Book Description
From the oilfields of Saudi Arabia to the Nile delta, from the shipping lanes of the South China Sea to the pipelines of Central Asia, Resource Wars looks at the growing impact of resource scarcity on the military policies of nations. International security expert Michael T. Klare argues that in the early decades of the new millennium, wars will be fought not over ideology but over access to dwindling supplies of precious natural commodities. The political divisions of the Cold War, Klare asserts, have given way to a global scramble for oil, natural gas, minerals, and water. And as armies throughout the world define resource security as a primary objective, widespread instability is bound to follow, especially in those areas where competition for essential materials overlaps with long-standing territorial and religious disputes. In this clarifying view, the recent explosive conflict between the United States and Islamic extremism stands revealed as the predictable consequence of consumer nations seeking to protect the vital resources they depend on.A much-needed assessment of a changed world, Resource Wars is a compelling look at warfare in an era of rampant globalization and intense economic competition.
Customer Reviews:
best characterization of the geopolitical framework of the Post-Cold War era .......2006-11-19
copyright 2006 Kat W.
In Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict Michael Klare argues that the post-Cold War era can be best explained by a perspective that focuses on the "global demand for" what he calls "key materials." These materials include but are not limited to water, oil, old-growth timber, uranium, copper, rutile, bauxite, diamonds, gold, other minerals, gems and the global atmosphere. Klare's concept of what Thomas Friedman would call `The One Big Thing' readily explains the major global conflicts in the post-War era. Klare concedes, however, that his conception of dynamic global order, as it is informed by disputes over resources "may not be " The One Big Thing" that lies at the heart of all international relations, [but] it helps explain much of what is happening in the world today" (14).
Klare's perspective is a useful and accurate one. I think that Klare's text stands above Friedman's Lexus and the Olive Tree, Sam Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, and Stigliz's Globalization and its Discontents. Klare gives the most parsimonious description of the current geopolitical climate. His characterization of conflicts as "resource Wars" is adaptable enough to be a useful paradigm for the next 40-60 years, perhaps longer if technology creates viable renewable forms of energy. This is because Klare's resource-based view of the global political climate is founded on the undeniable fact that as the world population soars and industrialization spreads; vital, finite resources will continue to diminish rapidly. Two hundred and fifty years of heavy industrialization in Europe and the United States has taken a toll on the world's resources. As India and China look to reap the benefits of a fully industrialized economy, resource allocation will play a priority role in the geopolitical climate of the coming decades.
American Capitalism was able to provide benefits and commodities that Soviet Communism failed to deliver. It was able to avoid the shortages that befell the Soviet Union. The fall of Communism in the Soviet Union was marked in economic terms more than in ideological terms. Klare usurps the view of Christopher Warren who claimed that "economic competition is eclipsing ideological rivalry"(8).
Currently, Nations perceive economic strength as a vital part of National security. Nations believe a strong economy is necessary for political influence in the world. Klare explains, " the adoption of an econocentric security policy almost always leads to an increased emphasis on resource protection" (14). A thriving economy is necessary for strong national security and open access to vital resources is a necessary component for a strong economy. Klare makes a compelling connection between national security, economic growth, and strategic military operations. In the post Cold-War era there is a shift from the "weapons technology and alliance politics [that] once dominated the discourse on military affairs, American strategy now focuses on oil-field protection, the defense of maritime trade routes, and other aspects of resource security" (6).
We see that documents of official U.S. foreign policy target resource-rich regions such as the Persian Gulf. When asked why the United States invaded Iraq instead of North Korea Donald Rumsfeld responded that the country swims on a sea of oil. Where Huntington sees clashes of civilizations as the main challenge to peace in the world, Klare sees "intensified resource competition" pushed by private and state interests as the main purveyors of global conflict in the current era. We see that the United States is all-too-often able to avert its watchful eyes from humanitarian atrocities as long as those atrocities don't hurt U.S. business' access to "vital raw materials." The United States allies itself with "three Muslim states -Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Turkmenistan -against two prominently Christian ones, Armenia and Russia" The Reason? : to have a claim to the Caspian Sea basin's impressively rich reserves of petroleum and natural gas(Klare 12-13). The strategic desire to acquire high-demand resources becomes more important than playing along civilizational lines. Klare's Resource-based perspective on international and domestic conflicts speaks to me in a compelling way for several reasons.
