The Stranglers: Song by Song, 1974-1990

Book Description

The Stranglers outlasted and outsold virtually every other band of their era, recording ten hit albums and releasing 21 Top 40 singles. As a response to David Buckley's No Mercy, Hugh Cornwell, founding member, songwriter, and creative force, sets the record straight, displaces the myths and explains for the first time the real stories behind The Stranglers, his departure, and the songs.

Customer Reviews:

the real story -.......2003-12-14

In his own words, Cornwell tells us what was really behind those great Stranglers tracks. Far better than the other Stranglers book 'No Mercy', which was more concerned with the trivial and mundane. Hugh tells us what the songs meant, what was going on and how he felt at the time. Clearly shows Hugh was the key player in the Stranglers success and deserves his place in rock history. Buy it!

A great Band Song By Song!.......2003-04-06

I really enjoyed this overview of The Stranglers song catalog, As told by Hugh Cornwell. I thought it might be dry and sort of boring in some respects, but I was thankfully Wrong! I found myself re-exploring songs and albums from a new jumping off point. Hugh speaks in actual musical terms, he addresses lyrical content, inspirations, as well as the cultural world of Music while they were being created. I have loved this band for so long so I was thrilled to see this book available in America. Never just another Punk Band, The Stranglers should be part of your Life, like they were part of Hugh's, and mine!

Cornwell Does Not Tell All, But He Does Not Need To!.......2002-12-25

This was a fairly quick read as Hugh Cornwell tells us his version of THE STRANGLERS history song by song. Using this format it is far from the full story that you could read in NO MERCY (the other Stranglers biography that Hugh claims is Jet Black's version even though he is not the author)
As a fan of Hugh's music I truly enjoyed reading this.He tells the history of each song instead of a biography of The Stranglers. If you are a big Hugh fan as well you need this. A casual fan or someone looking for a true band biography should read No Mercy.

A Brilliant Exposition.......2002-07-06

If only other composers did this: write a book about just what they meant and what they were doing. Yet it's a safe bet others in the business, a trade given to Tommy Lees and J-Los, couldn't possibly handle it as well, and with the humor and respectful reflection in this book. Hugh Cornwell is a smart man, a former doctoral candidate and teacher. Herein he takes us through his fifteen years with the Stranglers, documents what they were trying to say and why, and informs us just who Dagenham Dave is (was, actually). His reflections on the band's personalities are quite interesting. Dave Greenfield NEVER heard Ray Manzarek before joining the band. (Really.) Jet was in jazz bands. And JJ Burnel is a born joiner (from karate classes to the Hell's Angels to the Mishima crowd). All in all, you'll never get this information elsewhere--and never as well written and with such heart.

Excellent Stranglers Historical Document.......2002-06-20

While it's true this is only for the ardent Stranglers fan (i.e.--one who has followed them through any period containing Hugh Cornwell), many of the stories regarding the punk zeitgeist and tenor of the period in regards to the band's dealings with chart success, record companies, producers and the British press bring a fresh take to the well-documented punk era, and all that followed in its wake.

Though the interviewer tends to over-involve himself at times (opinions, lack of basic studio knowledge, etc.), he keeps the ball rolling with pointed questions and in-depth discussions of seemingly minute details; most often guiding Cornwell to other interesting points. One such item involves the "MenInBlack" theme in which the band entrenched themselves in the period '79-'80. You get not only the Cornwell explanation of the phenomena, but his personal views, why the band was so interested, yada yada yada...

A very impressive aspect of the book is the overall message that The Stranglers were never totally meshed-in with what is generally considered the "Punk" idea. While most groups were more concerned with looking the part or getting their rocks off, Cornwell and the boys appear quite conscious of their place among the UK music industry. There is much talk of chart positions, commerciiality, calculated structuring of songs and albums, record company pressures, and much more in that vein. These guys were professionals. Music was their job. They ran a business, and Song By Song details the growth and dissipation of The Stranglers as a commercial outfit.

