Advanced Corporate Finance

Book Description

The first book devoted exclusively to modern advanced corporate finance, this volume provides a comprehensive exploration of theoretical and empirical literature on corporate financial policies and strategies—particularly those of U.S. nonfinancial firms—defined in rational, economic terms. Throughout, Cases in Point show theory in relation to financial decisions made by specific firms; and Real-World Focus highlights numerous articles from the financial press, providing insights from practitioners' points of view. Empirical Perspectives On The Financial Characteristics Of Publicly Traded U.S. Nonfinancial Firms. Valuation And Financing Decisions In An Ideal Capital Market. Separation Of Ownership And Control, Principal-Agent Conflicts, And Financial Policies. Information Asymmetry And The Markets For Corporate Securities. The Roles Of Government, Securities Markets, Financial Institutions, Ownership Structure, Board Oversight, And Contract Devices. The Leverage Decision. Analyses Of The Firm And The Valuation Of Equity And Debt. Industry Analysis And Financial Policies And Strategies. The Firm's Environment, Governance, Strategy, Operations, And Financial Structure. Market Efficiency, Event Studies, Cost Of Equity Capital, And Equity Valuation. Corporate Bonds: Terms, Issuance, And Valuation. Private Equity And Venture Capital. Initial Public Offerings Of Stock. Managing Internal Equity And Seasoned Equity Offerings. Dividend Policy And Stock Repurchases. Corporate Liabilities: Strategic Selections Of Lenders And Contract Terms. Mergers, Acquisitions, Takeovers, And Buyouts. Financial Distress And Restructuring. Debt Restructuring, Being Acquired, Bankruptcy, Reorganization, And Liquidation. Organizational Architecture, Risk Management, And Security Design. For CEOs and CFOs of corporations, senior lending officers at commercial banks, and senior officers and analysts at investment banks.

Customer Reviews:

Really quite good. Four stars only because it is so specialized........2006-07-02

This is not a book in advanced financial topics such as options or mathematical evaluations of arcane financial topics. It is a very interesting and well written book on various topics managers need to know to well manage the financial aspects of their organization. Of course, since it is about finance there are numbers and some equations, but nothing very complicated. What I especially enjoyed about the book was its consideration of alternatives, including negative outcomes, for managers making decisions. It also discusses conflicts of interest among various parties and the managers role and responsibilities in dealing with them and the considerations one must take as a shareholder, manager, or creditor (they all have different interests at times).

The book has nineteen chapters grouped into five parts. The parts are: I) Corporate Finance (a review of your basic corporate finance course - or a brief overview before you dive in a bit deeper water in this book), II) Analysis of the Firm and the Valuation of Equity and Debt, III) Managing Equity and Debt, IV) The Markets for Corporate Control (a fascinating portion of the book), and V) is just one chapter, Organizational Architecture, Risk Management, and Security Design.

This is a long book and some parts are quite detailed. Depending on your background, you can dive into it here or there looking for various topics. Since there is no glossary nor very many helps along the way, the book assumes a basic understanding of finance and corporate structure and finance (though the first part helps establish some groundwork in the latter). If you have had the core course from a good program in finance and corporate finance, you will handle this book well. If you enjoyed those courses, you will likely find this book quite interesting as I did.

Each chapter has its own problems and questions (selected answers are provided at the end of the book for a few of these in each chapter), a section containing issues for creative thinking, and a few projects for analysis. Some of the chapters have an appendix or two discussing the more numeric aspects of the chapter, but none are too deep. For example, Appendix A in chapter 10 on corporate bonds discusses yield to maturity and duration. Again, you probably covered this in your core course on finance. If not, you get the basic treatment here.

I think this is a worthwhile book for business professionals involved in finance in any way. It is on my shelf of books on corporate finance.

Good content, but try to get the Hardcover edition.......2006-03-20

I bought this book for my Advance Corporate Finance class.
There are a lot of interesting case studies. However, if you have the option, buy the hardcover version. The paperback version is in poor print quality (worse than any of my textbooks); not to mention the cover wears out very quickly.