1) I am an environmentalist and I am well versed in the stubborn attitudes that certain senators (ex. =Voinovich from Ohio!) have toward diminishing U.S. economic output (measured in G.N.P) by limiting the use of finite fossil fuel resources. The U.S. senate regularly fails to pass climate change initiatives aimed at CO2 reductions because they believe investment in non-CO2 producing technology and subsequent shifts away from a coal-based economy will lead to a net loss of jobs and a drop in GNP. Klare does a nice job of connecting resource acquisition with the economy. He then relates the economy to national security, which informs political and especially military policy.
2) I am an atheist. I think this predisposes me to be more receptive to Klare's claims about the geopolitical climate of the post Cold War world, and less receptive to Sam Huntington's strongly argued and conceived civilizational division of global regions of power. Religion seems to be ( as Huntington explains) the heart of civilization. Klare is able to bring conflicts into focus with specific regional resources at the center when ostensibly these outbreaks of violence appeared to be results of ethnic or religious clashes and nothing else. Klare takes time to address conflicts (such as water wars between Israel and Palestine) that at first appear to be civilizational. He successfully convinces the reader that at its core the conflict is because of a dispute over resources.
3) I read the forementioned books with the U.S. occupation of Iraq in the forefront of my thought. Klare actually makes a cameo appearance in Hijacking Catastrophe, a movie that explains some of the ways that Bush's " War on terror" (which I believe to be a misnomer in the first place! - I think Wars are against nation states not decentralized, non-state actors) is not about preventing the spread of terrorist cells and "Islamo-Facism" but instead the war is about securing vital oil resources of the Persian Gulf region. The Plan for the New American century literally said that Persian gulf oil would be of vital interest to U.S. and that the U.S. should be prepared to act unilaterally to gain control or influence over the use of this oil. My previous exposure to the role that resources play in U.S. foreign policy made me very open to the core thesis of Klare's book.
4) I don't know very much about Islam in general, and my exposure (a few days a week for 14 years) to Christianity in America left me uninspired. Klare's discussion of the politics on the Arabian peninsula speak to me where perhaps, if I knew more about the region I might find Huntington's civilizational, demographic, and core state/ cleft state/ torn state perspective more compelling.
5) My interest in global politics is based in my desire to create a more egalitarian society in the United States and to spread the riches of industrialization to the poorest people in underdeveloped countries. With this purpose I see resource re-allocation as a way to pull some underdeveloped countries into the class of those who have what they need to survive comfortably. "The United States alone consumes approximately 30 percent of all raw materials used by the human population" (Klare 13). Each human requires a minimum of " approximately 1,000 cubic meters (265,000 gallons) per" year and there is currently enough for every person if the water is shared equitably (Klare 142-144). Klare's statistical data is a very useful tool that can be used to the meet the end of securing nutritional necessities for humans living in countries without infrastructure or exploitable assets (that could be used to get them out of poverty). Klare's thesis leads to a conclusion where he argues that the best outcome for the human population would be to manage and control resources in a peaceful way, under the regulation of a "global authority." He believes this, coupled with a concerted effort among nations to develop technological revolutions could help solve resource crises. Klare is weak on policy suggestions (it seems like less than 10 pages of the book is policy recommendations) but his `One World' unificationist ending is much more satisfying, hopeful, and accurate than strong challengers' ultimate conclusions about the strife-ridden, perpetually divided future of the world.
Religion haunts the text of Klare's Resource Wars. Interspersed between strong arguments for his resource-based perspective on Global politics Klare makes concessions to the popular conservative, Samuel Huntington. These concessions do not de-value the central thesis of the book, however. He does not attack a straw man's version of Huntington's, Friedman's and others' characterizations of the geopolitical climate. Instead, he critically engages these popular frameworks that are in opposition to the main trend he lays out. In terms of politics and conflict in the Middle East Klare admits," Even before the discovery of oil, the states in this region were torn by internal divisions along ethnic and political lines, and by historic rift between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. ... This fiery cauldron has been further heated in recent years by the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, and the endurance of authoritarian regimes, and deep frustrations (among many Arabs) over Israel's treatment of the Palestinians" (45).
However, at the same time, Huntington is unable to preach along civilizational lines without giving some mention of the fact that Saudi Arabia is both the "original home of Islam" and the land with "the world's largest oil reserves" (Huntington 178). Similarly Iraq is both the land of Babylon and the land with an estimated 112.5 billion barrels of oil, the second greatest oil reserves in the world (Klare 45). Lands of great religious significance are the same lands under which vital resources sit ready to be fought over. Conflicts in the Middle East must be approached with some previous knowledge of cultural, ethnic, historical and religious lines drawn between groups of people, but the significance of middle eastern conflicts and their primary significance all around the world lies in the fact that the region sits on top of resources that the rest of the world wants access to.
