Catalysis and Surface Properties of Liquid Metals and Alloys (Chemical Industries)

Book Description

Many historical processes are dynamic. Populations grow and decline. Empires expand and collapse. Religions spread and wither. Natural scientists have made great strides in understanding dynamical processes in the physical and biological worlds using a synthetic approach that combines mathematical modeling with statistical analyses. Taking up the problem of territorial dynamics--why some polities at certain times expand and at other times contract--this book shows that a similar research program can advance our understanding of dynamical processes in history.

Peter Turchin develops hypotheses from a wide range of social, political, economic, and demographic factors: geopolitics, factors affecting collective solidarity, dynamics of ethnic assimilation/religious conversion, and the interaction between population dynamics and sociopolitical stability. He then translates these into a spectrum of mathematical models, investigates the dynamics predicted by the models, and contrasts model predictions with empirical patterns. Turchin's highly instructive empirical tests demonstrate that certain models predict empirical patterns with a very high degree of accuracy. For instance, one model accounts for the recurrent waves of state breakdown in medieval and early modern Europe. And historical data confirm that ethno-nationalist solidarity produces an aggressively expansive state under certain conditions (such as in locations where imperial frontiers coincide with religious divides). The strength of Turchin's results suggests that the synthetic approach he advocates can significantly improve our understanding of historical dynamics.

Customer Reviews:

Great read!.......2006-12-30

This is a very good effort. The author goes through basic knowledge about complex systems and its basic math and then slowly brings historical trends and changes into the picture. This is a very good way to learn about history and a very easy way to remember historical events if the reader follows Turchin's approach.

Again a good read for those who want to learn history using the most natural approach.

This is not a review it is only Table of Contents to help those who are intrested,.......2006-12-27

Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Preface
Ch. 1 Statement of the Problem 1
Ch. 2 Geopolitics 9
Ch. 3 Collective Solidarity 29
Ch. 4 The Metaethnic Frontier Theory 50
Ch. 5 An Empirical Test of the Metaethnic Frontier Theory 78
Ch. 6 Ethnokinetics 94
Ch. 7 The Demographic-Structural Theory 118
Ch. 8 Secular Cycles in Population Numbers 150
Ch. 9 Case Studies 170
Ch. 10 Conclusion 197
App. A: Mathematical Appendix 205
App. B Data Summaries for the Test of the Metaethnic Frontier Theory 214
Bibliography 226
Index 243

A new avenue for historical research.......2003-11-13

I remember that some years ago when I discovered
"Looking at History through Mathematics" by Nicolas Rashevsky
(published in 1968 by the MIT Press)
I was at first enthralled by the title but then fairly
disappointed by the book itself for in fact it contains very
little history: no solid statistical data, not even
qualitative historical trends that would illustrate some
of the theoretical curves. Instead of focusing on sharply
defined questions, Rashevsky raises broad issues such as for
instance (on p. 9 and 117)
why it took 10,000 years rather than a few hundred
for humanity to develop from its cultural state at the
beginning of early urban civilization to its present state.

This former experience explains why I read Peter Turchin's book
with so much pleasure. What a contrast indeed! In
every section stimulating models are blended with quantitative
historical data drawn from the best sources. From the rise of
Islam to the growth of the Mormon Church to Chinese dynastic
cycles "Historical Dynamics" offers a fascinating sample
of sharply defined problems for which models are able to provide
unified understanding.

Finally, I would like to express a wish or a hope.
It would be really great
if this book would attract the attention of a sample
of historians willing to collect additional field data on
the issues that are raised in the book. For instance,
regarding the growth of religious communities, there are
literally hundreds of cases which could be considered, from the
spread of Lutheranism or Calvinism to the growth of the
Amish, Mennonites, Jehovah's Witnesses and many other
religious movements. Needless to say, to be useful such a work
has do be carried out in a uniform and systematic way,
by which I mean
that the SAME data must be collected in each case-study.
This would be an ideal task for a team
of historians from different countries, much in the same way
as observational research in physics or astronomy
is carried out by international teams of researchers.