Corporate Finance.......2005-07-25

This book is required reading for a Finance Class at the doctoral level. It is comprehensive but may require a review of financial termonology from student. The book does not contain a glossary of terms.

Mistitled?.......2004-01-03

This is a most interesting and instructive textbook, but I am not entirely clear just what its intended audience might be; I suspect it may be mistitled. From my perspective, the title "Advanced Corporate Finance" suggests some fairly heavy duty mathematics. In fact, there is nothing here of that sort; indeed the level of math is no higher and perhaps lower than you would find in a standard "basic finance text.

What we have here instead is a very helpful collection/summary of material on the institutional framework of corporate finance -- the kind of stuff you might wish your students knew before they ever started the technical part. Short of that, it has another good use: it's what you might call a "bottom drawer" book, i.e., one of the books the professor keeps in the bottom drawer to deploy for classroom examples -- thereby garnering an undeserved reputation for breadth of knowledge. This can only be bad news for the publishers: it means they sell only one copy rather than a whole classroom full of copies.

Customer Reviews:

Some gems of Irish short fiction.......2004-07-02

That realism has a natural humor which needs no embellishment or exaggeration seems to be the guiding principle of the fiction of Frank O'Connor, whose nearly seventy short stories of the lower and middle class in Ireland, many of which were originally published in the New Yorker at a time when the magazine was the authority for the best new short fiction, are gathered in this collection published by Vintage. His settings are localized to villages and towns; his stories, unlike the plays of Sean O'Casey, give little indication of the Irish political situation of the twentieth century, rarely even mentioning the World Wars, and instead focus primarily on religion, marriage, and childhood.

O'Connor's portrayals of the church and the clergy, ranging from the slyly satirical to the somberly sympathetic, illuminate the influence of Catholicism on the Irish mentality and the often strained relationships between priests and their parishioners. In "News for the Church," a teenage girl goes to confession for carnal intercourse with an older man, but the priest cynically guesses she is merely brandishing a badge of honor to prove her sexual maturity to her married older sister. O'Connor sees the unrewarding side to being a moral compass, but he never suggests that a priest's work is all in vain.

Many of the stories are about the confusion of youth and are narrated by a child with the voice of an adult. "The Man of the House," for example, struck me as a quasi-parable of the Fall, an adult-oriented parody of a morality tale that is told to children: A boy (the narrator) is entrusted by his sick mother to procure for her a bottle of cough syrup, but a bewitching girl he meets at the drug store tricks him into sharing the temptingly sweet medicine with her, leaving him to face the consequences of his mischief. These stories tend to culminate in poignant moments that, while not exactly equaling the Joycean epiphanies of "Dubliners," resonate with aching truthfulness.

One of the most pointed stories explores a curious contrast between the Irish and the English: In "The Sentry," an Irish priest with a Catholic parish in England during World War II discovers an English soldier stealing onions from his garden and challenges the man to a fistfight. When the priest later learns that the soldier--a sentry--could be shot for deserting his post, he tells this to an Irish nun, who replies, "Isn't that the English all out? The rich can do what they like, but a poor man can be shot for stealing a few onions!" Of course, the point is that the soldier would be shot for deserting his post, not for stealing onions; but the subtext of the nun's statement is that the Irish tend to see the bigger picture.

O'Connor is a natural dramatist with an uncommon ear for sincere, fluidly colloquial dialogue; he never overdoes a situation because he trusts the inherent strength and vitality of his characters to draw our interest. Here we have a collection of people who delineate the culture of their nation, always remaining fiercely individualistic, speaking the same language as the English but refusing to identify with them.

A Great Collection of Short Stories.......2004-05-08

In an interview published in THE PARIS REVIEW, Frank O?Connor stated that he wanted to be either an artist or a writer and chose writing because a pad of paper and pencils were less expensive than art supplies. O?Connor has an artist?s touch when he writes and this is evidenced in his many short stories, many of which can be found in this volume.