If I were to rewrite Klare's book I would change very little. I would expand on the policy implications that can be extracted from the paradigm that Klare lays out. I would probably offer stronger critiques of the United States' claims to unfair portions of global resources. I think Klare strikes the balance between the influence resources exert over global politics and the influence that culture and civilization exert over global politics. If I were Klare I would have gone one step further and in rewriting the book I would address Global climate change as it is related to the acquisition of fossil fuel resources. In addition, treaties such Kyoto would be areas of global politics that I would examine. I believe that issues having to do with the global warming will become very important in the coming decades. Densely populated regions face loss of coastal land and this means that there will be mass migrations of peoples. An environmentalist spin on Klare's Resource Wars may move a bit toward Friedman's claims that Green energy industry will be a prime money-making market of the new century.
Ultimately I believe that Klare's lens gives the least distorted view of international relations as they exist and operate in today's world. It is not what Huntington's followers may belittle as "vacuous" "western universalism" that pushes Klare to plead for resource allocations to be parsed out by transnational organizations (or "global authorities") ; it is the universalism of the basic rights and physical needs of the body that are common among all human beings. This is something that can be understood without religion, without culture (Huntington's definition) and without nationality.
Power where does it all stem from..........2006-11-03
This is a good book and it really opens your eyes to all the bickering that occures over the use of resources.. When you think of resources a lot of people think of hard material items such as gold or oil as scarce but even the most basic element water is faught over on a day-to-day basis in rugged territories and contested borders. How many people know that Roosevelt had a meeting with King Abdel-Aziz in 1945 and the bearing it had on US Saudi relations to date? How many people know about France's ties with Saddaam Hussein before the 90's? How about the divide between the rich and the poor refered to as globalization?
Good book on resource geopolitics. My 13 yo son loves it.......2006-10-09
We all knew that respources, like money, move the world. And that by explaining the concentration, consumption and need to control them, everything we see in geopolitics can be somehow explained.
What is also amaizing, is that this book is written in a way that my pre-teen son (13) was so inetrested that he read it with calm and eagerness, so you know that the style is not dry or uniteresting. Try it with your kids or those teens you are close to.
It woud be good to have a update, specially now that the venezuelan oil supply is in control of an american hating militaristic madman with pretention of waging a war against the "empire".
Needs a 2nd edition.......2006-02-12
This is a decent book. It is well researched and referenced, and it contains a lot of interesting information about foriegn policy with respect to resources (especially oil and water). Klare remains rather nuetral throughout, which is rather refreshing. Unfortunately, it is a little dated by now (written when the Taliban still controled Afganistan and before the Iraq war). Most of the US foreign policy dates back to the Clinton era.
The problem is that the book is not very well written. There aren't mistakes, it is grammatically correct, etc., but painfully dry. In place of indepth anaylsis, I felt like a lot of pages were devoted to term-paper type intros and conclusions, with really obvious and vague statements. These statements seems to be repeated ad nausem. At times the book fell from my hands. I almost gave up on the book after wading though the painfully long intro and half the first chapter. I finally just skimmed ahead to chapter 3. The first 50 pages do nothing more than to say basically "oil is important and most of it is in politically unstable areas."
It is unfortunate, because it is an important book, and there is a lot of good info burried in it. It could just be about half as long.
balanced and dispassionate analysis.......2005-11-17
Thirty or forty years in the future, people will look back at Resource Wars by Michael Klare as one of those books they wished they had read, or as one that policymakers should have read.
Klare takes a serious look at the types of potential conflicts that will emerge as a result of increasing population and decreasing natural resouces. Many would cover oil exlusively (and Klare has written on oil alone), but this book was refreshing because it also looked at resources such as lumber, and water. The book covers a wide range of topics in a very practical, matter-of-fact fashion. This is not a polemical book and that is refreshing.
Resource Wars could almost be compared to Huntington's Clash of Civilizations in the way that each author is making a prediction about future conflicts. While Huntington's thesis is interesting, Klare's seems more likely.
Highly recommended.
Book Description
With populations decentralizing and cities sprawling ever-outward, twenty-first- century urban planners are challenged by the need to organize not just people but space itself. Hence a new architectural discipline has emerged: landscape urbanism.