Amazon.com

Amy Tan begins The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings, a collection of essays that spans her literary career, on a humorous note; she is troubled that her life and novels have become the subject of a "Cliff's Notes" abridgement. Reading the little yellow booklet, she discovers that her work is seen as complex and rich with symbolism. However, Tan assures her readers that she has no lofty, literary intentions in writing her novels--she writes for herself, and insists that the recurring patterns and themes that critics find in them are entirely their own making. This self-deprecating stance, coupled with Tan's own clarification of her intentions, makes The Opposite of Fate feel like an extended, private conversation with the author.

Tan manages to find grace and frequent comedy in her sometimes painful life, and she takes great pleasure in being a celebrity. "Midlife Confidential" brings readers on tour with Tan and the rest of the leather-clad writers' rock band, the Rock-Bottom Remainders. And "Angst and the Second Book" is a brutally honest, frequently hysterical reflection on Tan's self-conscious attempts to follow the success of The Joy Luck Club.

In a collection so diverse and spanning such a long period of time, inevitably some of the pieces feel dated or repetitious. Yet, Tan comes off as a remarkably humble and sane woman, and the book works well both to fill in her biography and to clarify the boundaries between her life and her fiction. In her final, title essay, Tan juxtaposes her personal struggles against a persistent disease with the nation's struggles against terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11. She declares her transformative, artistic power over tragedy, reflecting: "As a storyteller, I know that if I don't like the ending, I can write a better one." --Patrick O'Kelley

Book Description

Amy Tan has touched millions of readers with haunting and sympathetic novels of cultural complexity and profound empathy. With the same spirit and humor that characterize her acclaimed novels, she now shares her insight into her own life and how she escaped the curses of her past to make a future of her own. She takes us on a journey from her childhood of tragedy and comedy to the present day and her arrival as one of the world's best-loved novelists. Whether recalling arguments with her mother in suburban California or introducing us to the ghosts that inhabit her computer, The Opposite of Fate offers vivid portraits of choices, attitudes, charms, and luck in action—a refreshing antidote to the world-weariness and uncertainties we all face today.

Customer Reviews:

That rare book I can recommend to any would-be writer.......2007-06-17

The first Amy Tan book I read was THE KITCHEN GOD'S WIFE, and it blew me away. It did what a really fine literary novel ought to do, in my opinion: it spoke the truth about human beings. While I enjoyed Tan's use of her own Chinese American background to give the book its setting, and her sharing of her heritage with its characters, I took those things as judicious use of the oldest and best advice given to fiction writers: "Write what you know." I was surprised, therefore, to read in this memoir about Tan's amazement when she began hearing herself declared a "minority" writer. A "writer of color," and so on. With each of those labels came a heavy load of expectations, of responsibilities (as perceived by those applying the label) to which she must rise. What didn't surprise me one bit, though, was the resentment that followed Tan's initial consternation. Labels that seem perfectly logical, and therefore helpful, to someone else can be limiting and hurtful to the person slapped with them. To put it another way, being pigeonholed pinches. And attempting to live up to the expectations of readers, reviewers, etc. as one writes a second novel after producing a wildly successful first book has got to be the most creativity-stifling exercise in this world.

I remember something else about THE KITCHEN GOD'S WIFE. I'd never heard of Amy Tan when I happened to pick it up, scan it, and decide to take it home. I sought out THE JOY LUCK CLUB, therefore, only after getting to know Tan's writing from her second book; and although I enjoyed her first, I thought (and still think) that her second novel is better by far. What I loved about both books was the universality of their themes, and of the characters I met in their pages. I'm not Chinese American (I'm a Down East Yankee, thank you very much, with Maine coastal roots three centuries deep). But I recognized the women she wrote about just the same! And despite cultural differences, I also recognized their joys and their sorrows; their dilemmas, and the ways in which they resolved them.

People are people everywhere, and writing is something writers do in order to stay sane. That's what Tan's work tells me. Both her novels, and this memoir that will be joining Stephen King's ON WRITING as that rare book I can recommend to any would-be writer. "Read this first, and then decide whether or not you're really cut out for this life," I can say. "This writer tells it like it is, and you need to know what you're getting into."

