Gone Fishin': Featuring an Original Easy Rawlins Short Story "Smoke" (Easy Rawlins Mysteries)

This book explores the accomplishments of the golden age of “macrohistory,” the sociologically informed analysis of long-term patterns of political, economic, and social change that has reached new heights of sophistication in the last decades of the twentieth century.

It describes the scholarly revolution that has taken place in the Marxian-inspired theory of revolutions, the shift to a state-breakdown model in which revolutions, rather than bubbling up from discontent below, start at the top in the fiscal strains of the state. The author links revolutions to military-centered transformations of the state, and reviews how he used this theory in the early 1980s to predict the breakdown of the Soviet empire.

He goes on to show the implications of viewing states and societies from the outside in, including the geopolitical patterns that affect the legitimacy of dominant ethnic groups and thus determine the direction of ethnic assimilation or fragmentation. Another application is the author’s new theory of democratization, which asserts that democracy depends not merely on a widening of the franchise but on a geopolitical pattern favoring federated structures of collegially shared power.

Using this new theoretical tool, the author argues that Anglophone scholars have polemically misinterpreted German history, and that the roots of the Holocaust cannot be determined by German-bashing but must be attributed to processes that affect all of us. Other essays generalize about the historical dynamics and transformations of markets. Going beyond Weber’s Eurocentric model, the author proposes a more general theory that explains the origins of capitalism in Japan on an independent but parallel path.

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Robots and Empire
Isaac Asimov
Manufacturer: Collins
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback

ASIN: 0586062009

One of his main points is that peoples around the world, for whatever reason, seemed to be instinctually drawn toward the worship of something - an object, animal, human or unseen god or goddess. In this first volume he explores various cultures and their beliefs - the Mayas, Greeks, Iranians, neolithic man, Egypt, other Middle East groups...a dazzling array of cultures and societies. As the imagination grew, so did belief in an unseen world.

Of particular interest is the section on ancient Israeli beliefs and the origins of Yahweh. The chapters on religion in Greece were notable for their abundant detail. Even in the most isolated areas, the same rites and beliefs emerged - the idea of sacrifice, the belief in another life, the battle of good vs evil, the idea of holy representatives and eventually the thought of eternal life.

The greatness of this history is that Eliade actually writes about almost everything, ever. So these three volumes are a solid introduction to the totality of religion. Since all of us lack familiarity with something, we can all fill in some significant gaps in our knowledge with these books.

But unfortunately, it's not the best introduction to any specific thing that it covers. If you already know about some subject, then Eliade's coverage of it proves completely useless and superficial. It seems that Eliade's purpose was to show how every important religious phenomenon in history relates to his pet theories. In his defense, perhaps this is simply inevitable when one person tries to write about all of religion in 1000 pages. Certainly, there is nothing else like this out there because the task is enormous. If nothing else, the fact that Eliade researched and wrote this is amazing.