The Magic Mirror: Law in American History

Book Description

Chronicling American law from its English origins to the present, and offering for the first time comprehensive treatment of twentieth-century developments, this book sets American law and legal institutions in the broad context of social, economic, and political events, weaving together themes from the history of both constitutional and private law. The Magic Mirror treats law in society, and the legal implications of social change in areas such as criminal justice, the rights of women, blacks, the family, and children. It further examines regional differences in American legal culture, the creation of the administrative and security states, the development of American federalism, and the rise of the legal profession. Hall pays close attention to the evolution of substantive law categories--such as contracts, torts, negotiable instruments, real property, trusts and estates, and civil procedure--and addresses the intellectual evolution of American law, surveying movements such as legal realism and critical legal studies. Hall concludes that over its history American law has been remarkably fluid, adapting in form and substance to each successive generation without ever fully resolving the underlying social and economic conflicts that first provoke demands for legal change.

Average customer rating:

This Book Gets Better With Age
Tour De Force
Thanks.
I feel as if I was really there...
Bring On the Cannibals

A Hall of Mirrors
Robert Stone
Manufacturer: Mariner Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 0395860288

Book Description

Rheinhardt, a disk jockey and failed musician, rolls into New Orleans looking for work and another chance in life. What he finds is a woman physically and psychically damaged by the men in her past and a job that entangles him in a right-wing political movement. Peopled with civil rights activists, fanatical Christians, corrupt politicians, and demented Hollywood stars, A Hall of Mirrors vividly depicts the dark side of America that erupted in the sixties. To quote Wallace Stegner, "Stone writes like a bird, like an angel, like a circus barker, like a con man, like someone so high on pot that he is scraping his shoes on the stars."

Customer Reviews:

This Book Gets Better With Age.......2007-03-08

This book is as wise and penetrating today as when it was written. In this age of predatory capitalists aligned with the Christian right, Stone's corrupt evangelists and attorneys come alive again in New Orleans. Amid this corruption, broken people try to live, love and survive.

Stone's language is poetically compressed, and his range of imagination uncovers detail and image that lesser writers would never discover. It is astonishing that this is a first novel. It is truly a "Great American Novel" on par with anything Faulkner ever wrote. If we did not live in an age of cultural lobotomy, he would certainly get the attention that he deserves.

How often do we read something that leaves us changed? Not often. Read this book if you want to go home to the best part of yourself.

Tour De Force.......2003-10-21

This book consumes the reader with its ideas and its poetics. It is Apocolyptic literary fireworks, man. Morgan Rainey, the warped Jehovah. Rhienhardt, the suffering Judas. Geraldine, the sacrificial Virgin whore. New Orleans tranformed into a Dantean Inferno, a Boschian landscape of demonic avian fascists, lecherous, dragon like, regal homosexuals like Lester Clotho, shimmering toothed Hollywood vagabonds and ice-evil Capitalists with frozen souls. This book is pure inspiriational genius. A 60's morality tale that reads like an insane, surreal masterpiece hybrid of Conrad's & Chandler's novels.

Thanks........2001-01-19

I'd like to ardently thank "A Reader from New York" for giving away the last line of this book, which I bought shorty before reading your review. That was very, very considerate of you.

I feel as if I was really there..........1999-06-11

Along with Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer" this is one of the best written books I've ever read about New Orleans. However, while Percy concentrates on a slowly rotting family from old-society New Orleans, Stone concentrates on a more modern, touristy, sordid side of the city - one that will probably seem more familiar to those who have visited or lived in the city.

Some of the other reviews below mention that they found this book "overwritten" but I didn't really find that to be the case. I thought that Stone struck an excellent balance between detail and plot. The characters were fascinating, sometimes terrifying, and often hilarious.

Interestingly, I was not nearly as drawn to the main characters as I was to the fascinating side characters, especially the British pseudo-preacher who is definitely one of the most memorable characters I've read in years.

An excellent book, artfully written, and brilliantly executed.