Most of the stories in this collection take place in Ireland in the years after the Southern Republic of Ireland became an independent nation. Some of the stories such as ?Guests of the Nation? which may be O?Connor?s best known story and ?The Martyr? have this struggle as a backdrop. Most of the stories are about ordinary people facing ordinary situations. The stories tell of people young and old, rich and poor, in a variety of situations, some enviable, others not. We find priests, some holy, others not, but all human. Parents and children face daily life. Some of the stories have tongue in cheek humor (?My Oedipus Complex?) whereas others such as ?An Act of Charity? deal with tragedy. In each of the stories, there is a dignity to the characters. The characters can be familiar, but are never clich?. While I admit to being biased in my praise of O?Connor?s works, since I love my Irish heritage, especially the great Irish writers, I believe that while O?Connor?s writing and characters are distinctly Irish, the emotions and struggles O?Connor writes of are universal and can find a spot in the heart of anyone who loves great writing.

a great storyteller.......2003-07-10

Generally, when it comes to literature, I'm fairly hard to please. That being said, I love this book without reservation. I've recommended it to and foisted it on friends for years now. Many of them react much the way I do: there isn't anyone else like Frank O'Connor.

The stories are lyrical, sharply and humorously observed, and told with elegance in an easy but precise idiomatic diction. O'Connor always gave his work the test of being read aloud, and this care for the sound and cadence of his prose shows on every page.

Then, there is O'Connor's feeling for people. Reading the stories, one gets the impression that he was an intelligent but fundamentally kindly, generous man. Even when a character in the stories does something that seems objectionable, O'Connor never loses sight of that character's humanity. There is no absence of modernist irony, and the irony can sting (as in "The Mad Lomasneys"), but it is never cruel.

O'Connor's stories take place in Ireland, but they are not circumscribed by a desire to depict Irish regional color or romantic notions about the place. He wrote what he knew and understood, and what he understood was the people he grew up with. If that makes him a regionalist, then so were Faulkner and John Millington Synge. In his own subtle way, O'Connor was a realist, and ultimately, these stories are universal: they touch places in the psyche and the human heart that are common to us all.

Any selection of one's "favorite" stories will be personal. To an interested reader, I would say, "Read them all." To friends who ask, I add that they should start with "Guests of the Nation" and "First Confession." These aren't his "best" stories, but I've always liked them both, they are typical of his best, and one must start somewhere.

When I've given 5 stars to a book, I've often had to argue with myself as to whether it deserved it. Not for this one.

The best short story writer in English.......2003-06-12

There is a line from William Trevor (no stranger to the short story) on the back of the book that I think is highest praise that one writer can give another: "without adornment, he simply tells the truth."

We don't demand things so weighty from books anymore, and are probably likely to dismiss a person or a book that promises it, but I think the word at least gets at O'Connor's idea of a short story. The truth, for him, is a live person on paper, going through a period of his or her life where they understand something about either themselves or the world. When he taught writing, he insisted that his students write a one-sentence theme for their story: what is it saying, demonstrating - what truth is it getting at?

This seems an old-fashioned idea of the story, but nothing about O'Connor's work seems either old-fashioned or excessively schematic - his stories are as alive as writing can be while still having unity and weight, and they carry their truth with humor and humanity. The Richard Ellman introduction, I'm afraid, misses this completely. Ellman was a friend of O'Connor's in later life, but I don't think he understands his work very well. The introduction makes O'Connor sound like some sort of genial provincial, with the primary virtue of his work being a portrait of a vanished society.

But no writer of fiction who is just a chronicler can survive: it doesn't matter that today Anna and Karenin could simply divorce. The book is relevant because Anna and Karenin are both real on the page, as so many of O'Connor's characters are. Ellman's lack of understanding influences his selection: too many of O'Connor's later less inspired work is here, and many wonders are missing. Why did he leave off In the Train, for example? Sadly, this is the only collection that's in print, but most of the great stories are here, and they are inexhaustible.

After discovering this book, I immediately went out and read everything of O'Connor's I could find, including a biography, and I copied down a passage that I think shows the way in which he looked at people and the world. He was writing to a friend who had been estranged from his wife, and was now feeling extreme remorse as she was dying:

"On occasions like this we all feel guilt and remorse; we all want to turn back time; but even if we were able, things would go on in precisely the same way because the mistakes we make are not in our judgements but in our natures. It is only when we do violence to our natures that we are justified in our regrets, and neither of us is capable of that. We are what we are and within our limitiations we have made our efforts. They may seem puny in the light of eternity but they didn't at the time, and they weren't."