Book Description

Joseph Grano is the leading critic of the Warren Court's so-called revolution in American criminal procedure and the predominant critic of the Miranda decision. Here he presents a sophisticated analysis of both the relevant Supreme Court cases and the philosophical underpinnings of the concept involved.

The author discusses a number of issues that bear on the normative judgments that must be made in cases of confession. Included are the various coercive effects of offers and threats, the issue of causation, and the connection between unfair police practices and the issue of a confession's voluntariness. Confessions, Truth, and the Law is divided into two parts that discuss policy and constitutional considerations, respectively. One of its key themes is that policy analysis and constitutional analysis may lead to different conclusions.

In addition to law students and professors, students of philosophy and related disciplines will have an immediate interest in this book.

"Everyone who has an interest in the criminal justice system should read Joseph Grano's . . . Confessions, Truth, and the Law. . . . He does not shy away from controversial positions, and his attack on the rather smug, self-satisfied current attitude toward the law of confessions comes as a breath of fresh air. It also comes as an assault on the temple of Miranda." --Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

Joseph D. Grano is Distinguished Professor of Law, Wayne State University. He has written extensively on the issues of confessions and constitutional rights.

Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence (The Cultures and Practice of Violence)

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Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence (The Cultures and Practice of Violence)
Leigh A. Payne
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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An Argentine navel officer remorsefully admits that he killed thirty people during Argentina’s Dirty War. A member of General Augusto Pinochet’s intelligence service admits on a television show that he took sadistic pleasure in the sexual torture of women in clandestine prisons. A Brazilian military officer draws on his own experiences to write a novel describing the military’s involvement in a massacre during the 1970s. The head of a police death squad refuses to become the scapegoat for apartheid-era violence in South Africa; he begins to name names and provide details of past atrocities to the Truth Commission. Focusing on these and other confessions to acts of authoritarian state violence, Leigh A. Payne asks what happens when perpetrators publicly admit or discuss their actions. While mechanisms such as South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission are touted as means of settling accounts with the past, Payne contends that public confessions do not settle the past. They are unsettling by nature. Rather than reconcile past violence, they catalyze contentious debate. She argues that this debate—and the public confessions that trigger it—are healthy for democratic processes of political participation, freedom of expression, and the contestation of political ideas.

Payne draws on interviews, unedited television film, newspaper archives, and books written by perpetrators to analyze confessions of state violence in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and South Africa. Each of these four countries addressed its past through a different institutional form, from blanket amnesty, to conditional amnesty based on confessions, to judicial trials. Payne considers perpetrators’ confessions as performance, examining what perpetrators say and what they communicate non-verbally; the timing, setting, and reception of their confessions; and the different ways that the perpetrators portray their pasts, whether in terms of remorse, heroism, denial, or sadism, or through lies or betrayal.

Confessions, Truth, and the Law. (book reviews): An article from: Michigan Law Review

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Confessions, Truth, and the Law. (book reviews): An article from: Michigan Law Review
Michael Chertoff
Manufacturer: Michigan Law Review Association
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Michigan Law Review, published by Michigan Law Review Association on May 1, 1995. The length of the article is 4755 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Confessions, Truth, and the Law. (book reviews)
Author: Michael Chertoff
Publication: Michigan Law Review (Refereed)
Date: May 1, 1995
Publisher: Michigan Law Review Association
Volume: 93 Issue: n6 Page: 1713-1723

