Book Description
With Guerrilla Prince, syndicated journalist Georgie Anne Geyer calls on her twenty-five years of experience covering Latin America to create an extraordinary biography that finally reveals the untold story of Fidel Castro. Based on hundreds of interviews with unique sources - including four extensive personal interviews with Castro - Guerrilla Prince is an intimate and revealing portrait, charged with all the electricity of the charismatic man himself. In this edition, Geyer adds a preface and an extensive epilogue to her 1991 hardcover text, addressing the changes since that time - the collapse of the Soviet Union, the internal unrest, and the growing anticipation of a post-Castro Cuba.
Customer Reviews:
From the Camouflaged Prince into the Castelan Communist : Fidel Castro.......2007-06-02
According to Lenin's blueprint for the 'dictatorship of the proletariat',the state needs a constant one-party system of communists.Eventhough Lenin supported the scientific writings of Charles Darwin,Lenin believed that the people's will could be controlled and restricted by the state.History has proved him wrong.The loss of Fidel Castro would be the end of the Cuban-Leninist-Communist state.Fidel is a 'Leninist',and his brother Raul is a 'Stalinist'.Fidel was the fiery spark that kept the peasant's hopes alive.The 1959 revolution was an idealistic experiment in communist governing that quickly soured into stagnation and repression.Cuba has a very high literacy rate and advanced health-care for its Latin American people.Yet,the diesel fumes sicken the people,day in and day out.Sugar is a food-staple of poor people and still declining in global use.It does not seem appearant that Raul Castro will relinquish his authority,once he is crowned,'jefe supremo del pais por la gente'.His potentially stalinistic policies will be just as fettering and perhaps even worse than his older brother's edicts.-A soviet designed nuclear reactor will soon be operational,near Havana.The fate of this Chernobyl time-bomb is worrisome.And as with North Korea's quasi-communist leader,Kim Il Sun,the reigns of power are within the family.If socialist China continues its economic global ties,would Cuba secure Arabian oil via China?And cheap oil from Hugo Chavez?-Abdication of their rule would be the complete end of their influence and politically suicidal.So, who knows?Maybe a bearded Raul will try to board a Swiss jet and learn to ski the Alps?Hugo Chavez claims he is the communist of the campo,yet he is rhetorically quasi-Catholic and therefore European christian influenced.-This book is simply the best at showing the mental workings of Fidel Castro and why he took the role of 'Guerrilla Prince'.History is what happens when national leaders are busy making other plans.Learn about Castro's personal decisions in this book.I can only recommend reading this for understanding the charismatic personality of the world's oldest living ruler ,Fidel Castro.
Unmasking a Dictator / Desenmascarando a un Dictador.......2007-03-18
This book gives you a view inside the political and military decision making of the Cuba communist regime. It is incredible to see how every major decision is controlled and dictated personally by Fidel Castro himself. The so-called Revolution is really nothing more than Fidel Castro's personal wishes and views. What the revolution wants and does is not determined by what the proletarian wants as he demagogically preaches. This book truly takes the mask away and shows the real dictatorial and egocentric personality of Fidel Castro for the world to see, putting him up there with other dictators like Nicolae Ceaucescu, Joseph Stalin and Kim Jong il. All of the Cuban communist government's crimes and all the suffering of the Cuban people will be well known to the rest of the world after his communist regime is no more.
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Este libro muestra una ventana dentro de las decisiones militares y políticas del régimen comunista Cubano. Es increíble ver como cada decisión de importancia es controlada y dictada personalmente por el propio Fidel Castro. La llamada revolución no es nada más que la visión y los deseos personales de Castro, lo que la revolución quiere y hace, no es determinado por el proletariado como Castro demagógicamente predica. Este libro realmente desenmascara y muestra los verdaderos rasgos dictatoriales y ego centristas de la personalidad de Fidel Castro. Ubicándolo en un mismo grupo con dictadores como Nicolae Ceaucescu, Joseph Stalin y Kim Jong il. Todos los crímenes del gobierno comunista Cubano y el sufrimiento del pueblo Cubano saldrán a la luz pública mundial cuando su régimen comunista deje de existir.