This is his truth: to discover people's natures, to see the essential in even the smallest actions, and get across the moments when people see themselves whole. Read this book: it's one to keep for life.

Ireland's Premier Short Story Teller.......1999-07-07

The tradition of the Irish story teller has been reborn in this century in her marvelous short story writers. None was finer than Corkman, Frank O'Connor. All of O'Connor's classic stories are here. O'Connor truly captures Irish life in the early part of this century. The wit and humor that are legendary among Corkmen is present throughout this book. This is one of my favorite books ever. I have given it as a gift too many times to count. Every person that I gave it to came back raving about it!

The Little Monasteries: Translations from Irish Poetry Mainly of the Seventh to the Twelfth Centuries

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The Little Monasteries: Translations from Irish Poetry Mainly of the Seventh to the Twelfth Centuries

Manufacturer: Dolmen Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0851052967

Player's Option: Spells and Magic (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition, Rulebook/2163)

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Reward's for being creative.
Good book with spells and NWPs galore!
Unique in the good way
Very good book for all types of Spellcasters
A necessary book to spells casters

Player's Option: Spells and Magic (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition, Rulebook/2163)
Richard Baker , and David O. Miller
Manufacturer: Wizards of the Coast
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0786903945

Customer Reviews:

Reward's for being creative........2000-08-26

I was searching for a way to create magical items with a mage and picked up this book and found it defines this and more. I was able to hunt for magical components and this book helped with the research factor.

I wanted to find a few off-the-wall components and this book helped to define a good way to do that. It was helpful in answer magic related questions about Mages and what an Enchanter is good for or an Invoker. This book is a must if you plan of playing or running Mages, it is very helpful.

Good book with spells and NWPs galore!.......2000-04-12

Spells & Magic is a good, well-written, fairly well organized book packed with spells for both wizards and preists, along with numerous NWPs.

Unique in the good way.......2000-01-09

Unlike "Skills and Powers" and "Combat and Tactics", "Spells and Magic" does not introduce a wholly new set of rules that the other two books in the series are infamous for. "Spells and Magic" so rarely deviates from the original rules and presents so much expanded materials ( rather than totally new), you will soon be immersed into the originality of the effort. While this is basically a second take on The Complete Wizard's Handbook, it accomplished its goals so much better and quicker that it has plenty of leftover space to introduce several new subdivisions of the magic-user class and many other useful innovations. My advise as for Spells and Magic? Opt for this rules expansion - steer clear of its comrades.

Very good book for all types of Spellcasters.......1999-10-07

This book is a great source of information for any type AD&D game, this book includes detailed info about all types of Spellcasters and includes too the system of Character Point's already seen in the Player Option's:Skills&Powers but expanded and woth more option's this time for all Spellcaster. There is a system that you can create your own spellcaster type and almost create a new class, by choosing it advantages, disadvantages special powers and special traits. The books also include a system and a table of critical hit caused by magic. The book is very interisting and very good it worth the price you pay. Get it if you can.

A necessary book to spells casters.......1999-07-09

The new spells and the new rules of this book made the mechanics of the game more realist and more "playable". An important acquisition for every spellcaster and most adventurers.

The Big Fellow: Michael Collins and the Irish Revolution

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A bit stilted, but enjoyable read
Childhood memories revisited
A Contemporary's View of Michael Collins
A fawning portrayal from a fan, not a historian
Passionate account of Collins' life

The Big Fellow: Michael Collins and the Irish Revolution
Frank O'Connor
Manufacturer: Picador
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0312180500

Book Description

In 1916, a young man named Michael Collins returned to his native Ireland, after ten years in voluntary exile in London, to join one of the most impassioned and complicated revolutions in history. Playfully nicknamed "The Big Fellow," Collins began to take a key role in the uprisings, eventually becoming a revered revolutionary leader.

Acclaimed writer Frank O'Connor, a man who himself fought in the Irish Civil War, traces Collin's life from the day he returned to Dublin to the day a young Irish soldier shot him dead on a country road.

