Civilization & Culture Books - Page 5

Readings in the Western Humanities, Volume 1

Roy Matthews, Dewitt Platt

Amazon Price: $34.69 Usually ships in 24 hours By: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages Amazon Marketplace: 50 new & used starting at $0.01

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Arts & Photography -> History & Criticism -> General AAS
Subjects -> History -> Ancient -> Early Civilization
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Greece -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Readings in the Western Humanities through the Renaissance 5 out of 5 stars.
14 of 14 people found this review helpful.

This is the fifth edition of "Readings in the Western Humanities, Volume I: Beginnings Through the Renaissance," which complements the first volume of the fifth edition of the textbook "The Western Humanities" by Roy T. Matthews and F. Dewitt Platt, which covers ancient Mesopotamia through the Renaissance (with Volume II doing the Renaissance through the 20th century, leaving it up to professors and institutions to decide whether the Renaissance gets covered first semester or second). When I took history classes in school I always thought it would be nice to read some of the great works of literature and famous speeches from history, because those are primary documents representing the times. Now I find out that in Humanities you can combine history and literature and have been looking at textbooks for a two-semester Humanities course. What attracted me to the Matthews and Platt volumes were these supplemental reading texts (and the CDs with representative music).

In terms of the selections included in this first reading the strategy is clearly to cover the basic texts. If you are only going to do one Greek tragedy it should be "Oedipus the King" by Sophocles and that is what is here, as is the section on Aristotle's "Poetics" that talks about the key elements of tragedy. Instead of choosing between Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey," they provide selections from both. The book begins with the beginnings of Western literature, with selections from "The Code of Hammurabi" and "The Epic of Gilgamesh." The Romans are covered in a bit more depth than the ancient Greeks but the section on the World of Islam is comparable to that of Judaism and the Rise of Christianity, which is certainly relevant in these times. You will find selections from St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dantes's "Inferno," Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, Baldassare Castiglione, and Niccolo Machiavelli. The result is a solid coverage of the West's literary and philosophical heritage, from "Beowulf" to the "Song of Roland." Apparently some of changes were in response to the requests of reviewers and those additions noted in the preface are certainly welcome, even at the expense of "Lysistrata."

Matthews and Platt note that the most substantive change in these readings are the footnotes that provide annotations for identifying difficult proper names, place names, titles, terms, ideas, quotations, and allusions in each selection that are either vital to a work's meaning or useful to know. Having taken considerable pride in doing this for the collection of great speeches that I co-edited many years ago, I certainly applaud this effort (although half the fun of teaching is standing up in front of your students and explaining all about Tiresias the blind prophet of Thebes and how Dante organized the circles of Hell. Now all I have to do is get these classes on the schedule so I can actually use these books.

Editorial Review:

An anthology for use with The Western Humanities, Fourth Edition, by Roy T. Matthews and F. DeWitt Platt, this Volume I covers literature from the Epic of Gilgamesh through The Prince. The readings are accompanied by extensive contextual headnotes.

Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

Peter Watson

Amazon Price: $14.57 List Price: $19.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Harper Perennial Amazon Marketplace: 29 new & used starting at $11.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Historical Study -> Civilization & Culture
Subjects -> History -> World -> General
Subjects -> History -> World -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Flawed but interesting 4 out of 5 stars.
6 of 9 people found this review helpful.

One must give Peter Watson credit where credit is due; he is not shy when it comes to examining topics of enormous scope, or at the very least craft titles that imply that this is his aim. Unfortunately, far from examining thought "from fire to Freud" Watson's work is of far more limited dimension, instead examining European cultural evolution from the early Middle Ages forward. His text examines several topics to understand their influence and development on civilization. His examination, however, proves too often limited, failing to look far enough to embrace the full range of his field. Most disappointing is his tendency to bifurcate ideas into two competing camps, and ignore the vast nuance in the middle.

