Customer Reviews:
my review.......2001-03-14
The book Last Wild Places is an inspiration to the mind. When my grandma sent me the book I started to look through it. The wonderful pictures are even more wonderful the caption of animals in their habitat made me want to read on. The untouched and undisturbed wildlife tell about the wild that the way it's supposed to be. The moving through the different wild places like the frozen polar region to the hot savanna of Africa to Australia and to the tropical forest of Africa takes you all most everywhere, where nature still rules. This book made me think about how wonderful nature can be and can be for you. I thought this book was marvelous and creative. I recommend it to everyone who likes nature and animals.
my review.......2001-03-14
The book Last Wild Places is an inspiration to the mind. When my grandma sent me the book I started to look through it. The wonderful pictures are even more wonderful the caption of animals in their habitat made me want to read on. The untouched and undisturbed wildlife tell about the wild that the way it's supposed to be. The moving through the different wild places like the frozen polar region to the hot savanna of Africa to Australia and to the tropical forest of Africa takes you all most everywhere, where nature still rules. This book made me think about how wonderful nature can be and can be for you. I thought this book was marvelous and creative. I recommend it to everyone who likes nature and animals.
An emotional experience..........2000-06-25
It began by my casually flipping through the book at a friend's party, but soon I was hooked. I spent over an hour reading the fascinating articles and admiring the incredible National Geographic photos. If you doubted the existence of pure, untouched and untainted nature, then this book will renew your faith in the beauty of the natural world. For me, reading this book not only made my day, it also renewed my desire to travel and to see all of the stunningly beautiful parts of the world.
Book Description
This collection of essays about the Yaak Valley in northwestern Montana brings to life the wilderness and isolation, exhilaration and trepidation that visitors (and residents) encounter here. The half-million-acre Yaak Valley is home to only 150 people but untold numbers of elk, deer, grizzly bears, cougars, and other critters, big and small. An astonishing 175,000 acres remain roadless in this remote territory near the Canadian border. Read about a mother who spends Thanksgiving weekend in the Yaak with her children. ....the Yaak is where my children and I together have fallen headlong into the glory of the unfamiliar, into the last of the planet's wilderness, the unpredictability of the natural landscape, the authentic hush possible only away from the clamor." (from "Traveling Close to Home" by Debra Gwartney). You will learn about a teacher who is torn between the world beyond the Yaak and the life he has come to know: mountains, thick forests, snow, and bears. And you will learn why we as a people must protect wilderness like this for future generations.
Contributors include:
Todd Tanner
Bill McKibben
Gregory McNamee
Jeff Ferderer
Amy Edmonds
Scott Daily
John Lane-Zucker
Sue Halpern
Tim Linehan
Debra Gwartney
Bob Shacochis
Doug Peacock
Annick Smith
William Kittredge
Jim Fergus
Customer Reviews:
Forever Yaak?.......2003-01-20
One of my experiences as a biologist for the U.S. Forest Service was a brief stint in Libby, Montana where I was a weekend visitor to the remote Yaak Valley championed by resident conservationist Rick Bass. My first pass through the valley was a shock. The sea of clearcuts from past timber sales were clearly alarming, and I vowed to return for further investigation. In 1994 I studied fish populations in the Libby area now, and then, a superfund site at the plywood mill where we installed a fish weir in an attempt locate the last remaining Bull trout, now an endangered species in the Pacific Northwest. The previous year there were two. In 1994 none returned to the Libby trap. Similar conditions exist on the Yaak River, a major tributary to the Kootenai. Though superficially "wild" in outward apearance this is devastated landscape due to economic activity that has ruined the landscape and the citizenry from asbestosis at the other superfund site, a vermiculite mine once operated by W.R. Grace Corporation of "A Civil Action" fame. They are gone now, but so is everything else the area once offered. "We don't mind looking at the clearcuts," my boss a dour wildlife biologist told me. It is a legacy that Mr. Bass will be hard pressed to reverse with the current forest management leadership. But we must try. I stand with him in that battle. The chapter in my book "Against a Strong Current," is called "Three Bull Trout."