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Book Description

The claims made for television when it was a fledgling industry in the early 1950s have virtually all proven false. TV was to be the great entertainer-educator, an electronic marvel that could reach into the lives of millions and, over time, elevate their tastes and sensibilities. As we now know, of course, the entertainment component of this equation has so thoroughly dominated every aspect of TV and the mass media that most everything has been reduced to simple, slick, and powerful images. As Fred Friendly once remarked, "commercial television makes so much money doing its worst, it can't afford to do its best." This is the state of things in America on the eve of the twenty-first century. And as Ian I. Mitroff and Warren Bennis show in this fascinating and profoundly disturbing book, the situation only promises to get worse. Already, newspapers and magazines such as USA Today and Business Week have adopted a sort of television look, helping to blur the line between reality and fantasy that the authors believe is a frightening hallmark of contemporary life. Surveys show that up to 50% of those who watch crime re-enactment programs such as "Rescue 911" believe they are witnessing "the real thing." And consider, for example, the prospect of "virtual reality," where people can place themselves "inside" TV; in the not so distant future, the authors suggest, consenting adults will be able to slip into undergarments lined with sensors and miniature actuators and, while whispering endearments, enjoy "sex" over the phone. What becomes clear as we read The Unreality Industry is that the deliberate creation of unreality is one of the most pivotal social forces shaping our time. Mitroff and Bennis explore in detail the pervasive and dangerous effects of television on American culture, arguing that we have fallen victim to the invented unrealities passed on through the mass media. Focusing on TV as the major culprit of a problem that threatens to spiral out of control, they point to specific issues such as the selection of political candidates, celebrity worship, and the choice by political and business leaders to offer the public pleasing visual images rather than real solutions to a variety of economic and social problems. The authors present a number of suggestions for corrective action, among them an impassioned plea for the uncommercialization of the television news, programs which continue to resemble more and more the satirical "game show" version of the news in the movie Network. The only book to address what is perhaps the most pressing social issue of our time, The Unreality Industry should be required reading for anyone concerned with the extent to which the "American Dream" has become just that.

Customer Reviews:

Feelin' the Late 'Eighties Burnout..........2003-09-21

Mitroff and Bennis' _The Unreality Industry_ is about the nature of unreality and how the manufacturing of unreality is taking over America. Needless to state, TV is the primary medium of unreality, with the disconnected, a-historical context which it presents its news and entertainment material. The authors take care to outline the dichotomy between reality and unreality. Reality is very difficult to understand, is stressful to deal with, and only increases in its complexity. Unreality is simple, mindless, and creates the illusion (computer games, movies) of some kind of control over one's surroundings. Our embrace of unreality as a means of escape from the harshness and confounding nature of reality is deeply rooted in US culture: bigger is better, the infallibility of science and technology, the veneration of "progress". One aspect of unreality is that it employs "boundary warping" to catch the audience's attention. "Boundary warping" entails the near complete destruction of rational thought processes and categorization, the lack of any organization and coherence. The MTV music video is where "boundary warping" will find its most unadulterated manifestation--brightness, quick movement, lack of central focus, erotic images, disconnected and apocalyptic themes. It is often difficult to differentiate between male and female for instance and some androgyny or hybrid concoction is the norm (sounds like Gnostic Gnostalgia to me, but the book doesn't take the analysis that far). Another phenomenon that figures in unreality the commercialized, systematized and industrialized manufacture of celebrities. They have a mass-market appeal for various audiences, such as movie stars, sports figures, political parties, etc. The entertainment industry uses archetypes to sell its products as well. Archetypes, the primal images and ideas that unite humanity embodied in fairy tales, religions and myths, are constantly being re-hashed into different combinations to create stereotypical programming for the masses. The US is increasingly becoming a "leaderless" society, with true leadership replaced by managerial and bureaucratic ability. A chapter is devoted to the "Metaphysics of Sappiness" i.e., the dummying-down of society and discourse between people. With the advent of the electronic age, when people get together in large groups, it is usually for the purpose of entertaining each other rather than for intellectual conversation. In all, the authors seem to support the idea that the masses are not able to tolerate sustained inquiry, however, they warn against the trap of becoming too pessimistic. Obviously, this subject matter is going to arouse some controversy, and the authors pre-empt the criticism. They explicitly state in their introduction that their study in _The Unreality Industry_ would be one of a moral argument rather than one of dispassionate objectivity. Perhaps it can be said that Mitroff (a Ph.D. in engineering) and Bennis (a Ph.D. in economics from MIT) are two eggheads distasteful of the lack of more cultured programming (they like _Masterpiece Theatre_ for example). But in all, this book was written in 1989--the end of the Eighties. What did come out of the Eighties? Reaganomics, yuppies, video games, Madonna, Gorbechev, crack, hair-bands? _The Unreality Industry_ is late-Eighties burnout, pure and simple, and as we just wrapped up the Nineties a couple years ago, the idea that unreality is in total control is more relevant than ever.