In The Landscape Urbanism Reader Charles Waldheim — long at the forefront of this new movement — has assembled the definitive collection of essays by many of the field’s top practitioners. Fourteen essays written by leading figures across a range of disciplines and from around the world — including James Corner, Linda Pollak, Alan Berger, Pierre Bélanger, Julia Czerniak, and more — capture the origins, the contemporary milieu, and the aspirations of this relatively new field. The Landscape Urbanism Reader is an inspiring signal to the future of city making as well as an indispensable reference for students, teachers, architects, and urban planners.
Customer Reviews:
The Landscape Urbanism Reader.......2007-04-11
this book is really good to students who study Landscape Architecture.
The Landscape Urbanism Reader.......2007-01-15
This was a gift for my architect brother. He was thrilled with it. It was received as promised, with quick shipping and arrived in pristine shape. It was indeed a merry Christmas.
Book Description
In his first book ever, the father of string theory reinvents our concept of the known universe and mans unique place within it. The beginning of the 21st century is a watershed in modern science, a time that will forever change our understanding of the universe, Leonard Susskind contends. Several decades ago, Susskind introduced the revolutionary concept of string theory to the world of physical science. In doing so, he inspired a generation of physicists who believed that the theory would uniquely predict the properties of our universe. Now, in his first book ever, Susskind argues that the very idea of such an elegant theory no longer suits our understanding of the universe, and that our narrow 20th-century view of a unique universe will have to give way to the much broader concept of a gigantic cosmic landscapea megaverse, pregnant with new possibilities. His other contributions to physics are too numerous to mention, but his recent victory in an argument with Stephen Hawking over the nature of black holes made headlines everywhere.
Customer Reviews:
The Problem With Math.......2007-09-26
Susskind, along with many other, such as Randall Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions makes a serious mistake in leaping to the conclusion that reality corresponds to his mathematical models. Along with other string theorists, they assume that if the math they use to build their models contains some number of additional dimensions, then the real world must contain those dimensions. I see this in much of the literature, including, for example Woit Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory And the Search for Unity in Physical Law who debunks string theory, but nevertheless seems to accept the idea that if the math contains extra dimensions, reality must also contain those extra dimensions. Susskind really goes off the deep end with this.
A mathematical model is just that - a model. It is the best math we can construct at this point in time to describe the reality we are trying to model. It is not the reality itself. If the string theorists are successful in constructing a model that includes six or seven tiny dimensions, that does not mean that those dimensions actually exist. All it means is that the best model we can currently construct has to include those dimensions in the math. We must remember that much more math will come along. Someday, we may have a math that describes the same reality without the additional dimensions.
That said, if the string theorists can make a prediction that absolutely, positively depends upon those extra dimensions and if that prediction is confirmed by experimental results, then they may have a case. So far, the string theorists have failed utterly to make such a prediction. Even here, a different math may come along. The night is young.
As good as it gets!.......2007-08-27
TCL is popular science writing of the first order: a fascinating, informative, and highly entertaining tour of what rate as some of the most abstruse theories ever conceived. In Susskind's own words (p. 348):
"My main purpose in wiriting this book is not primarily to convince the reader of my own point of view; scientific arguments are best fought on the pages of technical journals and the blackboards of seminar rooms. My purpose is to explain the struggle of ideas that is about to take front-and-center place in the mainstream of science so that ordinary readers can follow the ideas as they unfold and experience the drama and excitement that I feel."
I can heap no greater praise on Susskind than to say that TCL brilliantly achieves his purpose. It is one of the finest pieces of popular science writing that I have ever read. Somewhere in this book Susskind alludes to another book he hopes to write one day. Here's very much hoping he directs that (and other) future efforts to a non-specialist readership. It is very much to the benefit of science and the public when scientists translate their work for the edification of non-scientists. Kudos to Susskind for joining the ranks of the most able popularizers!
Plain English, finally!.......2007-05-07
Choice book, great theorist writes in plain English..I have read 3 times, always something new!
Why is there Something rather than Nothing?.......2007-01-30
Very illuminative book in understanding the present state of the relevant physics and cosmology.
Really, we have no need of intelligent design theory if progress in science goes on.
Although the book is full of analogies and slogans instead of formulas, it provides a good overview of physics and cosmology.
The book is written in a lively way and thought provoking with challenging concepts.