Bring On the Cannibals.......1999-02-07

Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Latin America Otherwise)

Average customer rating:

Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Latin America Otherwise)
Laura A. Lewis , and Laura A. Lewis
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Mexico | Americas | History | Subjects | Books

General | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Wicca | Earth-Based Religions | Religion & Spirituality | Subjects | Books

Witchcraft | Earth-Based Religions | Religion & Spirituality | Subjects | Books

General | New Age | Religion & Spirituality | Subjects | Books

All Titles | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books

Nonfiction | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books

Religion & Spirituality | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

ASIN: 0822331470

Book Description

Through an examination of caste in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico, Hall of Mirrors explores the construction of hierarchy and difference in a Spanish colonial setting. Laura A. Lewis describes how the meanings attached to the categories of Spanish, Indian, black, mulatto, and mestizo were generated within that setting, as she shows how the cultural politics of caste produced a system of fluid and relational designations that simultaneously facilitated and undermined Spanish governance.

Using judicial records from a variety of colonial courts, Lewis highlights the ethnographic details of legal proceedings as she demonstrates how Indians, in particular, came to be the masters of witchcraft, a domain of power that drew on gendered and hegemonic caste distinctions to complicate the colonial hierarchy. She also reveals the ways in which blacks, mulattoes, and mestizos mediated between Spaniards and Indians, alternatively reinforcing Spanish authority and challenging it through alliances with Indians. Bringing to life colonial subjects as they testified about their experiences, Hall of Mirrors discloses a series of contradictions that complicate easy distinctions between subalterns and elites, resistance and power.

THE BEST OF FREDRIC BROWN: Arena; Imagine; It Didn't Happen; Recessional; Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (with Carl Onspaugh;) Puppet Show; Nightmare in Yellow; Earthmen Bearing Gifts; Jaycee; Pi in the Sky; Answer; The Geezenstacks; Hall of Mirrors; Knock

Average customer rating:

Very nice mix of humor, irony and the macabre

THE BEST OF FREDRIC BROWN: Arena; Imagine; It Didn't Happen; Recessional; Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (with Carl Onspaugh;) Puppet Show; Nightmare in Yellow; Earthmen Bearing Gifts; Jaycee; Pi in the Sky; Answer; The Geezenstacks; Hall of Mirrors; Knock
Fredric (edited by Robert Bloch) Brown
Manufacturer: Del Rey - Ballantine Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Customer Reviews:

Very nice mix of humor, irony and the macabre.......1999-06-29

This is an excellent way to be introduced to the work of pulp writer and mystery/science fiction author Fredric Brown. The collection here -- introduced by Robert Bloch -- nicely spans Brown's career and while heavy on the science fiction elements, still presents a fine selection of Brown's output. Mostly short stories and not a dog in the bunch!

Average customer rating:

Hall of Mirrors
David Sinclair
Manufacturer: arrow books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000NYKIBY

The Voice in the Mirror (Nightmare Hall)

Average customer rating:

How far would you go to cover up a dark past?

The Voice in the Mirror (Nightmare Hall)
Diane Hoh
Manufacturer: Scholastic Paperbacks
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Literature | Children's Books | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

ASIN: 0590568698

Customer Reviews:

How far would you go to cover up a dark past?.......1997-06-30

What would you do if a "voice in the mirror" told you crazy, evil things? What would you do if you committed murder and could find no way out? Would you kill again? Those questions and more are answered in this haunting Nightmare Hall book. Annie loves holidays and celebrations, until two of her friends are involved in horrible "accidents". She is determined to uncover the truth, no matter what the costs! You'll be on the edge of your seat with every turn of the page--wondering what awful things will happened next..

Average customer rating:

Ambush in a Hall of Mirrors
S Johnson
Manufacturer: DLSIJ Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Book Description

S. Johnson has been publishing poetry since she was a child. Decades later, she has compiled a collection that includes both previously published poems and some newly inked. These poems are alive with imagery and raw emotion. These poems are confessionary; yet it is each and everyone of us at the kneeler. Whether you are new to the world of poetry or a seasoned veteran, these verses will touch you with their ease and poignancy.

