People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority Review

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People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority ReviewMoshe Halbertal, professor of Jewish thought and philosophy at Hebrew University, relates the following tale about heaven and hell in his Introduction to "People of the Book: Canon, Meaning and Authority": "Don't think that hell is where people are consumed by fire for their sins or that heaven is where they are rewarded with pleasures for their piety. What really happens is that God gathers everybody in one large hall. Then He gives them the Talmud and commands them to start studying. For the wicked, studying Talmud is hell. For the pious, it's heaven."
Halbertal's tale amusingly illustrates the importance that sacred texts play in Judaism and provides a fitting entrée into this short, but fascinating, exploration of the development and importance of the Bible, the Mishnah and the Talmud as canonical works of the Jewish community.
Halbertal begins with a short introduction adumbrating the meaning of a "canonical" text and its various guises. The adjective, of course, refers to a text's special status in a community. The special status of a canon can be "normative" (it is obeyed and followed as the law of a community), "formative" (it is a curriculum that is taught, read, transmitted, and interpreted) or "exemplary" (it is a paradigm for aesthetic value and achievement). For example, the Talmud is both a normative and a formative canon of the traditional Jewish community; normative in the sense that it establishes appropriate behavior in many aspects of life, formative in the sense that it is a fundamental text that is the object of endless interpretation and debate and, in some cases, the intellectual sine qua non of membership in the community.
From this brief introduction, "People of the Book" then explores, in successive chapters (which mirror the chronological development of each successive text), the canonization of the Bible, the Mishnah, and the Talmud and what the ascendancy of each of these texts meant for the formation of authority and meaning in the Jewish community. He also explores the challenges that philosophy and Kabbalah posed to the Talmudic canon in the Middle Ages and closes with a short appendix discussing how Hobbes and Spinoza appropriated and interpreted the canonical text of the Hebrew Bible in their political philosophy.
In less than one hundred fifty pages (excluding the extensive footnotes), Moshe Halbertal has written a challenging and thoughtful exploration of the development of the canonical works of Judaism and how those canonical works shaped authority and meaning in the community and between the community and the non-Jewish world. "People of the Book" is a concise, but intellectually rich, exegesis of the key texts of Judaism and how those texts shaped Jewish thought through the ages.People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority Overview

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Errand into the Wilderness Review

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Errand into the Wilderness ReviewWhen I was pursuing my Ph.D. in American history more than twenty years ago Perry Miller's studies of Puritan New England represented required reading on this religious group and its settling in North America. Having just reread this volume, originally published in 1956, Miller's work still offers insight into the Puritan mindset. He argues in this book that the Puritans came to America not so much in search of a better livelihood so much as in search of a better world. The quest for a perfect society motivated them beyond all else. I recommend "Errand into the Wilderness" both as an important statement of the intellectual history of the Puritans and an enthralling reading experience by one of the masters of American colonial history.
"Errand into the Wilderness" is a collection of ten essays, mostly previously published, on various aspects of colonial intellectual history. All but one of them deals with Puritan thought, but the one on the Virginia colony also emphasizes the religious/intellectual nature of the "errand" to create a more perfect society in North America. The Puritans explicitly accepted the mission of an "errand into the wilderness" to establish God's kingdom, serving as a beacon to England of what it should become as well. Essays with titles like, "The Marrow of Puritan Divinity," "The Puritan State and Puritan Society," "The Rhetoric of Sensation," and "The End of the World" trace an overriding concern for the salvation of humanity through increasing "perfection" in this life. The utopian element of Puritan thought comes through clearly in these essays, and they present a compelling element of the American experience. Making the world a better place has long been the "stuff" of the American character.
Miller asks several fascinating questions at the conclusion of this volume. "Can an errand, even an errand into the wilderness, be run indefinitely?...Can a culture, which changes to embody itself in a nation, push itself into such remorseless exertion without ever learning whether it has been sent on its business at some incomprehensible behest, or is obligated to discover a meaning for its dynamism in the very act of running....What will America do--what can American do--with an implacable prophecy that there is a point in time beyond which the very concept of a future becomes meaningless? Protestant America, as well as Catholic, has an implicit commitment to this event. What then happens to the errand?" (p. 217) The Puritan sense of the errand into the wilderness is pervasive in American society to the present. Miller's analysis resonates still.Errand into the Wilderness Overview

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Beyond Basketball: Coach K's Keywords for Success Review