Redefining Wilderness.......2002-09-27
A valuable collection of diverse voices bearing witness to the last of the last: a small but ecologically rich valley in the far northwest corner of Montana. Those familiar with the prolific writings (and rantings) of Yaak resident Rick Bass know that he can come off as a monomaniac, but this anthology proves his passion is grounded and infectious. Great contributions from prominent writers, poets, conservationists, biologists, politicians, and local residents provide a mosaic of visions on the endangered magic that is the Yaak. The primary lesson: the Yaak is a biological, not a recreational wilderness. It is a place that must be saved, not for your next summer vacation, but for the itinerent wolves, the few remaining stands of ancient larch, the inland redband trout, the resident horse loggers, 15 modest-sized 'gardens' of unroaded national forest, and a tiny (perhaps single digit)population of super-survivor grizzly bears.
Once gone, they are gone forever.
Book Description
Conservation International's Hotspots placed that organization at the forefront of global conservation efforts. Wilderness: Earth's Last Wild Places continues the efforts made in that previous volume, combining nearly 500 breathtaking images of untamed lands and rare glimpses of the people who inhabit them with the most current scientific analyses of their endangered ecosystems.
To qualify as "wilderness," the areas included must have 70 percent or more of their original vegetation, cover at least 10,000 square kilometers, and have fewer than five people per square kilometer. Wilderness identifies 37 wilderness areas around the globe—including tropical rain forests, wetlands, deserts, and arctic tundra, from Amazonia to the Congo Forests of Central Africa to the complex of North American deserts—and presents the research of nearly 200 specialists carried out over two years by Conservation International's Center for Applied Biodiversity Science with support from its Global Conservation Fund. The result is a detailed document of the biological riches that can be found in each of the wilderness areas, with chapters that describe and illustrate them, highlight the human cultures unique to each area, and explain the threats to each region and the conservation measures in place.
The result of a collaboration among CEMEX, Conservation International, and Agrupación Sierra Madre, Wilderness will enjoy the same reputation as the earlier Conservation International books—a volume that presents vital information on the earth's biodiversity and a realistic program of conservation complemented by state-of-the-art photography.
Customer Reviews:
The real richness of our planet.......2006-11-06
An excellent book that I whish everybody in the world would be able to see and realize that the real richness we have in our lives is nature. Help protect the last wild places
One of a kind..........2004-01-04
The three massive books of this series ("Megadiversity", "Hotspots", and the latest, "Wilderness.") should be considered a "must have" for every person who is concerned about the future of life on Earth. The photographs of the natural world are many and without parallel - in huge format and by the world's greatest nature photographers (Gil, Lanting, Rowell, Wolfe, etc.). The accompanying text is by no means "lite" reading - indepth description of the threats currently facing earth's last remaining wild ecosystems and how Conservation Internation is addressing those threats.
"Wilderness" also pays special attention to the human cultures that are on the brink of extinction side-by-side with the lemurs, tigers, and tamarins.
It should be noted that these are, physically, some of the largest books I have ever seen. They weigh over 20 lbs and measure 12" by 14" - not something that is easily read in bed - but still handsome and absolutely stuffed with content.
I will treasure this book (and its two sister volumes) for the rest of my life and look forward to sharing them with my children. If anything, they are a super-detailed, highly poignant accounts of the state of Earth's biosphere in 1998-2003, and what mankind was doing to both destroy and save those systems.