Download Description

A 50-poem collection from Poet S. Johnson.

Art and Film since 1945: Hall of Mirrors (World of Art)

Average customer rating:

Hall of Mirrors

Art and Film since 1945: Hall of Mirrors (World of Art)
Kerry Brougher , Jonathan Crary , Bruce Jenkins , and Kate Linker
Manufacturer: Monacelli
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | History & Criticism | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

General | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

General | Performing Arts | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

General | Movies | Entertainment | Subjects | Books

All Titles | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 1964-1977 (Whitney Museum of American Art Books)

ASIN: 1885254210

Customer Reviews:

Hall of Mirrors.......2000-06-13

'Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors' accompanied a major exhibition presented by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1996 - in the Centenary of Cinema. This large scale exhibition charted the various aspects the dynamic relationship between film and modern art as it has developed over the last 50 years, and was an exploration the incredible impact that cinema has had on out visual at large, across the world and half the century. The exhibition drew on the immense expertise of Kerry Brougher, who curated the show and partly authored this catalogue. The catalogue is opened by Brougher's broad survey of the history of film and art, divided roughly into three moments (which was also the organising structure behind the exhibition) and goes on to explore other perspectives in illuminating essays by Russell Ferguson, Bruce Jenkins, Kate Linker et al. The volume is completed by a chronology of events and a comprehensive bibliography, which provides a useful tool for anyone interested in a further exploration of the field. Over all the catalogue is fascinating and inspiring reading for anyone with a passion for film and/or art. Especially to anyone who was fortunate enough to experience the exhibition the book is an absolute must. The publication must also be recommended for its fantastic illustrations, which adequately convey the spirit of the exhibition, even to art lovers and cinephiles who missed the show. The book is very pleasurable viewing as well as reading, and one finds oneself returning to it over and over again.

In the same vein I would like to recommend to other exhibition catalogues, which also offer valuable source material on the interdisciplinary relationship between film and art:

* 'Notorious', MOMA, Oxford 1999, catalogue by Brougher and Michael Tarantino.

Average customer rating:

Accessible, wide-ranging, and opens the doors to many new topics and genres. Very highly recommended

Superlative conception; inadequate execution...

Introducing: Heather LeLache

jaw slacking, eyebrow squeezing novel

Power without control, and morality in a man without judgement
The Lathe of Heaven: A Novel (Perennial Classics)
Ursula K. Le Guin
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

LeGuin, Ursula K. | ( L ) | Authors, A-Z | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books
General | Fantasy | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books
General | Science Fiction | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books
Popular Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Book Clubs | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

The Left Hand of Darkness

The Dispossessed

The Lathe of Heaven

Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Three Complete Novels of the Hainish Series in One Volume--Rocannon's World; Planet of Exile; City of Illusions

The Telling

ASIN: 0060512741
Release Date: 2003-08-14

Amazon.com

Ursula K. Le Guin is one of science fiction's greatest writers. She is also an acclaimed author of powerful and perceptive nonfiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. She has received many honors, including six Nebula and five Hugo Awards, the National Book Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Newbery, the Pilgrim, the Tiptree, and citations by the American Library Association. She has written over a dozen highly regarded novels and story collections. Her SF masterworks are The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Dispossessed (1974), and The Lathe of Heaven (1971).

George Orr has dreams that come true--dreams that change reality. He dreams that the aunt who is sexually harassing him is killed in a car crash, and wakes to find that she died in a wreck six weeks ago, in another part of the country. But a far darker dream drives George into the care of a psychotherapist--a dream researcher who doesn't share George's ambivalence about altering reality.

The Lathe of Heaven is set in the sort of worlds that one would associate with Philip K. Dick, but Ms. Le Guin's treatment of the material, her plot and characterization and concerns, are more akin to the humanistic, ethically engaged, psychologically nuanced fiction of Theodore Sturgeon. The Lathe of Heaven is an insightful and chilling examination of total power, of war and injustice and other age-old problems, of changing the world, of playing God. --Cynthia Ward

Book Description

George Orr is a man who discovers he has the peculiar ability to dream things into being -- for better or for worse. In desperation, he consults a psychotherapist who promises to help him -- but who, it soon becomes clear, has his own plans for George and his dreams.