I had no idea........2007-05-14

I finised this book several weeks ago and still can't get it out of my mind. That last chapter was brutal. This book was also responsible for me hunting down a copy of "The Best American Short Stories - 1999". Thanks Amy, I've read all your (adult) books and have enjoyed them all.

Serendipity in Essay Form.......2007-04-05

Tan gives the reader a glimpse into her life with this collection of essays covering everything from a China trip with her mother to a childhood crush.

Disbelief.......2007-01-29

I enjoyed the style of Amy Tan's writing in this collection of essays, which span a broad range of topics: a China trip with her mother, a childhood crush, and the violent death of a friend, to name a few. I enjoyed the glimpse Tan was able to give the reader into her real life, and the contrasts between her reality and the fiction she writes. I liked reading about how she writes her novels, where her ideas originate and how she sometimes struggles to keep a book going when her inspiration seems to have failed her. Tan jumped off of the pages as a real, three-dimensional person, and one that I liked.

I was uncomfortable with one aspect of the book, though. Tan writes at one point that she realized as a child that memory was highly suggestible. She reveals that when she writes something, sometimes what she's written becomes confused with the actual truth. She presents two meetings with writer Vladimir Nabokov, then reveals that she never actually met him, that these were fictional constructions based on wishful thinking.

This seeming willingness to be foggy about the truth made me a bit suspicious about much of the book. Tan writes in many of her essays about the overwhelming string of coincidences she's noticed in her life. She writes of her friend predicting the circumstances of his death, which then come to pass almost exactly as he'd thought. She describes being worried about an unforseen bill for her cat's medical care, then being involved in a fender-bender with the man at fault offering to pay her, in cash, the exact amount of the worrisome bill. This focus on coincidences and also on proving the existence of ghosts or other friendly spirits that inhabit Tan's life, made me feel she was not a reliable narrator and perhaps I shouldn't take what she had written to heart.

Rather than simply appreciating her writing and the stories of her life, I found myself pulling back from Tan frequently with disbelief, which weakened my enjoyment of her book.

