Narratives of George Muller
354549
Excellent book of narrations on the life work of George Muller.  George Muller of Bristol is his life story written from these narratives and is a bit more easier to read.  His life deals with his desire to give God all the glory for His enabling him to depend on God for his daily needs and the needs to run his ministries including, schools, orphanages and his churches.
4150332
I've been a fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories for years, but this is the first time I've encountered the Brigadier Gerard stories.  An interesting set of vignettes from the Napoleonic wars and of warfaring as a career choice.  Definitely thought provoking.
2508176
Kyle's Adventures in Wordland, framed in a plot loosely resembling The Life of Pi, this book is a quasi-mystical journey where we meet words as living beings. Like Alice, Kyle floats down into an unfamiliar land where words speak and walk. They are layered characters who we understand and yet don't fully comprehend at all times in their nuances and layers of meaning. Kyle Noss, in a 6-week long coma, wanders into the land of words, converses with them, engages in arguments, visits their forums and institutions, even a court of law. His companions are Word and Thought, two lively companions in this wonderland. Multi layered interpretations underlie this search for insight into how we conceptualize our ideas within the limits imposed by language and presumptions. Kenneth Niles has written a novella to set readers off on a winding path of musing and speculation.
1598155
Uncut, just as George Muller wrote it. The only way to read about anything worthwhile: from the one who actually lived it.
3001002
This book tells stories about figures in Drucker's life that influenced his thinking. The book is partitioned in episodes relating to the times he spent in Vienna, Frankfurt, London and the US. Drucker was forced to make up his mind on the Nazi threats while living in Vienna and Frankfurt. He left for England and later for the US, when the Nazis came to power in 1933. He realized that the liberal 19th century had definitely come to an end and that not only his future but that of Western civilization was at stake. Some of his intellectual companions portrayed in the book shared his concerns but came to different conclusions on how to abate the danger facing Germany and Europe.
The book opens with portraits of Viennese people like his grandmother and teachers that inspired him in later life. Intellectual forces in his youth like Freud, Marxism, Stalinism, rural sociology and Prussian Junckerdum are  discussed by describing persons holding these ideas. However, he rejects them all as ideologies that wanted to achieve salvation by society. The world of investment banking he encountered in his London years is painted by pictures of men, who made decisions unbridled by ideology. His US years also portrays men of action. Drucker's management theory can be understood as a theory of decision making. Management wants to achieve results and not heaven on earth. His ideas on management were influenced by practitioners like Alfred Sloan of GM. This book gives interesting insights on how Drucker's ideas on management evolved in a discourse with other people and ideas.
1537919
This is a remarkable book. Besides the usual variety that appears in most books on economic thought (Smith, Marx, Keynes, Hayek, Schumpeter) it includes a nice selection of non-economists such as Voltaire, Burke and Marcuse. Muller is a master of situating intellectuals in their respective context and presenting them in lively detail. Having read Voltaire's "Candide", it was remarkable to find out about his personal adventures with financial speculation. When dealing with Smith, Muller takes pains to retain all the nuances, such as Smith's claim that division of labor, no matter how productive, could make human beings "as stupid and ignorant as it possible for a human creature to become". As Muller is a specialist on conservative thought, his treatment of a variety of criticisms of the market by conservatives is very intriguing. Furthermore, although chapters are written in a way to make them independent of each other, Muller links them nicely using common themes and referring back to already discussed, older ideas. One of such themes is the identification of capitalism with Jews. One might find it surprising how old and often recurring this identification was in European thought.

My main qualm regards Muller's treatment of the left. Although all of the selections are understandable (Marx is a must, Lukacs is representative of 20th century communism and easy to juxtapose with Freyer, while Marcuse is representative of the New Left), large strands of interesting left-wing thought are omitted. Karl Polanyi who wrote the classic about the industrial revolution and the nature of the market ("The Great Transformation") and who seems like a perfect addition to such a book is only mentioned in one of the hundreds of footnotes. Anarchists seem non-existent. The reader might walk away with the feeling that the only things the left has to offer are nagging and central-planning. In the meantime, Hayek and Schumpeter - classical liberals with overlapping ideas (e.g. the role of the entrepreneur) are both given separate chapters. On an unrelated note, some might find the treatment of Keynes inadequate as well. In the first page of the Keynes/Marcuse chapter, Muller states that "[Keynes] provided an economic rationale for governments to try to actively combat unemployment by raising the level of government spending" (p. 317). You will hear the same reductionism in an intro to macro college course, but Keynes' insights were way more nuanced (the role of uncertainty - see: Duncan Foley's "Adam's Falalcy"; the need for a fundamentally different monetary policy - see: Allan Meltzer's and Geoff Tily's work) and often cannot be described as "Keynesian" (or rather, what came to be viewed as "Keynesian").