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- The Basque Diaspora
- A Soulful read
- A Compelling Description of the Sespe Wilderness
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The Sespe Wild: Southern California's Last Free River (Environmental Arts and Humanities Series)
Bradley John Monsma
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Sand County Almanac (Outdoor Essays & Reflections)
ASIN: 0874175364 |
Book Description
A hundred miles northwest of Los Angeles, Sespe Creek flows through some of the wildest territory in California. A mostly roadless expanse of chaparral and mixed forest, in many places nearly inaccessible even on foot, the Sespe is the untamed heart of Southern California, a wilderness on the edge of one of the world's major metropolitan developments. To nature writer and outdoorsman John Bradley Monsma, the Sespe is both his place of escape and the place "that teaches me to be fully alive."
In The Sespe Wild, Monsma shares his exploration of this unique and fantastic region. His attention ranges from the physical Sespe, examined on foot or by kayak, to the subsurface geology that shaped it, the Chumash people who first occupied it, and the impact of Spanish and then American settlers. He also considers the Sespe through the eyes of some of its nonhuman populationsthe nearly extinct condors, the vanished grizzlies, the mountain sheep, the steelhead trout, the red-legged frogs. Through the metaphor of the river, he ponders the tensions between preservation and overmanagement of wildlife and wilderness areas, the ecology of fire, the intricate connections between species, and the almost miraculous ways that the Sespe has escaped the fate of other Southern California streams, dammed or carved up into canals by development.
"To consider this place," Monsma says, "is to call up issues crucial wherever wilderness and cities meet: recreational impacts on wildlife habitat, the dynamics of accessibility and protection, the physical and psychological need for healthy ecosystems, threats of development and resource extraction." Monsma's engaging text addresses the Sespe's losses and its ongoing pattern of creation and renewal, leading us through rich layers of natural and cultural history in a narrative as colorful and exciting as a day on a Sespe trail. The Sespe, existing at the intersection of ecological processes and human ideals of wilderness, reminds us that nature and culture have always intermingled, and that the past and present, animal and human, "natural" and "unnatural" are ultimately and irrevocably inseparable.
Customer Reviews:
The Basque Diaspora.......2005-08-25
Gloria Totoricagüena's Identity, Culture, and Politics in the Basque Diaspora is a great introduction to the understanding of Basque diaspora from a multi-disciplinary approach -a somehow overlooked area of Basque studies by the international academia and surprisingly by the homeland scholars-. It analyzes the formation of the diaspora as an historical phenomenon for the over five hundred years, reveals the multi-directional interconnectedness and networks (from a familiar to an institutional level) among diaspora Basque communities and between those and the homeland, and describes the changing nature of the meaning of being Basque from transnational and deterritorialized perspectives. The book focuses, from a historical perspective, on the physical, emotional and psychological interconnectedness among diaspora Basques and the Basque region, while emphasizing the current Basque Government-diaspora institutional relations, promoted increasingly since the return of democracy to Spain and the early 1980s-. It also pays special attention to the influence of the Basque homeland nationalist ideology on the reformulation of Basque identity on the diaspora communities, specifically in the period of the Basque-Government-in-exile between the 1940s and the late-1970s. In sum, Identity, Culture, and Politics in the Basque Diaspora is a comprehensive ground-breaking work which lays the foundation for more theoretical and empirical comparative research in Basque studies in the international terrain as well as in the Basque Country and which will attract not only an expert reader, but also a wide audience eager to learn aspects of Basque history, culture, and politics that until now have been to some extent ignored.
A Soulful read.......2004-09-09
"The Sespe Wild" is an anthology of reflections on life and life issues in the Sespe river. Each chapter focuses on an animal that lives or used to live around the Sespe. There are also chapters talking about attempted dams, oil drilling, and rock art left by the Chumash Indians. The book can be read in installments, or, if you have the time, in one sitting.
Monsma is a gifted storyteller, and traces the individual histories of each aspect in a way that makes you want to root for the cause of conservation. At the the same time, he presents both sides of each issue fairly, and never comes down clearly either way. This can be a challenge for the reader, particularly if you're looking for a more black and white discussion of environmental issues. Personally, I loved that aspect, as it left me asking questions of myself. Perhaps that is the biggest lesson in this book: You ask important questions, and as you go through life, part of the answer is revealed, but only enough to prompt more questions.