Not Convincing .......2007-01-21
I'm not a physicist, but I could say that my interest in science stemmed from my background as an Engineer in electronics. And no need to go over the scientific aspects mentioned in the book since others have done a good job. Yet, I was surprised at a scientist, or rather the father of the String Theory, and quite knowledgeable in Quantum Mechanics, would treat man as a separate being from the universe. When we say that the universe is fine tuned to suite us, who is "us"? Aren't we a part of this universe in quantum physics perspective? And although I liked his scientific analogy a great deal and I learned a lot, not to say that I completely understood it, but his Anthropic views and conclusions threw me off balance. I'm sure that he has much more explaining to do before he could come to this conclusion. But generally speaking; if you are interested in science of quantum physics, it is a page-turner and the writer's ability to bring the complexities of this field to a layman's lever was amazing. And one more thing; the title was misleading when the writer used the word "illusion" in juxtaposition with"intelligent design"
Book Description
Paul Shepheard's previous book, What is Architecture?, was about making real, material things in the world -- landscapes, buildings, and machines. The Cultivated Wilderness is about those landscapes, and about the strategies that govern what we've done in shaping them.
In the author's words, this book is about "seeing things that are too big to see." His emphasis on strategy makes landscape fundamental -- he says that every architectural move is set in a landscape. Norman England, for example, was constructed as a network of strong points, in a strategy of occupation. The eighteenth-century grid cities of the New World reflect a strategy of reason. Our current strategy is the economic exploitation of the Earth, an intricately woven blanket of commerce that covers up a multitude of other possibilities, many other ways to treat the surface of the globe -- some of which are the landscapes revealed in this book.
In a series of first-person narratives, reminiscent of his last book, the author pairs six landscapes, in order of descending scale from global to local, from the seven wonders of the ancient world to the condensed destruction of World War I's Western Front. In an engaging style, Shepheard takes the reader on an odyssey through these landscapes, meeting people and seeing places. He states that now, at the end of a century in which the appropriate landscape was sought but never found, the strategy of turning the land to profit is under review -- and offers this book as his contribution to that review.
Customer Reviews:
among the most exciting books on the subject I have read.......1998-01-22
Shepheard's book is among the most exciting I have read in a very long time--even though I still don't quite know what it is. Is it what, as a university press publication, one might suppose it to be, a work of "scholarship"? is it instead, as, having read it, I now almost think, a very nearly poetic meditation on the interactions between human beings and their environment? I can say neither with certainty. What it is, "certainly," is a set of essays that consider, among other things, what "wilderness" might mean to the human beings who interact with, live in, or stamp their presence over it; the seven wonders of the ancient world; the human presence in Antactica; Scotland; Flevoland and the Dutch polders; the relationship between London and its surroundings; and--in its last chapter--the western front. Each essay is characterized first and foremost by the author's idiosyncratic and playful voice. He writes like a cranky and opinionated human being speaking to other human beings, not like an academic ghost-in-the-book-as-machine addressing some equally dessicated conception of an academic reader. The essays are shot through with conversations (invented? recorded?), little dramas, vignettes, and a basketful of other irrelevancies--although they never turn out to be as irrelevant as you suppose. Each is also characterized by flashes of insight that strike you like lightbulbs going off at unpredictable intervals, page after page. Many years ago, an English professor named Robert Stevick wrote an essay attempting to define the "form" of a genre called "the anatomy." It had, back then, recently been made "famous" all over again by a Canadian name of Frye. Stevick's examples, as I recall, included not only melancholick Burton, more or less obviously, but also Swift's Tale of a Tub, Tristram Shandy, Sartor Resartus, Moby Dick, A la recherche du temps perdus, and Ulysses. At an MLA meeting in the late 1970s, I proposed that Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time would be better understood in reference to this genre than if it were read (as it usually is) against the standards of realistic fiction; I still believe this argument is worth making in a more formal way than I did then, as an aside in a different argument, or here, as an assertion. Whatever else it may be, Shepheard's Cultivated Wilderness is the most recent major contribution to the anatomy genre I have come across. I also think it is simply brilliant. My pleasure in the book sent me looking, the day I finished it, for Shepheard's first book, What is Architecture? An Essay on Landscapes, Buildings, and Machines (MIT Press, 1994; paperback $9.95). I took me twenty-four hours to find a copy, which proved a bit frustrating. When I finally got my mitts on it, this earlier book also won me over. Art is everywhere [Shepheard writes]. As life has become detached from the wilderness, the human world is everywhere. I see music as a throbbing accompaniment to every moment of contemporary life, a sort of continuous current of emotion, that incorporates what poetry used to be. I see drama as a hugely expanded art that includes films and novels, which even has a new name, literature, and sucks in clothes and manners to itself as well. Architecture? Would we not all agree that architecture is much more than tombs and palaces and temples now? (p. 36) Do "we" all agree? Well, maybe yes . . . and maybe no. Page after page is filled with stuff that gets the ol' mental juices going, exciting agreement, provoking argument and disagreement, and inciting the reader to thought. If there is more to ask of a book, I am not sure what it is.