The Big Fellow achieves a narrative both probing and poetic as it chronicles the life of a man so charismatic that he made people "aware of his presence even when he was not visible, through that uncomfortable magnetism of the very air, a tingling of the nerves."

Customer Reviews:

A bit stilted, but enjoyable read.......2002-11-20

The controversy caused by this biography led it to be banned by the Irish government for decades. Unique in its contemporary view of this important Irish leader, Frank O'Connor's biography suffers from a rather stilted approach. However, what it lacks in historical accuracy and readability, this account of Collins's life proves an enjoyable read and recounts many enlightening first hand accounts of the man.

Childhood memories revisited.......2002-07-05

I remember reading this book in school in Ireland. Collins was a true patriot, but like most of us he had his faults. The book shows the good and bad at a time in Irish history when life was in some cases very cheap. Collins place in the peace treaty can never be discounted and the controvesy relating to the ambush and death will probably never be fully uncovered. I was and still am touched by his own words when he signed the treaty "today I have signed my own death warrant" a true giant the " Big Fellow ".

A Contemporary's View of Michael Collins.......2000-04-02

This biography was fascinating to me because it was written much closer to the time of the events related than more recent books on Collins, and was written by a man who fought in the Irish Civil War (in which Collins lost his life)and fought on the side opposite Collins. The book is written in a novelistic style that can sometimes be rather offputting, but it is nonetheless an intriguing view of the most charismatic and, probably, most effective Irish leader ever. Certainly it reveals the great regard in which Collins was, and is, held by his countrymen, even those who did not support him after the Treaty which precipitated the civil war(which Ireland seems only now to be putting behind it).Anyone interested in Michael Collins and the tremendous impact he had on his country should read this book.

A fawning portrayal from a fan, not a historian.......1999-04-10

Sadly, Frank O'Connor seems to have been more of an idolizer of Collins than an historian interested in focusing the reader on the important events of his life. One has to wade through multiple tepid apologies for his occasional boorishness, though O'Connor seems to find these stories irresistably cute and keeps going back to him again and again. It may be that the book is best suited to those who have read extensively the other biographers and historians so that this could be understood in context. The Big Fellow is not for the novice Irish history student, because you learn precious little from it and have to work hard to get that.

Passionate account of Collins' life.......1999-02-03

This Collins biography was the first one I ever read. I bought it immediately after viewing Neil Jordan's biopic in 1996 and tore through it cover-to-cover in no time flat. Part of that was from youthful enthusiasm and the rest because O'Connor's writing style is so engaging. O'Connor himself deemed the book a "labour of love" and it is clear from the very first page that he meant it. My paperback edition has a foreword from the author in which he explains his affinity to Collins and his motivations for writing the biography. From there, he divides the text into three parts: Lilliput in London, The Body and the Lash, and The Tragic Dilemma. He covers Collins' youth, though his focus begins during Collins' teen years in London. He discusses the Easter Rising, Collins' jail time, his work at infiltrating the British spy system, Bloody Sunday, Collins' assassination, and, very briefly, the aftermath in Ireland. Throughout the book, O'Connor gives his reader a voyeuristic peek into Collins' life through Collins' own words and Collins' personality traits. This is one of the best Collins biographies at allowing the audience to know Michael the person as opposed to Michael the soldier, Michael the revolutionary, or Michael the politician. Also what sets O'Connor apart is his creative writing background. His words are infused with a kind of passion to which many writers can only aspire. I have to admit the last three paragraphs of the book may have you in tears as I was the first time I read them. If you are new to the life of Collins, this is not a bad selection to begin with and, likewise, if you are already familiar with Collins, this is an excellent book to include in your collection.

The Lonely Voice, a Study of the Short Story

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The Lonely Voice, a Study of the Short Story
Frank O'Connor
Manufacturer: World
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: B0000CLZJ5

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Both sides are equally ignorant
A most necessary read
what is it about Black Athena Vol. 1 & 2 that has scared soo many?
A Brief History of the Rise and Fall of One Dimensional Whiteness
Afrocentrists, and their critics, the People Without History !

