A disciple of Voltaire and Schlovsky.......2006-01-02

Malaparte's Kaputt is a true heir to Voltaire's "Candide" and Scholvsky's "Sentimental Journey." All three works employ estrangement, emotional distance, irony, grotesque imagery and pointedly compromised narrators in order to engulf the reader in the horror of human evildoing.

In this, they are the opposite of Romantic fiction, which seeks to elevate the reader to the position of Hero, by identifying him/her with the values and actions of the "heroic" protagonist.

(A Schlovskian aside: Joseph Heller cribs most of the novelist style of "Catch 22" from these authors - and creates a whole new cloth.)

Romantic fiction makes good airport reading because the reader is set squarely against the villain. We are Frodo, not Sauron.

It's all very comforting and ultimately self-congratulatory. The Readers applauds the Protagonist's heroics which he/she imagines to be his/her own moral supremacy. ("If I was in Frodo's place, I'd act just like him" says the dear reader to himself.)

"Kaputt" is the opposite of this.

As the reader/protagonist, we are forced to comfront the inaction that was Europe's (and America's) in the face of the Nazi horrors. We are forced to associate with mass-murderers. We are forced to endure the shameless apologies about "German culture" and "minor flaws" which lead to genocide.

This is all very hard for a reader to endure.

We would rather hang out with Tom Hanks and Private Ryan.

But Malaparte's work serves a purpose - beyond what the author might have imagined:

As Schlovsky famously wrote in "Sentimental Journey", and I paraphrase, "If this [description of amputating a leg] disgusts you, then don't make war."

Average customer rating:

Bali kaputt.
Lara Stern
Manufacturer: Droemer Knaur
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 342660762X

Bauern, Klosterfrauen, Alusuisse: Wie eine Industrie ihre Macht ausspielt, Beamte den Volkswillen missachten und die Umwelt kaputt geht : eine wahre Schweizer Geschichte

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Bauern, Klosterfrauen, Alusuisse: Wie eine Industrie ihre Macht ausspielt, Beamte den Volkswillen missachten und die Umwelt kaputt geht : eine wahre Schweizer Geschichte
Urs P Gasche
Manufacturer: Zytglogge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Perfect Paperback

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ASIN: 3729601261

Bremen, kaputt: Bilder vom Krieg, 1939-1945 : Berichte, Dokumente, Erinnerungen (Bremen-Reihe)

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Bremen, kaputt: Bilder vom Krieg, 1939-1945 : Berichte, Dokumente, Erinnerungen (Bremen-Reihe)

Manufacturer: Brockkamp
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 3922496458

"Das macht die Seele so kaputt-- ": Armut in Bremen

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"Das macht die Seele so kaputt-- ": Armut in Bremen

Manufacturer: Edition Temmen
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Perfect Paperback

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ASIN: 3861082098

DDR kaputt, Deutschland ganz: Eine Abrechnung mit dem "Realen Sozialismus" und dem Imperialismus deutscher Nation : abweichende Meinung zur "deutschen Frage"

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DDR kaputt, Deutschland ganz: Eine Abrechnung mit dem "Realen Sozialismus" und dem Imperialismus deutscher Nation : abweichende Meinung zur "deutschen Frage"
Peter Decker
Manufacturer: Resultate
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Perfect Paperback

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ASIN: 3922935311

Der Alltag: Die Sensationen Des Gewohnlichen Thema: Kaputt

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Der Alltag: Die Sensationen Des Gewohnlichen Thema: Kaputt
Michael Rutschky
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000JF24TG

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Die Zeit ist kaputt
Klaus Kordon
Manufacturer: Beltz
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 3407787820

Grun kaputt: Landschaft und Garten der Deutschen

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Grun kaputt: Landschaft und Garten der Deutschen

Manufacturer: Raben
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Perfect Paperback

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ASIN: 3922696430

Hitler - Triumphierend und Kaputt A Military Record of World War II in Europe with 116 Maps

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Hitler - Triumphierend und Kaputt A Military Record of World War II in Europe with 116 Maps
Delno *SIGNED by author* Stageman
Manufacturer: Privately Printed
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000VW2HRG

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