Story of Serendipity.......2006-12-13

Time and time again as children, we are told to do our best to accomplish our goals. We have it reinforced in us by parents, teachers, religious, and other community leaders. It's inbred in us that it is our greatest opportunity and privilege as citizens of the United States of America to do our best to accomplish our dreams. Some people do succeed, some don't, and sometimes people end up involved or doing something that they never thought or even considered being a part of or thought that they would get into. All things are possible, but sometimes our path in life takes unexpected turns for whatever reason because of the people we are close with.
Even before graduation, high school students typically decide in their senior year that they are going to college to further their education. Then somewhere along the line, they may end up doing something different: they may change a major, change universities or colleges, instead of college, they may decide that they should drop out to become a mechanic because it's a skilled trade, or maybe they decide that instead of art school they want to pursue a career in medicine. Maybe, like Bill Gates, they don't even finish high school and drop out to program computers that end up being the next big thing. There is the occasion that students stick with their original plans, and there are times where something happens to change it all.
Now imagine that you're in your senior year at Berkley at the University of California. You are on your way to getting your doctorates in linguistics and aren't really sure what you're going to do with the rest of you life after that point. Then something drastic happens. One of your good friends and roommates is murdered the night that he moves into his brand new apartment. In Amy Tan's case, the entire course of her life changed with the event of that friend's death and with influence of her mother upon her own life.
Throughout our lives we come across people who make a great impact upon us that later comes back to aide or hinder us somehow in the most difficult times we experience, like in a traumatic time as Amy experienced with the death of her friend, the trial of the murders of her friend, and the passing of her mother. The life of Amy Tan is a great example of how relationships can truly influence and change our fate, as she writes about her experiences in her book, The Opposite of Fate: Memoirs of a Writing Life. The book offers a look into her life as she deals with the struggles of so much tragedy and recalls each as an important step in her life as a writer. Chopped full of humor, touching moments, and sadness Opposite is an emotional journey that shows the human part behind the writer that typically is only revealed a little in her fiction. She writes for herself and to preserve her memories and the memories of others that were close to her. Tan has never forgotten her roots or those who influenced her life in such a way that made her become a writer. The Opposite of Fate gives evidence to readers that much of our fate is influenced upon the relationships we develop with others and the events that happen with those people in our lives
By taking a look at Tan's biography, we can also learn a little bit about her that will already be discussed in the book, although it isn't necessarily covered in the book itself. Amy was born on February 19th, 1952 in Oakland, California. She lived there with her mother, and her younger brother until 1966 when her mother uprooted them and insisted they move to Switzerland after both her father and second brother died from brain tumors. She went to high school in Switzerland and later came back to the United States to go to college. Tan went to five colleges: The Linfield College in Oregon, San Jose City College, San Jose State University, the University of California in Santa Cruz, and finally The University of California at Berkley. She became a freelance writer after she graduated college with her linguistics doctorate and became a language development consultant mainly working with children, although she never wanted anything to do with children except to be studied as subjects. She's written many books, her most popular novel that was published, The Joy Luck Club, was later turned into a movie. As for family life, Tan and her husband Lou DeMattei don't have any children but have been married since 1974. Tan does have two half sisters and an uncle who live in China, and an older brother who lives in Vancouver, Canada. Tan and her husband have two homes, one in New York and another in San Francisco. The house in San Francisco was close where her mother lived before she died in the year 2000 from a combination of old age and the later stages of Alzheimer's disease. Tan was her mother's care giver for a great deal of the rest of her mother's life and her mother, in turn was then revealed to be Tan's most influential ties according to Opposite.
As a child, Amy often listened to her mother lament over the tragedy of the same kind of death happening in the same family twice. Both Tan's brother and father died within a year of each other from brain tumors. As a teenager, like most, Amy dreaded hearing her mother's nagging. More than that, she despised hear her mother's hysterical ravings, suicidal threats, and the attempts that the entire family witnessed time and again from the time she was a little girl and even into her mother's old age. Although Tan has no real qualms about this happening now that she's older, as a teenager she would ignore her mother's suicide threats in the open, but deep down she was "terrified that one day my mother would carry out one of those empty threats" (Tan 130). She admits to having let her eyes glaze over and act as if the verbal threats were just dead noise then later would find herself staring into the bathroom mirror feeling ill and scared at the thought of her mother carrying out some plan to kill herself. Now as an older adult, she has come to accept the idea that if her mother had been completely happy and well adjusted earlier in her life, she would not have become the writer that she is today.
As many parents would have great hopes for their children, Amy's mother and father wanted Amy to become a doctor or a concert pianist even though she showed no interesting in actually playing the piano. As a little girl, the typical motherly anecdotes of "don't cross the street without looking," came as absolutes of impending death, "if you don't look, you get smashed" (Tan 33). However if her mother had been like most simply saying," it's alright honey, you don't have to practice, go outside and play," it's questionable whether or not Tan would have chosen the same path. Perhaps, if her and her mother had not had such tragic lives, she would have become the doctor or concert pianist that her parents wanted her to be. Instead, she went to college to get a doctorates in linguistics, then chose a different path because of a tragedy that hit very close to her with the death of a room mate that she and her husband had lived, worked, and studied with for the better half of a year or so.