The Lathe of Heaven is a dark vision and a warning -- a fable of power uncontrolled and uncontrollable. It is a truly prescient and startling view of humanity, and the consequences of playing God.

Customer Reviews:

Accessible, wide-ranging, and opens the doors to many new topics and genres. Very highly recommended.......2007-08-10

George Orr has the ability to dream things into being, changing reality smoothly and seamlessly into what he creates in his dreams. Scared by this power, he takes drugs to stop his dreams and soon ends up in mandatory sessions with a dream-specialist therapist who promises to help him--yet reveals that he has his own plans for George and his effective dreams. Unlike George, who did not want to change reality, the psychiatrist Haber has no qualms changing reality to serve what he views as the greatest good. A well-developed science-fiction text in its own right, Lathe of Heaven also delves into the realm of dystopic societies, utilitarian philosophy, and issues ranging from race to socialized medicine to human natures. The text is skilled, accessible, well-paced, and both thought-provoking and essentially satisfying as a book. I greatly enjoyed it and highly recommend it.

I was impressed by how much ground and how many topics Le Guinn covers in such a short book, and how accessible the topics remain throughout. It is a very readable text, but not because Le Guin dumbs down or oversimplifies topics. Rather, she carefully juggles plot, characterization, and theory such that the book moves at a good pace without becoming rushed and the various factors combine in a way that brings out the best and most useful (to the reader and the story) in all of them. Therefore, I would recommend this book to all readers, including those that don't generally read science-fiction.

The topics which Le Guin investigates are wide-ranging and, though she doesn't investigate any in extensive depth, the text does provide a lot of food for thought. Covering everything from healthcare to the patient/doctor relationship, from utilitarianism to human nature, to race and war and the unconscious mind, she really does touch on a wide range of subjects in the series of dystopic realities that span the book. The topics are covered in enough detail to be realistically realized, but are kept open so that the book keeps moving at a good pace and the reader is never given a clear, absolute answer to any one topic. My only complaint with the novel is this level of brevity and indecisiveness, but I believe it is necessary. It would be impossible to delve into all of these topics in depth without completely changing the purpose and content of the novel, and it would also make for a lengthy, tiresome read. As it is, the book opens a lot of doors and closes none of them, providing apt food for thought and introducing more topics (such as human nature) that are only accessible because it is able to cover so many.

I was honestly surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. It read quickly, kept me interested, but never became simplistic or shallow. I highly recommend this text to all readers, and I think it has the potential to open up pathways to all sorts of new thoughts and genres for the reader. This is a wonderful book.

Superlative conception; inadequate execution..........2007-06-24

Like its protagonist (Dr. Haber), this novel ultimately fails due to the paucity of imaginative means that are brought to bear in pursuit of its conceptually magnificent ends. And, unfortunately, in art, as one of the characters puts it: "All we have is means." In any case, a very charming meditation on the nature of reality and the mind's place in it - announced by the jellyfish/ocean allegory in the opening paragraphs - disintegrates, like Dr. Haber's attempts at remaking the World, into an incoherent and unsatisfactory welter of unnecessary characters (e.g. Heather Laleche) and events. Le Guin should have given herself a lot more time writing this one.

Introducing: Heather LeLache.......2007-05-13

You can read all the other reviews to learn why this is a great and enduring SF classic. I'm among the novel's many passionate fans, both for LeGuin's introduction of a powerful concept, her engrossing plot development, and her brilliantly right-sized characterization.

Others have abundantly commented on the conflict between George Orr and Dr. Haber, and they are generally on target. So I'll confine my remarks to the novel's third principal character, so disregarded that only one or two reviewers even mention her name.

"Well."

(As bangle-clashing, web-crouching, chronically caustic Heather LeLache would say.)