Very well written and argued.......2006-12-29
This is the best written biography of Fidel Castro. It covers almost all of his life focusing mostly on the political and military aspects. If you want to get a sense of society as a whole I would recommend reading Fidel Castro by Quirk but otherwise this is an excellent start to Castro's life. You could read this and feel that you have covered every relevant part of his life and then some. If you want to understand how Cuba was transformed into what it is today this is essential reading. Highly recommend.
A real challenge for leftists.......2005-06-18
In one corner, an American "bourgeois" woman named Georgie Anne Geyer. In the opposite corner, Fidel Castro. The opening bell rings! :-0
If I understand the "leftist" mindset at all well, there is no decision to be made here. Castro is right, and Geyer is wrong, and that ends that.
But -- unfortunately for that mindset -- Georgie Ann Geyer worked really hard in compiling her book, and conducted interviews with hundreds of people, and she knows an awful lot more about Fidel Castro than he knows about her. She knows that Castro was a killer, even in his university days. She knows that he was an absolutely ruthless seeker-of-power, like some others we have known (Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini...)
And, in his quest for absolute power, Castro was helped by another thing, not much discussed here. This was the idea that the current system is so corrupt, that anything else would be an improvement. We citizens of the planet Earth need to be very wary of ideas like this. For example, in Iran: the idea that the Shah had to go, that anything else would be an improvement. BZZT! WRONG! Thirty years of terrorist mullahs certainly put a big damper on that idea!
In the same way, the Cubans of long ago partied and had good times and never really dreamed that anyone could be worse than Batista. Of course, sooner or later, they woke up to the fact that they were being ruled by a thug who would never relinquish power, and who would creep into his senility crowned by Forbes magazine as one of the richest men in the world. Oh, that hero of the people, that secretive billionaire Fidel Castro! How could anyone fail to kiss his beard, and declare him the savior of mankind?
Geyer does not have the whole story here: she cannot (given the date of publication) quite cover all of the damage done to Cuba. But in the time of that evil "fascist" Batista, Cuba was an economic marvel: its workers were ranked #8 in the world in terms of wages received, among many other things. Nowadays, Cuba battles it out with Burma for the honors of "most godforsaken country."
And to think: it is still a "fashion item" to wear images of Che Guevara, whose main ability was shooting prisoners -- in prison. Thousands of them! Fidel's Grand Executioner, and we strut around wearing his image, for what reason?
The best biography of this [expletive deleted]. I really hope that Cuba will come back to the real world, and soon!
the truth THE BEST BOOK ON CASTRO.......2003-09-09
Here is the true story of Castro, written largely from a foreign policy standpoint. This is not a story of the everyday man in Cuba(although we do learn that he suffered much economically). This is not an economic history of Castro's Cuba(Although we learn how much the economy declined and sugar production as well). This is the story of Castro's foreign flings and the cult of personality around him. We learn of Castro's invasions of a dozen countries in Africa, from Angola to the Congo. We learn equally of Castro's associations with his Latin American compatriots and his attempts to invade and infiltrate most of his neighbors. Those that love Castro and believe he created a socialist paradise in Cuba will not be happy with this book. Equally those wanting to learn the gruesome details of the many suppressed by Castro will also not be happy. This is a fair portrait of this larger then life Guerilla and the wrath he has brought upon the world. This is not a negative book that condemns Castro, in fact I find myself admiring him more after reading it. What one does have to ask themselves if they are an admirer of Castro is if he is truly loved by his people why are their no free elections? Why are other political parties outlawed in Cuba? Why are only government sponsored newspapers allowed? If Castro's socialism was such a paradise then why not let his own people write what they think of it, and say what they think, why murder your political rivals? Or banish them? It is so obvious that communism and all it brings is slavery to its own people, Cuba is a great example and this book tells all about Castro. The author could have done away with the investigation of the Kennedy murder because she reveals nothing new but pollutes many pages with theories.
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Grammar and Style
Michael Dummett
Manufacturer: Duckworth Publishers
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ASIN: 0715624229 |
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A practical handbook encouraging writers to become more consciously aware of the way in which they employ words, drawing attention to points of grammar and offering hints on various styles of writing.