On a side note, readers with a Christian background may chuckle at some of verbal puns that hint at time spent in Sunday School, but for the rest, it's a soulful account of how a place so small and almost insignificant can be filled with life that continues to thrive in the midst of contant challenge. Monsma is obviously passionate about nature, and here he shares it with us.
A Compelling Description of the Sespe Wilderness.......2004-09-05
Drawing on his personal experiences of backpaking in the Sespe Wilderness over many years, Monsma revels in the beauty of the landscape, and its bird and animal life. His descriptions of early mornings in the wilderness are compelling; they make me want to reach for my backpack and hiking boots and head out to the backcountry.
Drawing on extensive scholarship, he tells the chequered history of the Sespe and the story of its preservation only 50 miles from the Los Angeles metropolis. Describing the threats from oil drilling, dam building and suburban development, he not only points out the short-sightedness of current energy and development policies, but also shows the remarkable ability of the wilderness to regenerate itself and obliterate the traces of earlier intruders.
He uses rhetorical figures such as the native american shamans, tricksters and bear-men to introduce different ways of seeing nature and connecting it to everyday urban life. The traces of zen buddhism and Carlos Castaneda appear hokey at the beginning, but become an integral part of the book's structure.
By the end this is the kind of book that makes you not only want to visit the wilderness, but also makes you see under the surface of urban life. Every freeway drainage ditch, patch of scrub, and visiting hummingbird comes alive with layers of meaning.
Average customer rating:
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The Atlas of Wild Places: In Search of the Earth's Last Wildernesses
Roger Few
Manufacturer: Checkmark Books
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ASIN: 0816031681 |
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The Last Place on Earth
Harold T. P. Hayes
Manufacturer: Not Avail
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ASIN: 081286087X |
Customer Reviews:
An Excellent Book.......2005-08-18
Harold T.P. Hayes, who died in 1989, was a long-time editor at Esquire magazine. In 1969 he went on African Safari with renowned zoologist Bernhard Grzimek through Kenya, Uganda, and the Serengeti Plain in Tanzania. This is a beautifully written account of their journey and the plight of the animals and people they encountered along the way. In his review, Gay Talese
said "Harold Hayes has written a rare and important book about the politics of nature." And Cleveland Armory stated: "One of the most enjoyable of all the studies of our misused wildlife." I highly recommend this book as a valued addition to anyone's
library.
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A Last Wild Place
Mike Tomkies
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ASIN: 0224043552 |
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Life at Wildernesse.......2002-12-08
Hi!
The outdoors are especially important to our family ... we have lived in many parts of Canada, including the Northwest Territories ... where we built a cabin on a lake.
This book concentrates mainly on a series of adventures with the fox population, their habits ... denning, avoiding/contacting humans, food - including caching, Hunts, rearing ... as well as the other story charcters like Moobli and Liane.
I best liked the story from the human/aninal interface, life in the wilderness ... also ... experiencing controversies like the long established customs like the Hunt ... though recent news shows that it is possibly approaching it's end as a 'sport'.
The Canadian mention was interesting ... though I'm not sure in what part of our country Mike lived.
The pictures in the book added good value to the story.
The only slightly negative thing that struck me was the constant reference to dead 'food' ... though I guess that is probably a true reflection on nature.
If such a location still exists after these 17 years ... I'd like to consider it as a 'visit location' ... if I ever ventured to Scotland.
Paul Jarvis
Lloydminster, AB
Canada
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A LAST WILD PLACE.