For example, Watson divides thought into two opposing spheres : the physical (scientific or natural) world and the spiritual (religious). While it is true that this dichotomy exists in the West -- interestingly forced on the physical camp by the Church - far from inevitable, the division is a historical artifact created by social context. Those enchanted by Watson, and they are legion, will retort that his is not interested in the possible, but the actual, and even then only what occurred in (western) Europe. Yet even here, Watson ignores alternatives. Judaism, which Watson gives only so much attention as suits his goals, long embraced a notion of the co-existance and even integration of these two concepts. Many rabbis examined the physical world and sacred texts and sought reinterpretation of the former when they conflicted with the latter (two prime examples being Nachmanidies of Spain and Maimonidies of Egypt, two of the most significant sages of Jewish history). Watson might likewise have considered the ancient Greeks like Aristotle who sought to understand the spiritual through they physical.

When it comes to certain concepts Watson plainly tortures his topic to reach desired conclusions. Thus he imagines Freud's examination of the unconscious as on the continuum of the notion of the soul, yet this is at best forced. While it is true that Freud postulated a division between mind and body - not surprising given the technology available to him - but far from a notion of rote ritual, he developed a theory based on observation and imagined it being refined over time by experimentation. Even a cursory comparison of this with religion reveals the extreme limits of the comparison.

This brings us to the place where Watson succeeds, and in my opinion shines. His examination of the notion of the controlled experiment, that instead of being limited to observations as they occur people can create things to observe in order to test hypothesis, is nothing short of brilliant. This concept may be the driving force of the creation of modern science, a concept that allowed humanity to tame the atom and journey to the stars. Despite its other short comings, this makes Watson's book worth reading and presents an idea worthy of further consideration.

Editorial Review:

Peter Watson's hugely ambitious and stimulating history of ideas from deep antiquity to the present day—from the invention of writing, mathematics, science, and philosophy to the rise of such concepts as the law, sacrifice, democracy, and the soul—offers an illuminated path to a greater understanding of our world and ourselves.

Humanities in Western Culture, brief

Robert C. Lamm, Neal M. Cross

Amazon Price: $68.20 List Price: $68.20 Usually ships in 9 to 11 days By: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Langua Amazon Marketplace: 34 new & used starting at $0.20

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Arts & Photography -> History & Criticism -> General AAS
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> General
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

PERFECT! 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

More than what I expected! Every artist should have one - it relates history periods to cultures then units all the arts together so you can have perfect understanding of it as a whole. Really fantastic! Full of information!

Editorial Review:

Based on the popular two-volume Humanities in Western Culture: A Search for Human Values, this brief edition contains all of the chapters from Volumes I and II with abridged literary selections. The lavishly produced artwork that is a hallmark of the larger books is faithfully reproduced in the pages of the brief edition.

For use in one-semester Western humanities courses.

Japanese Culture

Varley

Amazon Price: $39.95 List Price: $39.95 Usually ships in 1 to 2 months By: RoutledgeCurzon Amazon Marketplace: 7 new & used starting at $19.66

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Ancient -> Early Civilization
Subjects -> History -> Asia -> Japan
Subjects -> History -> Asia -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

I think Japanese should cherish the culture as Japanese too. 4 out of 5 stars.
31 of 47 people found this review helpful.

I have lived in Tokyo, Japan since I was born here. Though I can say about the case in Tokyo only, even I can not look at the Japanese historical things in my ordinaly Tokyo life. Tokyo is same as another big town over the world, developed town with high stores building, the imported fashion from mainly U.S.A etc. Certainly, the modern life in Tokyo may be comfortable, but I think that the life is not truth things, that is, that may be physical comfot, not mental.

If I say honestly, in fact, I am very tired in Tokyo life since my birth, especially mental part: the overpopulated city, dirt air from the rannning cars, people followed with benefit.

In such condition, I think that Japanese should get back the vanished Japanese history again. Japanese long history and cultures is not just culture, I think, they have been made on the reasonable means, for instance Japanese Buddhism would be born on the tender mind that take care of other person. But in modern Japanese city, there are little people that beleive in reliegions.

Thank you for reading poor writing.

Editorial Review:

For nearly three decades Japanese Culture has garnered high praise as an accurate and well-written introduction to Japanese history and culture. This widely used undergraduate text is now available in a new edition. Thoroughly updated, the fourth edition includes expanded sections on numerous topics, among which are samurai values, Zen Buddhism, the tea ceremony, Confucianism in the Tokugawa period, the story of the forty-seven ronin, Mito scholarship in the early nineteenth century, and mass culture and comics in contemporary times.