Black Athena Revisited
Mary R. Lefkowitz
Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0807845558
Release Date: 1996-03-13

Book Description

Was Western civilization founded by ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians?
Can the ancient Egyptians usefully be called black?
Did the ancient Greeks borrow religion, science, and philosophy from the Egyptians and Phoenicians?
Have scholars ignored the Afroasiatic roots of Western civilization as a result of racism and anti-Semitism?

In this collection of twenty essays, leading scholars in a broad range of disciplines confront the claims made by Martin Bernal in Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. In that work, Bernal proposed a radical reinterpretation of the roots of classical civilization, contending that ancient Greek culture derived from Egypt and Phoenicia and that European scholars have been biased against the notion of Egyptian and Phoenician influence on Western civilization. The contributors to this volume argue that Bernal's claims are exaggerated and in many cases unjustified.

Topics covered include race and physical anthropology; the question of an Egyptian invasion of Greece; the origins of Greek language, philosophy, and science; and racism and anti-Semitism in classical scholarship. In the conclusion to the volume, the editors propose an entirely new scholarly framework for understanding the relationship between the cultures of the ancient Near East and Greece and the origins of Western civilization.

Customer Reviews:

Both sides are equally ignorant.......2007-07-18

Greek civilization was much influenced by Egyptian civilization, this cannot be doubted, especially if one refers to ancient texts. What is absurd about both accounts and the militants forging their views, is the notion that Egyptian civilization was black or that African=Black. In fact, the label African was first used to refer to Phoenicians, and would never have been used to refer to the Black sub-saharan peoples that were known as Zanj, Sudanese or Aethiopian. When black contributors claim that Egypt is in "Africa" and that Egyptians were "African" they forget that they were not part of that "Africa" and that they weren't known as "Africans", that is, until the desecration of the word, it's misuse and abuse. As it stands today, the term is a misnomer. It is sad and scary how blacks are attempting to pillage alien cultures (Egyptian for instance) out of an inability or unwillingness to acknowledge their own for what it is. It is equally sad that certain "scholars" are trying to downplay Egyptian contribution and indeed, supremacy, in the ancient world. The world is changing , and I'm afraid for the worse.

A most necessary read.......2007-05-31

I came to this issue as a teacher of ancient philosophy, and a concern to understand the claims of afrocentrists, as well as Bernal, that the ancient Greek philosophers took some significant portion of their thought from the Egyptians, in particular the Egyptian priests. What I have read of these claims has not been, in my view, impressive. (The best that Bernal can offer, given that no Egyptian texts bear any resemblance to Greek philosophy, is that the popular religion of Egypt "must" have been a popularized expression of some more abstract wisdom-an argument from ignorance of the most tendentious sort.) Still Bernal is the most impressive of those who argue for a massive cultural influence on the Greeks by the Egyptians, both from the perspective of the breadth of fields he marshals (though hardly masters) in support of the position, and the massive size of his output. For many who are not specialists these two features alone might seem to suggest that Bernal is correct. Thus the great value of this volume, which includes evaluations by various true specialists in the fields that Bernal attempts to harness for his own purposes: classical studies, linguistics, archeology, Egyptology, and history (Bernal, by the way, is a trained political scientist).

What is revealed is the various ways in which Bernal gets things wrong. He trusts in the historicity of myth in a simple-minded way that no current student of mythology would. He is uncritical of the writings of ancient authors who to some degree appear to support his case. He is highly selective of the evidence. For example, his treatment of nineteenth century classical studies points to authors who appeared to have racial motivations while ignoring others, such as Grote, who clearly did not.

One, to my mind, particularly revealing article is offered by Jay Jasanoff and Alan Nussbaum, trained linguists, where Bernal's linguistic evidence is evaluated. This might be one of the more important articles simply because comparative linguistics is such a technical and seemingly arcane discipline to the uninitiated (such as me), that Bernal's seeming mastery of it in support of the claim that some 25% of Greek words had Egyptian origins might be thought to be a particularly impressive component of the overall argument. What Jasanoff and Nussbaum discover, however, is that Bernal ignores the long established standards of evidence in these fields in favor of a quite superficial "looks alike" method for finding the massive linguistic influence on the Greeks. The authors meticulously go through a wide selection of Bernal's etymologies and debunk them all.