Pete was an engineering student at Berkley and worked along side Amy and her husband at The Round Table pizza parlor in San Jose. They often shared late nights of political, religious, and philosophical discussions over drinks and became close friends, even enough to start renting a new apartment together. Unfortunately the celebration of their friendship and their new apartment together was cut short the night that they had moved into the new apartment. Pete was murdered in his sleep by two burglars who had hog-tied him and left him for dead on the floor. After that, Pete starts to come to Amy in her dreams and through the dreams Pete delivers advice as life became harder and more complicated with the start of the trial that would decide the fate of one of his syndicates. About a month before Pete died, Amy had been trying to decide what she was going to do with her degree after she graduated but couldn't think of anything. Pete suggested that she start working with children in language development. After his death, Amy took Pete's suggestion and ran with it, in a direction that before hand she had never really intended to get involved.
As the trial came to a close, Pete told Amy that she should talk to one of his friends who come help her later when she became a writer. Tan automatically dismissed the idea until later when she received a letter from Rose, Pete's friend, thanking her for telling her about Pete's death. At that point, her fate was set in motion to bring her to being the woman and the writer that she is today. Pete stopped visiting in dreams but a new relationship blossomed with Rose as a result. Rose and Amy kept in contact through letters and eventually Rose became Amy's first writing mentor.
During the time of her mother's death, Tan came to realize how much of an influence her mother actually had on her. After dementia set in, her mother was no longer the unhappy person she had seen before. Instead of bad memories, her mother became to remember the memories she shared with Amy, going on trips and the happier times in their lives. Her mother wasn't the same person that she had grown up with before. Tan came to the cruel realization that for most of their lives, she had not been approaching her mother's needs the right way. She had missed the concept that her mother wanted to be depended on before her mother became ill as much as after the illness struck. For example, instead of scowling at her mother as a teenager, she should have acknowledged and appreciated what her mother was trying to do for her, and then she would have been able to get away with doing different things as well. She began to think that she could have solve so many problems by learning this earlier in life, and they could have had happier lives if she had only realized this earlier. During the time of the illness, Amy became much closer with her other and after her mother's death, started writing a new book, The Bonesetter's Daughter with the renewed appreciation she had for her mother.
Whether it is a friend, a parent, sibling, husband, wife, boyfriend girlfriend or any other type of relationship, these entities set up our lives in such ways that create a domino effect to get us to the point we are at or the point which we wish to achieve. It is an act of conscious choice at which we decide who we are, whom we will be with, and what we wish to be. Our parents may effect us on some level as to instilling in us what types of values we wish to make a part of our lives, but our decisions are still solely our own. Every once in a while, we have someone who comes into our lives and after meeting them everything falls in place whether or not we admit it, remember it, or even think about it. After that point, whatever happens in our life that involves them may change what we decide to do.
The book, The Opposite of Fate: Memoirs of a Writing Life brings readers to believe that fate is not only left up to us as individuals, but to the influences of people around us who are important to us that impact our lives. Tan's humorous writing makes the book a quick read, and also helps the reader to stay interested, even though it isn't necessarily in chronological order. Tan slipped in a lot of very emotional memoirs in the book that are both happy and sad. The tone of Opposite in comparison to Tan's other work is far less serious than that of The Joy Luck Club, or The Kitchen God's Wife, but does have a lot of very serious memoirs in it dealing with loss and the role of hope in people's lives. Opposite is a wonderful book and an exceptional choice to read if a reader enjoys Tan's style, and remains to be enlightening, interesting, and causes the reader to think about fate and who and how it is effected by the people we know and care about.
Fate is not entirely dependent on the people we are around, those we hand around or those we are friends with, but that is just a slice of the pie of things that influence us. In Tan's life, many different played a part in her success as a writer, but only one event led to the point where she made the conscious decision to take a step towards becoming a writer. Her Success after that came from what inspiration she got mostly by spending time and caring for her mother, and other writers she was close to like Stephen King, or her editor Faith Sale, her mentors, and close friends like Pete. Without these influences, there may not have been a chance to read any of her work, including this book.

[...].

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The Opposite of Fate
Amy Tan
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The Opposite of Fate
Amy Tan
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ASIN: 1596004312
Release Date: 2005-11-28

Book Description

Amy Tan was born into a family that believed in fate. In The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings, she explores this legacy, as well as American circumstances, and finds ways to honor the past while creating her own brand of destiny. She discovers answers in everyday actions and attitudes - from writing stories and decorating her house with charms, to dealing with three members of her family afflicted with brain disease and shaking off both family curses and the expectations that she should become a doctor and a concert pianist.

With the same spirit, humor, and magic that characterize her beloved novels, Amy Tan presents a refreshing antidote to the world-weariness and uncertainties we face today, contemplating how things happen - in her own life and beyond - but always returning to the question of fate and its opposites: the choices, charms, influences, attitudes, and lucky accidents that shape us all.

En contra del destino / The Opposite of Fate (Arete Ensayo)

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