Media Revealed.......2002-06-14

Ian Mitroff and Warren Bennis are two academics heavily involved in the technological revolution. Their purpose in writing this book is to examine how technology, in what they call the "systems age," has created an all-consuming cocoon of unreality in our daily lives. They are not bashing technology, but examining how a lack of ethics has allowed technology to threaten the very nature of our system of government and of our lives. There are plenty of books available on media studies: Todd Gitlin, Jerry Mander, Neil Postman, and others; what makes this book different, at least in the eyes of the authors, is that it studies the underlying causes of the effects of television and mass media. This underlying effect is the creation of unreality, or a system that is so all consuming that it blocks out the real world.

The problem with an omnipresent unreality is that the real reality has not gone away. One of the reasons we create an unreality is that the real world is far too complex to understand. In the modern world, the interdependence of every aspect of global life has led to a complexity that is simply astonishing to behold. Not one human being on the face of the Earth can make heads or tails of events anymore. The result is fear on the part of humans, which leads to the creation of an alternate, unreal world where answers are easy and presented in a somewhat non-threatening way (I'm not sure this is right; the media loves to start panics). This alternate world has become so pervasive that it has become an actual industry, generating celebrities and images that people can relate to.

How celebrity is created and marketed is probably the best part of the book. The authors use charts and graphs to show how this process has become a huge industry employing thousands and thousands of people. The book also shows how the masses react to this celebrity, which in extreme cases, leads to the likes of Jonestown and Mark David Chapman. Celebrityhood is revealed to be a process of engineering; people are "remade" to fit personalities and molds demanded by the public (or is it really demanded by the public? Perhaps the demand is created.).

Other sections show how media uses archetypes from the human psyche to create shows, how heroes are generated in a society that lacks, or at least ignores, real heroes, and boundary warping, or how reality and unreality is actually defined.

This is a good book, although it is somewhat dated. Even the 1993 update makes this book pre-Internet, a new technology that would no doubt interest the authors. One of the charts uses characters from "Dynasty" as examples, and the reliance on Sigmund Freud shows that the authors are not aware that most psychologists view Freud as a quack. I think this is a necessary read, at least for those who are interested in media studies and the like. It does tend to get a little esoteric at times, which is not surprising as the two authors are engineers who are probably not used to writing directly to the masses. Recommended.

Overdramaticized view of American Media.......2001-10-05

While I agree that the media has its share of problems and is advertising driven and needs to be carefully analyzed, the arguments these two authors use are completely blown out of proportion. Everyone knows that you can't believe what you see on TV. As for the advertisements that permeate their way into programs - I don't see why the authors don't realize television wouldn't survive without clever advertising to keep the cash rolling in. As long as you can differentiate between reality and TV, you're fine, and this book will shed no new light on anything for you.

A Penetrating & Disturbing Look At The Electronic Media.......2000-06-15

I was literally blown away by this remarkable book and its well-argued and carefully documented thesis regarding the ways in which contemporary Americans are victimized and manipulated into a kind of strange, conjured, and artificial perspective of the world around them through the rise and active ministrations of the "unreality industry". Here is an eye-opening expose on the specific ways in which we are being influenced, entertained, and carefully manipulated even as we strive to learn more about the world around us. Reading this remarkable book helped me to better understand the ways in which the rise of the electronic media to a position of prominence (if not complete domination) of the promulgation, interpretation, and dissemination of information has profoundly changed the way we have come to view, interpret and understand the world around us.