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In this short, lucid, rich book Michael Dummett sets out his views about some of the deepest questions in philosophy. The fundamental question of metaphysics is: what does reality consist of? To answer this, Dummett holds, it is necessary to say what kinds of fact obtain, and what constitutes their holding good. Facts correspond with true propositions, or true thoughts: when we know which propositions, or thoughts, in general, are true, we shall know what facts there are in general. Dummett considers the relation between metaphysics, our conception of the constitution of reality, and semantics, the theory that explains how statements are determined as true or as false in terms of their composition out of their constituent expressions. He investigates the two concepts on which the bridge that connects semantics to metaphysics rests, meaning and truth, and the role of justification in a theory of meaning. He then examines the special semantic and metaphysical issues that arise with relation to time and tense. On this basis Dummett puts forward his controversial view of reality as indeterminate: there may be no fact of the matter about whether an object does or does not have a given property. We have to relinquish our deep-held realist understanding of language, the illusion that we know what it is for any proposition that we can frame to be true independently of our having any means of recognizing its truth, and accept that truth depends on our capacity to apprehend it. Dummett concludes with a chapter about God.
Book Description
For half a century analytical philosophy has dominated professional philosophy in English-speaking countries. When contrasted with "Continental" philosophy, analytical philosophy is often called "Anglo-American." Michael Dummett argues that this is a misnomer: "Anglo-Austrian" would be a more accurate label, for analytical philosophy arose in the same milieu as the principal rival school of phenomenology. Furthermore, the two schools have the same roots. By reexamining the similar origins of the two traditions, we can come to understand why they later diverged so widely, and thus take the first step toward reconciliation.
Customer Reviews:
Quite possibly.......2000-11-05
the best book I've ver read
Book Description
Michael Dummett is one of the most important and influential of contemporary philosophers; this book covers his work in the closely related fields of metaphysics and the philosophy of language.
Book Description
Michael Dummett's three John Dewey Lectures -- "The Concept of Truth," "Statements About the Past," and "The Metaphysics of Time" -- were delivered at Columbia University in the spring of 2002. Revised and expanded, the lectures are presented here along with two new essays by Dummett, "Truth: Deniers and Defenders" and "The Indispensability of the Concept of Truth."
In Truth and the Past, Dummett clarifies his current positions on the metaphysical issue of realism and the philosophy of language. He is best known as a proponent of antirealism, which loosely characterizes truth as what we are capable of knowing. The events of the past and statements about them are critical tests of an antirealist position. These essays continue and significantly contribute to Dummett's work.
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Language, Thought, and Logic: Essays in Honour of Michael Dummett
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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ASIN: 0198239203 |
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A distinguished international group of philosophers contribute new essays on central issues in philosophy of language and logic, in honour of Michael Dummett, one of the most influential philosophers of the late twentieth century. The essays are focused on areas particularly associated with Professor Dummett. Five are contributions to the philosophy of language, addressing in particular the nature of truth and meaning and the relation between language and thought. Two contributors discuss time, in particular the reality of the past. The last four essays focus on Frege and the philosophy of mathematics. The volume represents some of the best work in contemporary analytical philosophy.
Book Description
No one seriously interested in the philosophy of language can afford to ignore the work of Michael Dummett (b. 1925). Dummett's approach to the metaphysical issue of realism through the philosophy of language, his challenge to realism, and his philosophy of language itself are central topics in contemporary analytic philosophy and have influenced the work of other major figures such as Quine, Putnam, and Davidson. This book offers, in an accessible and no-nonsense manner, a systematic presentation of the main elements of Dummett's pivotal contribution to contemporary philosophy. Its overarching theme is his discussion of realism: Bernhard Weiss explores the philosopher's characterization of realism, his attack on realism, and his invention and exploration of the anti-realist position.
The book begins by examining Dummett's views on language. Only against that setting can one fully appreciate his conception of the realism issue. With this in place, Weiss returns to Dummett's views on the nature of meaning and understanding to unfold his challenge to realism. Weiss devotes the remainder of the book to examining the anti-realist position. He discusses anti-realist theories of meaning and then investigates anti-realism's revisionary consequences. Finally, he engages with Dummett's discussion of two difficult challenges for the anti-realist: the past and mathematics.
Dummett is one of the most influential philosophers of modern times. This book is a sympathetic and accessible study, aiming not only to expose but to engage both with Dummett's philosophical thought and with his philosophical character.
Customer Reviews:
Poor Addition to Weak Series.......2007-05-10
Michael Dummett by Bernhard Weiss is an instalment in the Philosophy Now Series Published by Princeton University Press. The following comments are offered for potential readers/purchasers.
This is the third instalment in the Philosophy Now Series that I have read. I have previously looked at the contributions discussing Searle and Rorty (they were on sale at my local bookstore for $3, and being an avid student of philosophy I couldn't resist). Despite their low cost, however, I have been disappointed with the series. Though the scholarship seems generally sound, the series seems to miss the mark. Where is the audience? On the one hand, they are too jargon laden and specific to be accessible to the lay reader, while on the other hand, they are too superficial to appeal to a more expert audience.
It strikes me that there are two key reasons for the failure of this series, the philosophers under consideration and the quality of writing. With regard to the former, thought they are capable individuals, Dummett and Searle (Rorty to a lesser degree) are secondary thinkers who comment and expanding upon existing arguments - I respect their effort, however, this narrowness does make their less appealing to a non-philosophical audience. This is the lesser of my two criticisms.
The more significant criticism is the quality of writing. The contributions in the Philosophy Now series I have read range from mediocre to poor, with Weiss' book being the weakest. Even with a background in analytic philosophy I find Weiss aggravating and difficult to follow. He requires too much decoding for a secondary source - I had to reread many sections and was often left thinking that the point in question could have been stated more clearly. In these types of introductory works the author should strive to make the subject matter more accessible not more confusing. Weiss often takes relatively straight-forward ideas and makes them nearly incomprehensible - his discussion of Frege's views of sense and reference is an example. In general Weiss' language come off as overly contrived and self satisfied, concerned with more with appearing learned than being helpful to the reader.
Overall, I applaud the idea of introducing contemporary philosophers to a wider audience. My criticism with this text, and the series in general, is that it doesn't seem to work. In my opinion, accessing the thinkers directly, or simply googling them on-line, is preferable to this series - especially this particular contribution.
Needlessly dry and pedantic style mars this introductory text.......2007-04-11
I just picked this up as a remainder at Strand in NYC for $10, so I suppose I have little right to complain. Nevertheless, I have to admit at being disappointed with the book. The author's manner is unnecessarily terse, perhaps better suited to an academic journal than to a general introduction. In this respect, Karen Green's volume on Dummett is far superior. Not only is her style more discursive, but she always seems eager to elaborate on the background to Dummett's preoccupations, as well as to link his thought to that of other philosophers. (At one point she even veers into an explication of Berkeley's particular brand of idealism.) Even more importantly, Green is much more disposed to periodically remind her readers of the larger philosophical issues at stake. (I grant that such a bent is absent not only from Weiss' book, but too often from this entire subdivision of the discipline, which has a tendency to get mired in, or obsessed with, technical minutiae -- something I learned early on in an undergraduate course under Davidson.) There are some issues that Weiss touches on which are absent from Green's account, such as his early discussion of Dummett's conventionalism vs. Davidson's interpretivism. In addition, one does get the sense that he is trying to present a systematic and synoptic account of Dummett's philosophy, and that this perhaps accounts in part for his ungenerous style. Green, much more sensitive to the shifts and contradictions in Dummett's thought, is correspondingly more expansive, although without any loss of rigor or clarity. In fact, just as reading her exposition reminded me that Anglo-American (i.e. analytical) philosophy could be enjoyable in its own distinctive way, Weiss made me recall why it can just as easily become exasperating and eventually tiresome.
INSIDER WRITING FOR INSIDERS.......2004-05-03
The publisher has described this book on the back cover as follows. "This book offers, in an accessible and no-nonsense manner, a systematic presentation of the main elements of Dummett's pivotal contribution to contemporary philosophy. Its overarching theme is his discussion of realism: Bernhard Weiss explores the philosopher's characterization of realism, his attack on realism, and his invention and exploration of the anti-realist position." After reading the book, I cannot agree that its presentation is accessible - I found it very difficult reading and in this review I will describe its peculiar manner of inaccessibility. Moreover, I cannot agree it has a "no-nonsense" style - I found the writing contrived, self-conscious and obscure. I found that the book's design made study and reflection unnecessarily arduous and tedious. For example, the notes do not come at the foot of the page, nor even at the end of the chapter; they are all collected on the last eleven pages of the book. Even worse, many of the notes should not have been notes at all: some are citations that would have been more conveniently incorporated into the text using the author's own abbreviating scheme given on page ix, some are just short parenthetical remarks, and some are gratuitous side comments.
Before describing the book's character, I need to reveal its content. What follows is again from the back cover. "The book begins by examining Dummett's views on language. Only against that setting can one fully appreciate his conception of the realism issue. With this in place, Weiss returns to Dummett's views on the nature of meaning and understanding to unfold his challenge to realism. Weiss devotes the remainder of the book to examining the anti-realist position. He discusses anti-realist theories of meaning and then investigates anti-realism's revisionary consequences. Finally, he engages with Dummett's discussion of two difficult challenges for the anti-realist: the past and mathematics."
One aspect of the book's inaccessibility is its insularity - the fact that it is written by an insider for insiders and that it shows no awareness that the outside even exists much less might want some background or clarification of the insider dogmas. An especially flagrant example comes early: on page 2 we learn that Dummett believes that "the (sic) goal of philosophy is the analysis of the (sic) structure of thought". Weiss shows no awareness that many if not most philosophers would find this belief to be extreme, astoundingly exclusionary, perhaps insulting. But there is no shortage of less obvious examples. On page 1 we learn that Dummett's main teachers at Oxford were Urmson and Anscombe, "the latter exerting the greater influence". Presumably, the reader knows who these people are and what Anscombe's influence was: we are not told another thing about either, except in the index where Anscombe's initials are given. On page two we learn the shocking "fact that Frege, a philosopher whom he [Dummett] profoundly admires, held some extremely racist views". The only evidence we are given is a quote by Dummett that says nothing about racism, but only that Dummett was shocked when he read Frege's diary. We never learn just what Frege said. We are not given an opportunity to decide for ourselves whether Frege expressed a view that we would regard as racist, and if so whether borderline racist, marginally racist, firmly racist, or extremely racist. Ironically, even though Dummett does not quote the Frege passage, he complains that the Frege's editors "chose to suppress" the diary passage in question. Could it have occurred to Dummett that he too was suppressing the Frege passage? Could it have occurred to Weiss that Dummett had made an omission that he, Weiss, had the power to correct for the benefit of outsiders?
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- Dummett's Devices
- A landmark in analytical philosophy.
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The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (William James Lectures)
Michael Dummett
Manufacturer: Harvard University Press
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ASIN: 0674537858 |
Customer Reviews:
Dummett's Devices.......2007-04-03
Michael Dummett's *The Logical Basis of Metaphysics* is a summing-up of his influential and controversial views on the philosophy of language. Based on the 1976 William James lectures at Harvard (a series which also included John Austin's *How to Do Things with Words*) but substantially revised at the end of the 1980s, this book offers a more technical and more comprehensive presentation of Dummett's views on the dispute between realism and anti-realism. Dummett's basic suggestion, that the dispute between these two parties hinges on the acceptance or denial of the principle of bivalence (that a statement is either determinately true or false) for an area of our discourse, is well-known: but he covers much more than this in examining what form a theory of meaning for a language expressing one or the other position might take.
At the time of the lectures, and even at the time of the book's publication, Donald Davidson's adaptation of Tarski's truth-definition for the purposes of natural language semantics was one of the most popular programs in the philosophy of language; a great deal of Dummett's discussion is oriented towards demonstrating the unacceptable limitations of such an approach. The problems with the famous "Convention T", and the relation between the logic obeyed in the object language and that obeyed in the meta-language, receive extensive treatment. And although Tarskian model theory was intended (and is generally accepted) as a semantics for quantificational logic of the type invented by Frege, Dummett's critique could be characterized as "Frege against Tarski": the principles of semantic analysis devised by Frege (laid out in Dummett's *Frege: Philosophy of Language*) are generalized to principles a coherently conceived "meaning-theory" for *any* kind of logic must implement. As such, they offer a vantage point for criticizing "modest" semantics, which takes a classical, Tarskian "homophonic" semantic theory's lack of structure as itself a reason to doubt the necessity or possibility of any more systematic theory.
Following the general discussion of semantics for classical and non-classical logics, chapters eight through twelve have a separate thematic unity (perhaps deriving from the original lectures): their theme is the justification of logical laws by examining their obeying certain proof-theoretical strictures. The logical method Dummett bases his discussion on is "normalization", discovered by Dag Prawitz in the 1960s. Normalization is an analogue of cut-elimination in sequent calculi (which demonstrates the theoretical superfluity of a "roundabout" approach to the proof of a theorem) for natural deduction: and the way it is worked, systematically converting steps in a deduction into a canonical form, is explicitly cited by Dummett as evidence of the value in proof-theoretical demonstrations of the meaning of logical constants.
But Dummett's discussion contains both more and less than the results of the literature on normalization: more, because he introduces additional concepts intended to show the superiority of intuitionistic logic as "self-justifying", and less, as he ignores many properties of normalization which have interested proof theorists as not germane to his purposes. At any rate, a passing familiarity with the concept -- which can now be acquired on the cheap, thanks to Dover's reprinting of Prawitz's Natural Deduction: A Proof-Theoretical Study -- is necessary for understanding what Dummett is up to in this section. Following this, the last two chapters of the book contain some more general critique of realism and truth-conditional theories of meaning, including arguments defending the tenability of anti-realism for the theist.
This book was surely intended as a summation of Dummett's work; but although that work has had a great deal of influence upon analytic philosophy, it would be slightly misguided to think that this book has a great bearing upon issues in contemporary philosophy. To a certain extent, it represents paths not taken by semantics, metaphysics, and philosophy of logic as they have developed in recent decades: but this in itself, coupled with the book's amazing technical sophistication, might be reason enough to read and ponder what is and what might not be the right way to avoid going at philosophy "bald-headed".
A landmark in analytical philosophy........2002-12-13
Hilary Putnam describes this as "one of the true high-water marks of twentieth century philosophy", John McDowell said "this is an extraordinarily important book", and, when I was a graduate student, a philosopher described it to a class of graduate students as being perhaps the most profound work on truth-conditional theory of meaning in the twentieth century; since Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus also deals with truth-conditional theories of meaning (so I would argue, at least), that is quite a claim.
If these names - Wittgenstein, McDowell and Putnam - mean anything to you, Dummett's name should be just as familiar, and this book should need no further recommendation. If you have not heard of these people, you are probably not acquainted with analytical philosophy, one of the most influential forms of philosophy in the twentieth century. Analytical philosophers tend to approach philosophical problems by means of philosophy of language: typically, they ask about meaning. In this book, Dummett attempts to explain what a theory of meaning is, why a theory of meaning has metaphysical implications, and how theories of meaning can be evaluated. His claim is that metaphysical problems are, fundamentally, problems about what logic to adopt, and that a theory of meaning can be used to justify a logic. This work raises issues that are deep, but also highly technical, and certainly not for a novice. Don't even try to read this book unless you've spent some time studying analytical philosophy, and have decided that it interests you. But if you are seriously interested in analytical philosophy, this is a book that you really should try to read.
If you want to begin reading Dummett, this is not the best place. Its the definitive statement of his position, aimed primarily at other experts in the field. His ideas can be found in a less comprehensive but slightly more digestible form in two anthologies of his, Truth and Other Enigmas and The Seas of Language. The latter is probably slightly easier for beginners.
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