Despite these flaws, this is a very well-written, insightful and stimulating book. If you are interested in the history of economic thought and more broadly - the different attitudes toward the market economy, make sure to check it out.
1444893
This book was great fun to read.  You may wonder why there are some reviews that are so harsh and vehement negative.  I think politics be the clue.

The writer seems (well, to me) to be referring to George when he writes: "The president was a boob, a brainless figurehead who had a talent for winning elections but little else."  There are enough references to the VP and Secretary of Defense to create a sense if currency in his descriptions of the immoral executive branch of the government.  The Secretary of Defense describes the protaganists as "professors, probably ultraliberal Looney Tunes" reflecting some of the attitudes of the current administration.

I'll bet political disagreements with the author are the real sources of the vehemence of the negative reviews.  The percentages seem about right. :)
3713792
David McCullough is one of the most distinguished and celebrated of contemporary American historians. In this collection of portraits he displays his special enthusiasm of character and story, for landscape. The gallery he chooses of people known and distinguished although not perhaps in the first-level of collective consciousness today. He opens with a portrait of explorer scientist Alexander Humboldt and follows with one of another legendary figure of his time Louis Agassiz. In the course of it he will write about other scientists including the entomologist Miriam Rothschild. He most often tells the story of the life including in many cases the ways it goes astray. He too gives a strong sense of place and time, and puts us back by and large in nineteenth- century America with it all its energy and richness.
4378367
There has been much debate over the actual state of the German nuclear weapons development program during World War Two. The generally accepted version is that - after losing its top native researchers (most of whom were Jewish) as well as many from occuppied countries - the German program was unable to muster the intellectual and econmic muscle needed to do what was done in America by the Manhattan Project.

And yet, with the war in Europe over, those self-same intellectually challenged scientists while held in detention were recorded as understanding exactly what had happened after being told of Hiroshima.

These raises the question of what was the true status of the German nuclear weapons program.

Friedrich Georg addresses this issue in HITLER'S MIRACLE WEAPONS: Secret Nuclear Weapons of the Third Reich and their Carrier Systems volume 1 - Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine. As is obvious by the title, author Georg is writing a multi-volume volume series on german high-level weapons R&D programs. This volume addresses the development of nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) weapons as well as the delivery systems that would be required.

Using data he claims was unaccessible until after 1990 because it was sequestered in the German Democratic Republic, Georg describes how the NBC programs were hidden within a bureaucratic miasma of mutually exclusive self-sustaining entities which allowed for plausible denial both within the Third Reich and without in terms of post-war contact with the Allies. The sources he cites also contain extensive files on the modification of existing weapons delivery systems (bf-109s, He-177s, U-boats, etc.) and the development of new systems (piggy-back aircraft combinations, surface to surface and submarine launched ballistic missiles) to deleiver the NBC weapons both the UK and the USA.

Not limited to text, this book also includes excellent scale drawings and actual models of the various weapons and delivery systems, as well as what few photographs have survived.