The authors carefully describe, articulate and identify those characteristics of the media that cause many of us such vague unease regarding the way the media increasingly seems to focus on provocative, entertaining and diverting news stories which often are of only tangential import to us as citizens or individuals. We're subjected to obligatory overdoses on petty, arcane and distracting stores about Michael Jackson, OJ Simpson, Susan Smith, Bill Clinton's cigar fetishes, and the vagaries of the stock market, while vital and critical issues of importance and relevance to us as individuals or as citizens are systematically ignored. According to Mitroff and Bennis, everything about the way the news programs are organized and presented leads us to increasingly view the news more as a vehicle for entertainment than as a method of informing ourselves to be involved citizens, so we come to expect ever-greater levels of stimulation and excitement by virtue of this stylized approach to what is important enough to report and present over the airwaves. Slowly we come to forget the critical differences between entertainment and information.

For the authors, as for an increasingly alarmed number of academics and social critics, the basic dialectic at hand revolves between objective and discernable "reality", on the on hand, and this artificially-generated, diverting, entertaining, but basically incorrect version of it called "unreality", a dialectic which more and more favors the organized collective forces of the media, who present such entertaining and stylized notions of what is relevant, cogent and important for us to pay attention to is not necessarily as accurate or as objectively disinterested as it may seem to be on the surface. We would do well to remember that the outcome of this struggle to correctly understand the world and how it operates is of desperate importance, and our eagerness to be entertained and diverted from the most egregious and disagreeable aspects of the modern environment must not allowed to become an addiction to fantasy, growing ignorance, and critical stupidity.

"Unreality is alive and well".......1998-07-02

MICHAEL D. TYSON

REALITY VS UNREALITY

"Technology has provided a means to get information from anywhere in the free world instantaneously at the touch of a button, the question needs to be asked can we live with this" Mike Tyson

The Authors of the Unreality Industry have focussed their finger pointing on the effects of AMERICAN TELEVISION and why they believe it has ruin the lives of the American people. I do not believe that the "Tele" or any method of delivery is the root of the problem nor we I ever believe that to much information or for that matter information overload is in itself a bad thing. The problem as I see it is that people need to have the capability, education wise to be able to filter out the horse s**t and tune in to what is real. If we tend to believe everything we hear on the radio and everything we see on the Tele then we deserve to be mislead. People have either become extremely gullible or extremely stupid to not have a clue that this was coming. Prime Time television is big business it exist because we let it, but we don't haft to let it control are lives. I agree completely with the author's suggestions that we must uncommercialize television news, advertising and all programs that depict the game shows aroma. This will not be as easy as it sounds, if people are not getting shot and there's no blood, and no sex then who's gonna watch, lets not forget about those Neilson rating's and how important they are. I am convinced that education or in this case lack of is why people would rather watch COP'S than 60 minutes. People will watch programs that stimulate them and they will respond to people that they can relate to, how else can you explain the SNOOP DOGGIE DOG phenomena. For those who have not figured it out yet Modern life is nothing more than a rat race and nobody wins. The so-called information age has brought with it the tools to rule the world the problem with that is that it also provides us with a method to destroy it. How l! ong will it take before people get enough of UNREALITY can we the Industry capital of the world afford to consume much more, I bet not.

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The Unreality Industry: The Deliberate Manufacturing of Falsehood and What It Is Doing to Our Lives
Warren Bennis Ian I. Mitroff
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OK8FBC

Book Description

/*4204Q-9, 0-13-142044-5, Britton, Robert, MIPS Assembly Language Programming, 1/E*/ Users of this book will gain an understanding of the fundamental concepts of contemporary computer architecture, starting with a Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC). An understanding of computer architecture needs to begin with the basics of modern computer organization. The MIPS architecture embodies the fundamental design principles of all contemporary RISC architectures. This book provides an understanding of how the functional components of modern computers are put together and how a computer works at the machine-language level. Well-written and clearly organized, this book covers the basics of MIPS architecture, including algorithm development, number systems, function calls, reentrant functions, memory-mapped I/O, exceptions and interrupts, and floating-point instructions. For employees in the field of systems, systems development, systems analysis, and systems maintenance.