Book Description
Why do we find ourselves returning to certain pictures time and again? What is it we are looking for? How does our understanding of an image change over time? In his latest book T. J. Clark addresses these questions—and many more—in ways that steer art writing into new territory.
In early 2000 two extraordinary paintings by Poussin hung in the Getty Museum in a single room, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (National Gallery, London) and the Getty's own Landscape with a Calm. Clark found himself returning to the gallery to look at these paintings morning after morning, and almost involuntarily he began to record his shifting responses in a notebook. The result is a riveting analysis of the two landscapes and their different views of life and death, but more, a chronicle of an investigation into the very nature of visual complexity. Clark’s meditations—sometimes directly personal, sometimes speaking to the wider politics of our present image-world—track the experience of viewing art through all its real-life twists and turns.
Book Description
"This book is a must for anyone teaching, or wishing to better understand, qualitative research . . . This handbook is destined to be a classic text in the field of qualitative research that belongs on every student's and researcher's bookshelf."
--HARVARD EDUCATIONAL REVIEW
The Landscape of Qualitative Research, Second Edition,
the first volume in the paperback version of the
The Handbook of Qualitative Research, Second Edition,
takes a look at the field from a broadly theoretical perspective, and is composed of the
Handbook's Parts I ("Locating the Field"), II ("Major Paradigms and Perspectives"), and VI ("The Future of Qualitative Research").
The Landscape of Qualitative Research, Second Edition attempts to put the field of qualitative research in context. Part I locates the field, starting with history, then action research and the academy, research for whom?, and the politics and ethics of qualitative research. Part II isolates what we regard as the major historical and contemporary paradigms now structuring and influencing qualitative research in the human disciplines. The chapters move from competing paradigms (positivist, postpositivist, constructivist, critical theory) to specific interpretive perspectives, feminisms, racialized discourses, cultural studies, sexualities, and queer theory. Part III considers the future of qualitative research.
"This may well be 'the one book on qualitative research' that one would want to take 'to a desert island,' as the editors hope."
--JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY
The Handbook of Qualitative Research, Second Edition is widely considered to be the state of the art in evaluating the field of qualitative inquiry. Now published in paperback in response to the needs of classroom teachers,
The Landscape of Qualitative Research, Second Edition will be an ideal supplement for a course on research methods, across a wide number of academic disciplines.
"The
Handbook of Qualitative Research represents a major publishing event. It comprehensively gathers together and organizes rapidly-growing developments in the philosophy, theory, and method of conducting qualitative research."
--EVALUATION AND PROGRAM PLANNING
Customer Reviews:
A very good survey.......2006-04-29
The editors bring together a very good representative sample of the "state of the art" in qualitative research. In an age of paradigmatic controversies, this book is very helpful in understanding the issues under discussion.
As a grad student in anthropology, I found this book to contain a number of useful chapters. It perhaps goes without saying, but it is most useful as a pointer to source materials, rather than being an end unto itself.
Yuck.......2006-03-18
The authors attempted to show how scholarly they are by using very hard to understand language. I would have appreciated language that was easier to understand to help me deduce their perspective
Book Description
An updated and revised version of a classic text in the field of environmental design.
Inquiry by Design lays out fundamental theoretical approaches to design and research as well as practical research methods applicable to planning, programming, and evaluating physical environments. It systematically describes basic methods of research and how to apply them and shows how collaboration between designers and researchers leads to greater design creativity. 50 illustrations.
Customer Reviews:
The design of our environment changes our brain, and life.......2007-09-17
I read the book about a year ago but forgot to review it promptly. For this review I've looked back at my highlights to refresh my memory and my review may not be as good as it could have been. Sorry.
The book used actual research results from a variety of studies to support the hypothesis that architecture and interior design can dramatically improve occupant's well-being. We respond neurologically, psychologically, and physiologically to our environments, and that designers can craft interiors that improve our well-being, including health and longevity.