Perhaps the most unfortunate part of the book is a section of three articles on the subject of race: "unfortunate" because Bernal and other afrocentrists have reintroduced a scientifically worthless but historically invidious concept into academic discussions in their claim that the Egyptians were "blacks" (Bernal is a bit more timid here than other afrocentrists, simply saying that certain Egyptians could "usefully be thought of" as blacks). The authors of all three articles insist on rejecting this introduction of race into the issue. To my mind one of the most interesting articles was written by a team of anthropologists headed by C. Loring Brace. Brace brings scientific techniques to bear on the question, particularly comparative anatomy. The discussion reveals two things: 1. that indeed the concept of race has no basis in scientific fact, and has been replaced by the notions of "klines" (variations of anatomy selected by environmental conditions) and "clusters" (variations due simply to the locality of a reproductive population), and 2. that evidence Brace and his team developed shows that the ancient Egyptians cannot be considered (even "usefully") as either "blacks" or "whites" in the modern senses of those terms.

The contributions to this volume are uniformly erudite, well-argued, and well-informed by the latest understandings in the various fields represented. And this is a much needed book. There has been a disturbing propensity in academe as of late to inject politics into research of various forms. This has had the general character of first defining a view that is understood as somehow politically or socially beneficial or expedient from some perspective or another, and then searching for any sort of evidence or argument, however fanciful it might be, to support the view. At times these efforts are coupled by the postmodernist view that all so-called "knowledge" is historically contextualized and a product of social interests, so that any view is acceptable so long as it is embedded in a set of the "correct" political and social motivations. Although it is true that all seekers of truths are to some extent a product of their times, this extreme view has the most unfortunate effects. In the case of Bernal and afrocentrists a couple of such effects pointed out by the authors of this volume are first that their views, quite ironically, validate once again the concept of race, a concept so long used as the basis of oppression in this country, and second rather than eschewing eurocentrism it in fact reinvigorates it by the suggestion that the only way that the achievements of any culture can attain legitimate value and be worthy of study is if they can be shown to have influenced European culture. Given the tenuous threads of argument in afrocentrist writings that attempt to connect subSaharan African culture to the Greeks, threads that I believe are bound to snap if they haven't already, the consequent devaluation of African culture is the inevitable implication.

what is it about Black Athena Vol. 1 & 2 that has scared soo many?.......2007-05-29

Funny how 19th. C. Historical rethoric is not questioned. Think about it?
Most 19th. C historians where of Germanic and otherwise Aryan stock, slavery was still in full boogie business. The great Egyptian pyramids had been re discovered. How could a generation of slave owners make peace with the fact that the humans theybought and sold were African as were the very people who had founded the Egyptian dynasties? They could not.

Martin Bernal is a Jewish scholar who after over twenty five years of teaching Chinese history has a mid life crisis, "I do not understand my own people, the semitics." With that he launches into digging of the truth behind 19th c. scholarly writings. Dr. Bernal discoveres that not only were the semitics white washed(see his paper on Hannibal and the Cartheginians), so where the Egyptians, in a grand quest to PR the destruction of these two races, why? To support the outright contempt the Aryan Euros had against the Jews and the blacks, why? To maintain the status quo as the unquestioned authority of racial origins of civilization, which was believed to be white.

As a matter of fact, the oldest university in the world originates out of Africa, want to know from where email me or research it yourself.

So with these essays that support the 19th C. process of suppression I am one who urges you to read Martin Bernal's careful, and unbiased study of how these historical changes all came about--

Truth has power, but truth is only as powerful as those who wish to drink from the source.