Heather is an appealing character, and absolutely essential to the plot, providing a badly needed positive focal point in the struggle between two neutral, static characters. Between them, passively resistant George Orr & manipulatively dependent Dr. Haber create an energy vacuum of monumental proportions. Heather is like a bolt of lightning in a lowering sky - when she appears, she discharges the leaden atmosphere of the Orr / Haber confrontation, bringing movement and change.

And where can we find a more weirdly charming character than Heather? Introduced to us in her chosen persona as a malevolent spider waiting for unwary "flies" to wander into her gasoline-redolent, converted car park office, she's contemptuous, dismissive, skeptical. She's also practical, persistent, honest, courageous, and absolutely loyal and it's impossible to imagine an emotionally intact Orr getting through the disorienting sessions with Haber without her support and validation.

George loses Heather to the universally grey world he creates at Haber's command - a world in which her "essential quality of brownness" and defensive belligerence cannot exist. A shadow Heather is restored to him through alien intervention (involving a Beatles 45) but she is meek and unconvincing, and the novel never fully recovers its impetus. Fortunately the apocalyptic crisis the story has been building toward is close at hand at this point.

In addition to the three Principal Humans the novel also includes a fourth principal character or characters - the alien(s). They don't get a lot of airplay (so to speak) but these are perhaps the goofiest, hippest aliens ever to grace the SF page. If you haven't read the book yet, I'll let you be surprised & delighted.

jaw slacking, eyebrow squeezing novel.......2007-04-23

I mean, wow. I found this book in tattered condition in a used book store in Thailand (like I find most of my books). I had no idea it was so intense! Reality? Perspective? Dreams? Free will? All these areas of thoughts are deep within the novel and intellectually well done. The book held my heart for quite a few moments, had my jaw slackened and squeezed my eyebrows.

Power without control, and morality in a man without judgement.......2007-03-13

Warning - I talk about some minor plot points below.

This is a novel whose premise is so outlandish that it begs for a dramatic opening line. Something that catapults the reader into the story and sets a frantic pace. A line like "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time". Instead we get this: "Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss." With that opening, and throughout the book, Ursula K. Le Guin refuses to cater to readers who want the focus of the story to be fantastic power and unlimited possibilities. Instead she gives us a man, George Orr, who is relentlessly in balance. He is hard to upset, difficult to anger, but easy to coerce. And through some unknown power of the mind, his uncontrolled dreams change the very fabric of reality.

When a well meaning psychiatrist discovers this power and begins to use it to improve the lot of the human race, Orr must struggle to decide how much change is too much. Although he is curiously without judgment in most things, he feels deeply that the integrity of what is should be respected. Nonetheless, he is such a passive man that he bends to the will of his doctor almost until it is too late.

Because Orr believes so deeply in reality and in humans being what we are, his subconscious cannot help but balance each improvement in humanity with a correspondingly harsh but in hindsight perfectly logical setback. When asked to imagine perfect peace on Earth, his subconscious assumes that there is something else to fight against, in this case aliens. When asked to imagine a world without racial strife, he does not imagine good will breaking out across the planet, but a human race where everyone looks the same. These setbacks infuriate the doctor who uses Orr. But it may be that Orr is only capable of one leap of imagination, the original one that he made to dream that the human race might not destroy itself. Almost unnoticed towards the end of the novel, Orr remembers our original reality, the world that held before he began to dream new ones. And in that reality humankind had befouled the planet and dealt it a death blow with war. So even though he is unable to imagine the paradises wished for by his doctor, Orr still finds himself imagining that the whole world is a dream simply because it still exists.

This is a powerful and thought provoking book, and a quick read to boot. I imagine that different readers could draw different lessons from it, but for me the thing that stood out the most was the desire of the doctor to do good with the power he had found, despite the evilness of his outcomes. It was a potent reminder that those who do the greatest harm are often seeking to do the greatest good.

The Lathe of Heaven: A Novel (Perennial Classics)

Average customer rating:

The Lathe of Heaven: A Novel (Perennial Classics)
Ursula K. Le Guin
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OE5YHG

Books:

Books Index

Books Home

Recommended Books