Mike. Tomkies
Manufacturer: Jonathan Cape
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ASIN: 0224022199 |
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Maui; the last Hawaiian place (The Earth's wild places, 1)
Robert Wenkam
Manufacturer: Friends of the Earth; distributed by McCall Pub. Co., New York
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Polymer Networks:Structure and Mechanical Properties
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Introductory Operations Research: Theory and Applications
Harvir S. Kasana , and
Krishna D. Kumar
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Stochastic Calculus for Finance I: The Binomial Asset Pricing Model (Springer Finance)
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Applied Partial Differential Equations:: A Visual Approach
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Stochastic Calculus for Finance II: Continuous-Time Models (Springer Finance)
ASIN: 3540401385 |
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This introductory text provides undergraduate and graduate students with a concise and practical introduction to the primary concepts and techniques of optimization. Practicing engineers and managers will also find useful its concentration on problems and examples relevant to them. With a strong emphasis on basic concepts and techniques throughout, the book explains the theory behind each technique as simply as possible, along with illustrations and worked examples. It gives a balanced treatment of both the linear and nonlinear programming, plus search techniques, geometric programming, and game theory. Some typical problems varying in difficulty level are solved so readers can appreciate intricacies of the underlying concepts useful for practical problem solving. Suitable for individual or group learning, the book also includes numerous end-of-chapter problems for study and review.
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- The Conflict between Pastoralism and Industrialization
- Men Become Tools of Their Tools
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The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America
Leo Marx
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Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Harvard Paperback, Hp 21)
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Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline
ASIN: 019513351X |
Book Description
For over four decades, Leo Marx's work has focused on the relationship between technology and culture in 19th- and 20th-century America. His research helped to define--and continues to give depth to--the area of American studies concerned with the links between scientific and technological advances, and the way society and culture both determine these links. The Machine in the Garden fully examines the difference between the "pastoral" and "progressive" ideals which characterized early 19th-century American culture, and which ultimately evolved into the basis for much of the environmental and nuclear debates of contemporary society. This new edition is appearing in celebration of the 35th anniversary of Marx's classic text. It features a new afterword by the author on the process of writing this pioneering book, a work that all but founded the discipline now called American Studies.
Customer Reviews:
The Conflict between Pastoralism and Industrialization.......2003-09-26
In writing this review I am attempting not to duplicate the excellent review by panopticonman below. Thus, I would refer all readers of this review to that review.
Marx's thesis, roughly stated, is that: Americans applied idea's developed about landscape in the old world to the landscape they discovered in the new world. In doing so, the landscape became a "repository of value" (value meaning economic, spiritual, etc.). The main idea about the landscape that travelled with them from Europe was the idea of "pastoralism".
Pastorialism, roughly expressed, represents the yearning by civilised man to occupy the space in between "art" and "nature". Marx does an excellent job of explaining the pre-modern understanding of "art" (which is different then our modern understanding of the word). Marx also distinguishes the a "simple" conception of pastoralism with a "complex" conception. Using the writings of Jefferson, Marx argues that Americans were more comfortable with the idea of a "complex" pastoralism that acknowledged the conflict inherent in the occupation of a "middle landscape" between art and nature.
Marx then attaches the concept of pastoralism to the symbol of the "garden" as representing a mediating space between art and nature (apply "arts" to "nature" and produce a garden).
After a further differentiation between the idea of the garden-as-continent vs. garden-as-garden, Marx moves on to the idea of the "machine".
What Marx means by the "machine" of the title is a relationship between culture and industry that was irrevocably altered by the industrial revolution. He details the attempts by writers to deal with the looming conflict between pastoralism and industrialization. Perhaps the most interesting portion of the book comes when Marx discusses the period when many saw NO conflict between the "machine" and the "garden".
However, the tour de force comes when Marx analyzes this conflict as it appears in the works of Emerson, Thoureau, Hawthorne, Melville and Fitzgerald.
Personally, I thought the analysis of Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand" was first rate.
Marx concludes by congratulating the authors he uses for "clarifying" the situation of Americans and noting that the ultimate resolution of the problem of the machine in the garden is not for writer's but for politicans.