The book includes a section on observing environmental behavior that gives designers a jump start on the practical application of ethnographic research for interior activities.
I didn't get as much information from this book as I had hoped. That isn't necessarily the author's fault though. The main problem is that the depth of research we need for understanding how to design architecture and interiors for human well-being is limited by both funding and researcher's imaginations. This is probably about the best the book could be written at this time in history.
I would love to recommend this book to all architects and interior designers but I know many and they would never have the patience or interest to get through it. However, there is a small tribe of designers who realize that both professions are sadly lacking in understanding humans in interior environments. If you are in that tribe then this book is a must read. You will help change the world.
- jim
Book Description
Based on her extensive experience in the urban communities of Los Angeles, historian and architect Dolores Hayden proposes new perspectives on gender, race, and ethnicity to broaden the practice of public history and public art, enlarge urban preservation, and reorient the writing of urban history to spatial struggles.
In the first part of The Power of Place, Hayden outlines the elements of a social history of urban space to connect people's lives and livelihoods to the urban landscape as it changes over time. She then explores how communities and professionals can tap the power of historic urban landscapes to nurture public memory.
The second part documents a decade of research and practice by The Power of Place, a nonprofit organization Hayden founded in downtown Los Angeles. Through public meetings, walking tours, artists's books, and permanent public sculpture, as well as architectural preservation, teams of historians, designers, planners, and artists worked together to understand, preserve, and commemorate urban landscape history as African American, Latina, and Asian American families have experienced it.
One project celebrates the urban homestead of Biddy Mason, an African American ex-slave and midwife active betwen 1856 and 1891. Another reinterprets the Embassy Theater where Rose Pesotta, Luisa Moreno, and Josefina Fierro de Bright organized Latina dressmakers and cannery workers in the 1930s and 1940s. A third chapter tells the story of a historic district where Japanese American family businesses flourished from the 1890s to the 1940s. Each project deals with bitter memories -- slavery, repatriation, internment -- but shows how citizens survived and persevered to build an urban life for themselves, their families, and their communities.
Drawing on many similar efforts around the United States, from New York to Charleston, Seattle to Cincinnati, Hayden finds a broad new movement across urban preservation, public history, and public art to accept American diversity at the heart of the vernacular urban landscape. She provides dozens of models for creative urban history projects in cities and towns across the country.
Customer Reviews:
The Power of Place in Planning.......2001-11-15
The Historical Perspective:
Hayden is an urban historian; she is concerned with the interpretation of historic places, people, movements and events. She specifically writes about woman's and ethnic histories in urban places. The Power of Place documents both a preservation project and the history to be preserved.
Hayden is involved in a relatively new movement of historians and geographers who are reexamining the use of space by society. Her geographic-historical perspective is reflected in many contemporary scholars, including Michael Dear, Jennifer Wolch, David Harvey, and Henri Lefebver.
Relevance to Planning and Urban Design:
Planners involved in historic preservation should understand that the historic preservation of the architecture and histories of multiple classes, ethnicities, and genders is important. Urban renewal and economic development is a powerful tool that can cleanse the landscape of any references to past inhabitants -- their struggles, lives, and uses of place. As we see with the Biddy Mason wall, good design can acknowledge the existence of previous uses even if no structure remains. With this in mind, there is a considerable amount of history yet to be acknowledged with appropriate monuments. So Hayden defines the power of place as: "The Power of ordinary urban landscape to nurture citizens' public memory, to encompass shared time in the form of shared memory".
A must read for urban planners involved in historic preservation.
Nuanced Spatial Critique.......2000-03-27
Dolores Hayden's book, The Power of Place, is a comprehensive guide for anyone whose goal is to engage in an examination of spaces and places. It retains a historical perspective that allows the reader to apply the places focused upon by Hayden to his or her own specific spatial examination. While she focuses specific attention on the Los Angeles area, I found her work compatible with any examination of spatial use or spatial history and contextualization. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the power of place.
Book Description
How do landscapes--defined in the broadest sense to incorporate the physical contours of the built environment, the aesthetics of form, and the imaginative reflections of spatial representations--contribute to the making of politics? Shifting through the archaeological, epigraphic, and artistic remains of early complex societies, this provocative and far-reaching book is the first systematic attempt to explain the links between spatial organization and politics from an anthropological point of view.