When Time Began: Book V of the Earth Chronicles (The Earth Chronicles)

Zecharia Sitchin

Amazon Price: $7.99 List Price: $7.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Harper Amazon Marketplace: 44 new & used starting at $4.17

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Ancient -> Early Civilization
Subjects -> History -> Historical Study -> Civilization & Culture
Subjects -> Religion & Spirituality -> Authors, A-Z -> ( S ) -> Sitchin, Zecharia

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

LOVE IT 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Besides loving the contents, of this book. I have decided to purchase the complete chronicle series.

The book came to my surprise brand New! Thank You Amazon!

Editorial Review:

They came to Earth thousands of years ago to usher in mankind's first New Age of scientific growth and spiritual enlightenment. Under the guidance of these ancient visitors from the heavens, human civilisation flourished - as revolutionary advances in art, science and thought swept through the inhabited world. And they left behind magnificent monuments -- baffling monoliths and awesome, towering structures that stand to this day as testaments to their greatness.

In this extraordinarily documented, meticulously researched work, Zecharia Sitchin draws remarkable correlations between the events that shape our civilisation in millennia past - pinpointing with astonishing accuracy the tumultuous beginning of time as we know it . . . and revealing to us the indisputable signature of extraterrestrial god indelibly written in stone.

Critical Path

R. Buckminster Fuller

Amazon Price: $14.93 List Price: $21.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: St. Martin's Griffin Amazon Marketplace: 64 new & used starting at $6.95

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Ancient -> Early Civilization
Subjects -> History -> Historical Study -> Civilization & Culture
Subjects -> History -> World -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Good thoughts, poorly written 2 out of 5 stars.
7 of 17 people found this review helpful.

This book was a struggle to read and enjoy. The author, though he has decent ideas (albeit very outdated), takes so many tangents, his point is never clearly made. It's like listening to Grandpa rant on about everything and nothing. I consider myself a very logical "scientifically minded" person. Much of Fuller's ideas of history of humanity are logically thought out based on his understanding and experience although it is not all necessarily based on sufficient scientific/ archeological evidence. So it's difficult to differentiate between which is credible mainstream theory and personal philosophical thoughts. I think the book has some wonderful ideas that apply especially to today's society. It's just a shame that the book was written so poorly and the train of thought was poorly organized. By the way, the Dymaxiom house is a horrible, unsustainable invention. That's why only a couple were built.

Editorial Review:

R. Buckminster Fuller is regarded as one of the most important figures of the 20th century, renowned for his achievements as an inventor, designer, architect, philosopher, mathematician, and dogged individualist. Perhaps best remembered for the Geodesic Dome and the term "Spaceship Earth," his work and his writings have had a profound impact on modern life and thought.

Critical Path is Fuller's master work--the summing up of a lifetime's thought and concern--as urgent and relevant as it was upon its first publication in 1981. Critical Path details how humanity found itself in its current situation—at the limits of the planet's natural resources and facing political, economic, environmental, and ethical crises.

The crowning achievement of an extraordinary career, Critical Path offers the reader the excitement of understanding the essential dilemmas of our time and how responsible citizens can rise to meet this ultimate challenge to our future.

On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense

David Brooks

Amazon Price: $11.20 List Price: $14.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Simon & Schuster Amazon Marketplace: 81 new & used starting at $5.95

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Psychology & Counseling -> Social Psychology & Interactions
Subjects -> History -> Historical Study -> Civilization & Culture
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Anthropology -> Cultural

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 51 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

suburban satire 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Whenever I travel to a different country and enjoy a new culture, I experience my distinctly American identity with a new force. I'll often ask myself what part of "me," how I think, feel, act, speak, relate, worry, dream, work, etc., is truly Christian, and what part of "me" is merely American. For all of that, what does it mean to be American? That is the question David Brooks, PBS television commentator and columnist for the New York Times, tackles in this book. In particular, he tries to describe what life is like for upper-middle-class Americans, "the people who hover over their children, renovate their homes, climb the ladder toward success, and plan anxiously for their retirement." If you grind your own coffee or enroll your kids in SAT prep classes, Brooks has you in his social scientific sights. His purview ignores the very rich, the rural, and the poor (for the latter categories read Robert Kaplan's An Empire Wilderness; Travels Into America's Future). He further asks what motivates our mania to work, study, move, play and consume as frenetically and assiduously as we do. Finally, he wonders whether we are as shallow as we sometimes look.