Customer Reviews:

Extremely useful reference.......2006-02-23

It has a lot of examples and lists of commands. You can learn MIPS straight out from this single book. No need to look elsewhere, this is the only book you'll ever need.

Excellent for Assembly Language beginners.......2005-02-26

This book in an excellent introduction to Assembly language. What I thought to be very difficult programming language isn't actually such a monster after all.

Just a "warning," the assembly language instruction set here is smaller and the processor architecture is less complex than, say, an Intel x86 processor. However, if you want to get a feel of how Assembly language is, this is definitely a good book.

The book isn't monstrous in pages so that's a plus. What I like about this fact is, I can actually reread the chapter if I don't think I understood it enough.

I gave it 5 stars because although it is not perfect, it suits my needs for information beyond enough.

Guide to RISC Processors: for Programmers and Engineers

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The technical editors of this book need to be fired
program the MIPS assembler !!!

Guide to RISC Processors: for Programmers and Engineers
Sivarama P. Dandamudi
Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0387210172

Book Description

Recently, there's been a trend toward processors based on the RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) design: Some example RISC processors are the MIPS, SPARC, PowerPC, ARM, and even Intel’s 64-bit processor Itanium. This guidebook provides an accessible and all-encompassing compendium on RISC processors, introducing five RISC processors: MIPS, SPARC, PowerPC, ARM and Itanium. Initial chapters explain the differences between the CISC and RISC designs, and one clearly discusses the RISC design principles. Roughly the second half of the book is dedicated to MIPS assembly language programming, thereby enabling readers to grasp the concepts discussed in the first half. Topics and features: *Includes MIPS simulator (SPIM) download instructions, so that readers can get hands-on assembly language programming experience *Presents material in a manner suitable for self-study, using several examples in each chapter • Assembly language programs permit reader executables using the SPIM simulator • Integrates core concepts to processor designs and their implementations • Supplies extensive programming examples and figures • Each chapter begins with an overview and ends with a summary Guide to RISC Processors provides a uniquely comprehensive introduction and guide to RISC-related concepts, principles, design philosophy, and actual programming, as well as the all the popular modern RISC processors and their assembly language. Professionals and programmers seeking an authoritative and practical overview of RISC processors will find the guide an essential resource, and students in computer architecture and other courses will regard it as an important reference tool.

Customer Reviews:

The technical editors of this book need to be fired.......2006-01-25

Typos, blatant errors in the sample code, and poor English makes this otherwise fine book very difficult to understand. To be fair, there are excellent figures which summarize the text nicely, and the overall organization is superb. But I can't give such bad editting and proof-reading more than two stars. I'll definitely check out the second edition if it comes out, since it will be a pitty to leave this book in such bad conditions.

program the MIPS assembler !!!.......2005-08-07

Easily the best thing about this book is how it tells you to get a download of a MIPS simulator, which is called SPIM. Half the book then takes you through the MIPS assembly language, with topics that you can code and run on SPIM. Very, very nice. If you've ever done any assembly programming, you'll appreciate immediately the utility of this.

Specifically, if you need to learn MIPS, you can do it here, at minimal cost. More broadly, the MIPS implements many if not all of the key ideas of a RISC approach. So programming MIPS can give you a thorough hands-on understanding of RISC.

But what about the rest of the book? It talks in general terms about the various major RISC families in the marketplace. It describes features common to all of these. The comparative analysis is useful. Of course, aside from MIPS, as explained above, you won't be able to program in those other chips, from this text.

A Programmer's View of Computer Architecture with Assembly Language Examples from the MIPS RISC Architecture

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A Programmer's View of Computer Architecture with Assembly Language Examples from the MIPS RISC Architecture
James Goodman , and Karen Miller
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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MIPS Assembly Language Programming
Robert Britton
Manufacturer: Prentice Hall
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OIRT0M

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