Friedrich Georg should be commended for his diligent attention to detail in relating this fascinating trove of information.
3294534
After an encounter with an alien race that leaves him with a strange `disease', Richard Muller exiles himself to Lemnos, a place famous for a vast, deadly maze that was built there long ago. He alone succeeded in getting to its center; now, veteran Charles Boardman, the one who convinced Muller to go on that ill-fated mission, and the young Ned Rawlins, whose late father was Muller's friend, must get Muller out of the maze and back to Earth for one last, heroic task (to do so, they, too, must master the maze). Getting through the maze won't be as difficult as it will be to actually convince Muller to follow them; thus, a psychological battle plays out during most of the book. In my mind, this isn't as fascinating as are all the different paths leading to different sorts of knowledge: in the first third of the work, Boardman's crew uses robots programmed to replicate the information that was saved during earlier, unsuccessful tries to get through the maze - that way, human lives are saved while the crew can afford to lose dozens of robots; some of the maze's sections are easier for the robots to go through, because they can more easily doubt their sense perception, whereas humans must close their eyes so that they won't be confused by appearances; meanwhile, Muller, having lived nine years in the maze and thus knowing it better than anyone, is still speculating about its possible origin, hidden secrets and traps. The only limitation to the various speculations is, plainly... death.
2024948
Picking up a history of automata, one expects to find a historical narrative of machine men evolving over the centuries into the car assembling and hand shaking robots of today.  In Kang's narrative, the physical devices are perhaps the least important part of the story.  Kang doesn't dwell on what the talking head said or what the digesting duck ate, but finds out where the ideas came from, who promoted them, and how they aged over time.  Kang's narrative is a story of automata in the imagination as a fitting metaphor for our conception of self, government, industry, and that which we love or hate in different historical periods.  As the automata is both attractive and vile, so too are the ideas that have long been associated with the term.  It stands in for the perfection of the human body and the universe in a world designed by a divine watchmaker, the rational mind, the efficient worker, conformists with no will of their own, tyrants, the oppressed, monsters, human hubris, workers yearning to break free of their masters, and transcendence of nature's laws.

The power of the automata in the western imagination has served many intellectual movements in our history and will shape us for centuries to come.  Kang's story ends in the inter-war years in a pre-atomic age before cyberpunks, cyberfeminists, and transhumanists.  He gets us to the 20th century where the story becomes more mainfold, international, and complex.  Sublime Dreams of Living Machines is an important contribution to our understanding of the history of automata, and it is my hope that Dr. Kang will continue to research and publish more aspects of this saga.
414045
I really liked this book. I could not put it down and read it in 4 days. Another winner by Muller.
4463696
In this book of well arranged and indexed essays Arthur Miller describes some of the ideas he explored in in his plays.  The example that I found most interesting was his statement that  in "The Crucible" he was exploring people who would not incriminate themselves. rather than the Salem Witches per se.  This stance, refusing to testify before the McCarthy inquiry, is the one he took.  Although he was neither incarcerated, nor hanged, he was on a black list for some years.
2155062
I really liked the book Middlemarch and have been very interested in the life and work of George Elliot so I was interested in this book.  If you haven't read Middlemarch or Elliot's other books, you'll have a much better time reading them.
440402
George did a great job telling his story, from persecution in communist controlled Romania to his new life and challenges faced in America.  I know George personally, and did not realize he had experienced so much in his life.  He is very grounded in his faith and willing to share his journey with all.  Buy this book, read it and share it with others.
2991343
George Muller's autobiography is important for every Christian to read.  His complete reliance on God made it possible for him to do the impossible. By today's rates, millions of dollars went through his hands to advance the Gospel and help orphans in early 19th century England. It is one of the most inspirational books one can read.
4293933
This stranger-than-fiction account of the relationship of two key figures behind the creation of the mamouth Oxford English Dictionary truly reads like a novel. It tells of James Murray, the young scholar to whom the job of overseeing the writing and editing of the OED fell, and Dr. William Minor, an American inmate at Broadmoor lunatic asylum, who turned out to be one of Murray's most prolific researcher-writers. The story has all the elements of a juicy Victorian novel--murder, madness, men's clubs, self-mutilation, class tensions, economic struggles, and immense undertakings that only a megalomaniac or fool would dare attempt. Winchester does a good job of describing technical information (the collection and organizing of the dictionary's definitions; evolving ways of defining and treating insanity) without being opaque or dull. At the same time he employs great compassion when telling the tragic events that enveloped the story's key characters. Winchester's story telling is never heavy-handed. I especially found it amusing thew way he peppered his account with repeated statements about how everyone involved in the creation of the OED vastly underestimated how long the project would take to complete. At one point, after working for many years and always missing the publisher's deadlines, Murray confidently claims, "I have got to the stage where I can estimate the end. In all human probability the Oxford English Dictionary will be finished on my eightieth birthday, four years from now." Winchester wryly adds, "But it was not to be. Neither was the OED to be completed in four years, nor was Sir James ever to become an octogenarian." All in all, the last volume was publishe 44 years after the project began.