I have enjoyed Brooks as a sensible commentator on television's McNeil Lehrer Report, and I enjoyed reading this book. If you like large doses of good-natured caricature, satire, exaggeration, sarcasm, and generalizations about Americans and life in America, as I do, then you will likely appreciate Brooks's style. His riff on suburban Ubermoms, for example, is marvelous. Ubermoms raise huge sums for school causes, drive monster SUVs, weigh less than their kids, are tech savvy, and entertain with effortless charm and verve. They have children whose first names sound like last names and they use "summer" as a verb. I saw myself in his chapters on how we educate our children, how we work, and how we shop. In addition to his biting satire, he employs a staple of statistics about consumption patterns, how often we move, household incomes, and the like. Finally, Brooks is not all laughs; he weaves into his cultural analysis extensive interactions with scholarly social criticisms from sociology, economics, history, and literature.

America might be the Rhino of the World, as Brooks suggests, a sort of bull in a china shop, or alternately the Global Bimbo that is vulgar, crass and shallow. But that is not all that is true about us. Brooks clearly loves America, and is not ashamed to say so. Whatever its many faults, and it has many, America truly is a place of equality, opportunity, mobility, and dreams about a possible future: "Born in abundance, inspired by opportunity, nurtured in imagination, spiritualized by a sense of God's blessing, and realized in ordinary life day by day, this Paradise Spell is the controlling ideology of American Life" (p. 268). Paradise Drive is a simple read about an important subject by an informed critic.

Editorial Review:

Take a look at Americans in their natural habitat: guys shopping for barbecue grills, doing that special walk men do when in the presence of lumber; superefficient soccer Ubermoms who chair school auctions, organize PTAs, and weigh less than their kids; and suburban chain restaurants, which if they merged would be called Chili's Olive Garden Hard Rock Outback Cantina. Are we as shallow as we look? Many around the world see us as the great bimbos. Sure, Americans work hard and are energetic, but that is because we are money-hungry and don't know how to relax.

But if you probe deeper, you find that we behave the way we do because we live under the spell of paradise. We are the inheritors of a sense of limitless possibilities, raised to think in the future tense and to strive toward the happiness we naturally accept.

On Paradise Drive, at once serious and comic, describes this distinct American future-mindedness that shapes our personalities and underlies our beliefs.

Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present

Peter Hessler

Amazon Price: $19.14 List Price: $26.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: HarperCollins Amazon Marketplace: 87 new & used starting at $4.37

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Asia -> China -> General
Subjects -> History -> Asia -> China -> General AAS
Subjects -> History -> Historical Study -> Civilization & Culture

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 40 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the acclaimed author of River Town comes a rare portrait, both intimate and epic, of twenty-first-century China as it opens its doors to the outside world.

A century ago, outsiders saw Chinaas a place where nothing ever changes. Today the coun-try has become one of the most dynamic regions on earth. That sense of time—the contrast between past and present, and the rhythms that emerge in a vast, ever-evolving country—is brilliantly illuminated by Peter Hessler in Oracle Bones, a book that explores the human side of China's transformation.

Hessler tells the story of modern-day China and its growing links to the Western world as seen through the lives of a handful of ordinary people. In addition to the author, an American writer living in Beijing, the narrative follows Polat, a member of a forgotten ethnic minority, who moves to the United States in searchof freedom; William Jefferson Foster, who grew up in an illiterate family and becomes a teacher; Emily,a migrant factory worker in a city without a past; and Chen Mengjia, a scholar of oracle-bone inscriptions, the earliest known writing in East Asia, and a man whosetragic story has been lost since the Cultural Revolution. All are migrants, emigrants, or wanderers who find themselves far from home, their lives dramatically changed by historical forces they are struggling to understand.

Peter Hessler excavates the past and puts a remarkable human face on the history he uncovers. In a narrative that gracefully moves between the ancient and the present, the East and the West, Hessler captures the soul of a country that is undergoing a momentous change before our eyes.

Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure

Daniel Quinn

List Price: $21.95 By: Harmony Amazon Marketplace: 31 new & used starting at $4.10

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Historical Study -> Civilization & Culture
Subjects -> History -> Historical Study -> Philosophy of History
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Anthropology -> Cultural

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 143 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

If a team of Martian anthropologists were to study our culture, their initial findings might read something like this: These people have the strange idea that the thing they call civilization is some sort of final, unsurpassable invention. Even though vast numbers of them suffer in this oppressively hierarchical system, and even though it appears to be plunging them toward a global catastrophe, they cling to it as if it were the most wonderful thing (as they quaintly say) since sliced bread. That a more agreeable (and less catastrophic) system exists BEYOND civilization, seems to be entirely unthinkable to them.

In Beyond Civilization, Daniel Quinn has made it his task to think the unthinkable. We all know there's no one right way to build a bicycle, no one right way to design an automobile, no one right way to construct a pair of shoes, but we're convinced there must be only one right way for people to live--and the one we have is it, no matter what. Even if we hate it, we must cling to it. Even if it drags us to the brink of extinction, we must not let it go.

Many other peoples have built civilizations--and then walked away from them. Quinn examines the Maya, the Olmec, the people of Teotihuacn, and others, who did just that. But they all walked away moving backward--to an earlier lifestyle. Quinn's goal in this book is to show how we can walk away moving forward, to a new lifestyle, one which encourages diversity instead of suppressing it. Not a "New World Order," but rather a New Personal Order. Not legislative change at the governmental level, but rather incremental change at the human level.

This is a guidebook for people who want to assert control over their destiny and recover the freedom to live at a scale and in a style of their own choosing--and starting now, today, not in some distant utopian future.

Aspects of Western Civilizations: Problems and Sources in History, Volume 2 (6th Edition)

Perry M. Rogers

Amazon Price: $52.94 List Price: $59.60 Usually ships in 1 to 3 weeks By: Prentice Hall Amazon Marketplace: 24 new & used starting at $40.99

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Ancient -> Early Civilization
Subjects -> History -> Historical Study -> Civilization & Culture
Subjects -> History -> World -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

A window into the minds that shaped the world. 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

As a high school teacher, I find Rodger's book a wonderful resource for helping students to see history through the eyes of the people who lived it. The books allow students to get acquainted with historical debates from which we can simulate them in the classroom. Students consistently report that they prefer the personal touch of primary sources to traditionally dry textbook accounts. After finding so much utility in them, I was somewhat surprised to see Rogers chided by so many reviewers. I noticed two dominant themes in these criticisms that warrant attention.
First, that "It's boring & confusing": This assertion reminds me of freshmen whose eyes glaze over when reading anything that contains anything with multiple syllables. Rogers' thesis is that history can only be made intelligible by studying the ideas of the people who shaped it. Those unaccustomed or disinclined from engaging with viewpoints other than their own would naturally take umbrage with his approach. Furthermore, one should not assume that one's own difficulties of understanding are necessarily symptomatic of defects on the part of the author. Serious reading takes time and patience.
Those who can discern no logic to the organization of the collection need only assemble a fuller concept of the history before attempting it. Rogers posits history as a debate between differing points of view. The outcomes of these debates become the dominant institutions and beliefs that define the events of any given period. His selections help us to see that process, from the horse's mouth as they say...
Second, that "Rogers is a Marxist": It is disheartening to see that readers lay the faults of communism on Rogers' doorstep. While certainly one is entitled to despise alternatives to capitalism, one cannot justly dispute that the activities of its opponents have done much to shape history, for good or ill. Rogers is an historian, not a politician. The beauty of Rogers' approach is that he allows his readers MAKE UP THEIR OWN MINDS by giving us competing ideas from many points of view. Of course if a free marketplace of ideas is repugnant to you, it would best to confine yourself to a diet of historical fiction, propaganda and your own writing. After all, wasn't politicizing history the worst mistake Marx ever made?

Editorial Review:

Aspects of Western Civilization challenges students with basic questions regarding historical development, human nature, moral action, and practical necessity. This collection of diverse primary sources incorporates a wide variety of issues and is organized around seven major themes, including Revolution and Historical Transition, Imperialism, Social and Spiritual Values, the Varieties of Truth, the Institution and the Individual, the Power Structure, and Women in History.