In this way, the book is significantly more political then one might expect. It really belongs to the genre of "American Studies", even though my 1970's edition refers to it as belonging to "Literature".
Marx achieves greatness by tenaciously explpicating the troubled relationship between America and its technology. Although written in 1964, this book retains great relevance.
I highly recommend "The Machine in the Garden".
Men Become Tools of Their Tools.......2002-10-28
Marx's book is roughly 50 years old now, but it still sparkles with insight into the myth and symbol discourse surrounding America's fulfillment of the 18th century idea of the "Garden of the World," a new Eden that would redeem mankind. Starting with "The Tempest" as reflective of the West's view of the geographic discovery of "primitive" and "unspoiled" lands, and moving through Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Twain, to Fitzgerald "The Great Gatsby" as an exemplification of how the simple"pastoralism" of the Enlightenment (based on the Virgillian pastoral form), Marx shows how the American artists and writers slowly came to grips with the penetration of the machine into the garden. He talks about the idea of the "middle landscape" a notion poised halfway between primitivism and progressivism, about the apparent perversity of "lazy" early settlers who, in the view of some commentators like Jefferson, never cultivated their own gardens, unlike the English aristocracy. The section on Melville's rewriting of the pastoral ideal in "Moby Dick" is a masterful excursion into the imagination and motives of Melville, as he questions the boosterism for industrialism which has infected even Emerson, who apostrophizes about how industry will forge a newer, better millenialist garden.
At some point before the industrial "take-off" there was hope that technology would extend and even democratize the garden. Stunning inventions one after the other -- the railroad, the telegraph, the industrial weaving machies -- and their introduction so soon after the American revolution portended a great unemcubered American future. But still Emerson noticed the change when he wrote in the 1840s that "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind," and Thoreau pointed out that men had become tools of their tools -- focused on the means but not on the ends, and instrumentalist view without ideals.
James in his notes on trip he took to America in his later career was struck by the "acquiesence to monotony" in the small New England towns. The railroad crossing had made them all the same. Thomas Carlyle had warned America about the insidious effects of industrialization on the spirit. So did Blake and Wordsworth and other Romantics. However, many Americans like Emerson, believed the degradation of the "dark satanic mills" would never happen in America. None could believe that the apple-cheeked farm-girls of New England working in the first mills would ever fall so low as the wretches in London. The "Garden" would not permit it to happen that way.
Some other highlights: his keystone use of a Hawthorne essay in the Virgillian mode penetrated by a railroad whistle. The mixture of Thoreau's hard-headed "empirical" approach to pastoralism, Melville's skillful metaphors, particularly the skeleton of the whale on an island of natives which looks half like a hanging garden and half like an industrial loom. Twain's pastoral America in Huck Finn, Twain's recognition that the pilot (as he was) had an entirely instrumental view of a sunset on the river (with its hidden dangers that required constant attention), while the passenger could actually enjoy the sunset. Finally, although short, Marx's retelling of Gatsby whose "Country House" on Long Island is founded of the spoils gained by factory workers a little bit up the railroad line, is compelling too.
Science fiction writers have exploited the machine in the paradox ever since the genre began. Indeed the genre began with Mary Shelley's whose monster was a creature of technology. And also, the myth is everywhere apparent in the suburbs of America -- the middle landscape between the country and the city. The myth and symbol approach of Marx and Nast was attached by the next generation of historians, but now that the dust has cleared we can see how influential a book this really is. Great stuff!
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"An exciting book, exemplifying studies in American culture at their best."--Hennig Cohen, Saturday Review
"This is an important contribution to our understanding of some of the enigmas and conflicts at work in the American imagination, particularly in the 19th century."--Tony Tanner, Encounter
"Paradoxically, in rereading this seemingly old-fashioned book, I had the sensation of encountering something quite new and fresh; it is a cultural investigation rather than a critical performance....The Machine in the Garden remains a timely book."--Times Literary Supplement
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