The Classic-period Maya, the kingdom of Urartu, and the cities of early southern Mesopotamia provide the focal points for this multidimensional account of human polities. Are the cities and villages in which we live and work, the lands that are woven into our senses of cultural and personal identity, and the national territories we occupy merely stages on which historical processes and political rituals are enacted? Or do the forms of buildings and streets, the evocative sensibilities of architecture and vista, the aesthetics of place conjured in art and media constitute political landscapes--broad sets of spatial practices critical to the formation, operation, and overthrow of polities, regimes, and institutions? Smith brings together contemporary theoretical developments from geography and social theory with anthropological perspectives and archaeological data to pursue these questions.
Customer Reviews:
An excellent book.......2004-07-02
This book is the best comparative treatment of early state political dynamics yet published. Smith (no relation) is erudite and a sophisticated thinker. He has great insight into all sorts of issues relating to ancient and modern states and political systems. Many past archaeological works on early states are in for serious criticism here. The level or thinking and writing can be difficult in places, but the book is well worth the effort.
In brief, Smith devotes a chapter to each of four major political relationships: geopolitics, polities, regimes, and institutions. Each of these is considered through three perspectives on human dimensions of the landscape: experience, perception, and imagination. Each chapter includes a single extended case study plus general remarks on theory and other cases.
Political Landscapes and Plain English.......2004-03-25
There are some extremely interesting ideas within this book, and Adam T. Smith also provides some useful discussion of past landscape (and archaeological) theory. However, my big complaint is about the language the author uses throughout. While I agree that sometimes it is necessary to express complex ideas in a complex way, as a general rule the simpler the language, the better the work. It is almost always harder to write well using simple words and sentence structures, but surely being instantly intelligible makes this effort worthwhile?
I'm sure academics will find this a useful volume, but only the most persistent students will benefit from it.
Book Description
This manifesto summarizes the disparate critical practices that constitute "ecocriticism. " Lawrence Buell, one of the world 's leading theorists in ecocriticism, traces the ecocritical movement back to its roots in the 1970s, through its coalescence into a recognizable entity in the early 1990s, to its diversification and proliferation today. He shows how, from an initial focus on such genres as nature writing and nature poetry, ecocriticism has come to take all of literary history and discourse as its arena; and he addresses questions currently facing the discipline, such as: Why has the interest in environmental literary and cultural studies so quickly increased? Can the nature-preservation emphasis of first-wave ecocriticism be reconciled with second-wave concerns with issues of environmental justice? What is the meaning of "place " in a globalizing world? And how do aesthetic, ethical, and political concerns interact and collide in ecocritical work? Finally, Buell looks to the future of ecocriticism, predicting that discourses of the environment will become a permanent part of literary and cultural studies.
Customer Reviews:
A positive-themed manifesto of means to balance differing agendas into a more unified, and therefore stronger movement.......2006-02-06
The Future Of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis And Literary Imagination is a scholarly summary of the distinct critical practices that constitute "ecocriticism" today. Written by one of the world's leading theorists, who traces the ecocritical movement to its roots in the 1970's and its coalescence in the 1990's, The Future Of Environmental Criticism Asks such bold questions as: Why has interest in environmental literary and cultural studies risen so rapidly in recent times? Can the emphasis upon preserving nature of earlier ecocriticism be successfully reconciled with later ecocritical issues of environmental justice? The Future Of Environmental Criticism draws from past and present reality to predict the directions in which future ecocritical movements will flow, and offers a positive-themed manifesto of means to balance differing agendas into a more unified, and therefore stronger movement.
Books:
- Revolutionary Road
- Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: A Novel
- So You Think You Know Thomas Hardy?: A Literary Quizbook (Oxford World's Classics)
- Southwestern Vegetarian
- Spiritual Gardening: Creating Sacred Space Outdoors
- Stop Sitting on Your Assets: How to Safely Leverage the Equity Trapped in Your Home and Transform It Into a Constant Flow of Wealth and Security
- The 10-Second Kiss: How to Turn Your Relationship Into a Lifelong Romance -- in Just 24 Hours! A Magical Formula for Passion, Pleasure, and Playfulness
- The Abs Diet: The Six-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life
- The Adventures of Tintin: The Crab With the Golden Claws / The Shooting Star / The Secret of the Unicorn (3 Complete Adventures in 1 Volume, Vol. 3)
- The Amazing Power of Deliberate Intent: Living the Art of Allowing
Books Index
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Weapons & Warfare
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| Control
| Conventional
| Nuclear
Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum
The Party's Over: Oil, War And The Fate Of Industrial Societies
The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World
PowerDown: Options And Actions For A Post-Carbon World
Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak