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Beyond Basketball: Coach K's Keywords for Success ReviewAll Duke fans and alumni should be proud to have such a sterling person to represent their school and team. I have seldom read such a humble book from such a successful person . . . not to mention the value of the timeless wisdom in the book.
Coach Krzyzewski is joined in this easy-to-read and hard-to-apply book by his daughter, Jamie Spatola, who is an example in several of the book's segments.
This book has an unusual concept. Be sure you understand and like that concept before you buy and read the book. Coach Krzyzewski likes to focus his team's attention. Rather than leading into a game with a long speech, he will put one word up and ask the team to keep that word in mind. It will be a word that reflects something needed to keep the team's focus and performance in balance. This book is organized much the same way. There are thirty-nine essays that explore one or two words in 2-3 pages . . . followed by a conclusion that looks at the essence of great team play. Each of the thirty-nine essays begins with explaining what the word means and why it is important, and then goes on to provide an example from Coach Krzyzewski's life. The examples are particularly charming because Coach Krzyzewski seeks to make others look great . . . while he plays the straight man.
As I read this book, I was reminded of a comment Larry Bird made about one of the Celtics coaches who liked to direct everything the team did. Bird noted that it's hard to start a fast break if the whole team is watching the coach to find out what half-court play the coach wants to call.
Coach Krzyzewski obviously tries to stay out of the way of his players' genius and tendencies. I loved the sections where he learned better methods of playing from many of his great players.
What are the thirty-nine words and word combinations? Here they are (in alphabetical order): Adaptability, Adversity, Balance, Belief, Care, Challenges, Collective Responsibility, Commitment, Communication, Courage, Crisis Management, Culture, Dependability, Empathy, Enthusiasm, Excellence, Failure, Family, Friendship, Fundamentals, Giving Back, Guidance, Imagination, Integrity, Learning, Love, Motivation, Next Play, Ownership, Passion, Poise, Pressure, Pride, Respect, Selflessness, Standards, Trust, Will, and Work. The conclusion focuses on The Fist (the team's focus on five core concepts of cooperation: communication, trust, collective responsibility, care, and pride).
The best way to gain from this book is to start by reading the words that you don't think are important . . . then move on to the words you think are important. You'll deepen your understanding in both cases. Then re-read this book at least once a year to reinforce these positive lessons.
My favorite examples in the book didn't have anything to do with basketball (although the ball is always in the background). But there are also wonderful examples of behind-the-scenes moments when Coach Krzyzewski took action to deal with a challenge and create a better effort . . . or a success.
However, the whole gleams with a special shine . . . like a highly polished diamond with 40 perfect facets.
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Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation Review

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Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation ReviewReaders, check your reaction to the following sentence:
Lynne Truss, an English grammarian is bloody fed up with sloppy punctuation.
Does that sentence leave you feeling confused, irritated, or angry? Do you feel you have to second-guess the author of the sentence, forced to ascertain whether s/he was writing to Lynne Truss or about Ms. Truss?
But that sort of thing is almost the norm these days, on both sides of the Atlantic. Of course, we Americans have been struggling for years with FRESH DONUT'S DAILY and Your Server: "MILLY" -- not to mention the archy-and-mehitabel school of e-mail that neither capitalizes nor punctuates and reading through this kind of sentence really gets confusing i think it does at least do you too?
Turns out that even the British--including the elite "Oxbridge" inteligentsia--are wildly ignorant of punctuation's rules and standards. Lynne Truss, an English grammarian and author of EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES, is bloody fed up with it! So she wrote this handy little book that is ever-so-correct but not condescending, sometimes savage but not silly, full of mission and totally without mush.
Think of Truss as punctuation's own Miss Manners, a combination of leather and lace, with maybe a bit more emphasis on the leather. (She advocates forming possees to paint out incorrect apostrophes in movie placards.) But her examples of bad punctuation serve a purpose: bad punctuation distorts meaning. EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES includes numerous hilarious backfires of punctuation -- statements and missives that use the exact same words but convey totally opposite messages due to inappropriate punctuation.
Do commas go where they go for breathing, as the do-it-naturally school of non-grammar so many of us were exposed to would have it? Or were they for Medieval chanting or, more analytically, for grammar? Truss explains that it's a mish-mosh of all three, and proceeds to make useful sense of it all. Along the way she confesses she would have gladly borne the children of the 15th-Century Italian typographer who invented Italics and the forward-slash.
With its blend of high dudgeon and helpfulness, Truss steers the reader through the shoals of possession and apostrophes, quotations (British use is a bit differerent from North American, but only a bit, and she notes the difference), the useful if forlorn semicolon, the mighty colon, the bold and (mea culpa) overused dash and other interrupters like parenthesees and commas.
It's important to note that Truss, while something of a true believer, is a believer who lives in the 21st Century. She does not advocate turning back the clock to the 1906 version of Fowler's MODERN ENGLISH USAGE; she is not a snob; she does not overwhelm us with technical terms of grammar and punctuation for their own sake. Just good, common-sense English prescriptive lessons in grammar. People who know they don't know their stuff will learn the right stuff there. People who felt that "the rules" have somehow become archaic in the last thirty years will be happy to see that there are still rules, and while they have become more fluid and pragmatic, they haven't changed inordinately. "It's" still means "It is" and "Its" is still a possessive: "It's a wise publisher that knows its public," say.
Best of all, the teaching is conveyed with wit, bite, and in a snappy tome easy to carry and inexpensive. I'm a former English teacher and I couldn't help but learn and laugh. Highly recommended.
Oh, John Updike? He uses comma faults all that time, that's a sentence like this that splices main clauses together with a comma, maybe using semicolons or starting a new sentence would be better. For us mere mortals, though, standard punctuation fits the norm: once we become world-famous, then we can punctuate at will.Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation Overview

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4000 decent very funny jokes Review

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4000 decent very funny jokes ReviewIn short, this book has too many repeated jokes (often with barely different wording) and seems to have been edited by a non-native English speaker, resulting in some stilted language and confusing punchlines.
The book is divided into sections but the table of contents is not active. The first section is adult jokes, and has quite a few raunchy ones (don't let "decent" in the title fool you into gifting this to your grandma!).
It's hard to go wrong with a 0.99 joke book, though, so if you're willing to put up with some annoying issues you will find quite a few good jokes in here.4000 decent very funny jokes Overview4000 contemporary decent jokes. All jokes have been carefully hand selected for being really funny. Take a great laugh and be happy!Jokes are in the following categories: adult jokesanimal jokesblonde jokescomputer jokeslawyer jokesdoctor jokesfamily jokeshumourous definitionshusband and wife jokeskids jokesknock know jokesmen jokesoffice jokes

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