A Brief History of the Rise and Fall of One Dimensional Whiteness.......2007-01-15

"In pursuing a PhD on Minoan archaeology, it became necessary to spend several years in Greece. Many of the scholars I encountered there were not only ignorant of the contributions of the Near East to the development of Greek civilization, they were uninterested." Dr. L. Hitchcock, Institute of Archaeology, UCLA

Classics and Education:
Education was once conceived almost exclusively as the cultivation of values and tastes that distinguished the learned from the lay, the culturally enlightened from the functionally literate. Today, however, we inhabit a flat world transformed both by expanding scientific horizons and by the agendas of new social and intellectual movements, from the critique of unfettered capitalism and the "universal" codes of the West to debates over endemic problems of class, sexism, racism, pollution, and homophobia.
Over the last twenty years, scholars influenced by these developments have clashed, as cultural historian Andrew Ross has observed, "with a reactionary consensus of left and right, each unswervingly loyal to their respective narratives of decline: charges of post-sixties fragmentation and academification from unreconstructed voices on the left, and warnings of doom and moral degeneracy from the Cassandras of the right."

Lefkowitz & Pseudohistory:
Pseudo history is purported history which often denies that there is such a thing as historical truth, clinging to the extreme skeptical notion that only what is absolutely certain can be called 'true' and nothing is absolutely certain, so nothing is true. Pseudo history includes Afro centrism, holocaust revisionism and the catastrophism, to them should be added Helleno-mania, centered in one-dimensional Whiteness. "Ancient Myths of Cultural Dependency," actually concerns a much broader topic: the way historians such as Herodotus, Diodorus, Strabo, Eudoxus and Aristobulus 'fabricated a myth' that the Greeks owed their culture to the Ancient Egyptians. Professor Lefkowitz, became involved in the debunking of Afrocentrism by discrediting Herodotus et al, and seemed upset, passionately shaken of her disregard as a scholarly authority, claiming her opponents and their supporters undermined her value, while they neglect to follow the conventional means of scholarly evidence. On a TV clip of Lefkowitz debating Afrocentrists, the moderator asks her, "And how many times have you been to Africa, Dr. Lefkowitz?" Replying that she has never been to Africa, the moderator commented conclusively, "I thought so."

Title change to Black Athena!
Black Athena: the pragmatic title of Bernal's best seller, suggests that the Greek goddess Athena, the central symbol of classical Greek civilization, had a tinted origin outside White Europe, in Black Africa. The question is not without consequences for philosophers of principal stake in the Black Athena debate, a claim concerning the non-European origins of the main philosophical tradition of Europe, if late antiquity Alexandria was excluded from the search of glorified ancestors. By one account, it was the publisher, in fact, who proposed the polarizing title, a proposal about which Professor Bernal was reported not to have been at all enthusiastic, probably realizing just how provocative such a title would be in the forefront of a work already full with more than enough of conflicting issues.

'Black Athena' & `White Egypt':
Ancient Egypt, although 'accidentally' situated on the NE edge of the African continent, was thought essentially by Egyptologists and Orientalists, led by JH Breasted, as a non-African civilization whose major achievements in the fields of religion, social, political and military organization, architecture and other crafts, the sciences etc., were largely original and whose historical engagement and its cultural interaction, and indebtedness lay, if any, with (South) West Asia rather than with sub-Saharan Africa. 'Black Athena' is a slogan just as false to history as is `White Egypt.' Egyptian wisdom was a only a part of the most enduring civilization to our day, is existentially moral and social, different, and immutable with individual speculative Greek philosophy, nevertheless, Platonism was amended and upgraded by late antiquity Egyptian Copts, as the second century infamous Plutinus, fouder of Neoplatonism, a thinker from upper Egypt, who taught in Rome. While Aristotalian science was garbled by another seventh century Coptic genius, John Philoponoi.
Dr. Louise Hitchcock, of UCLA, Institute of Archaeology, wrote, "Bernal is certainly passionate, but I don't think his attempt is amateurish as much as it is biased...He has moved away from this theory in the Archaeology Magazine video 'Who was Cleopatra?' stating that it isn't necessary to believe in colonization to admit massive near eastern / Egyptian influence in the formation of Greece. I show this video to all my ancient art classes as an exercise in critical thinking, and an exercise in "how evidence can be distorted, created, (and) interpreted out of context.' ... No where is the naturalism of the Amarna period mentioned nor is it mentioned that Athenian democracy lasted a very brief period and was limited to male Athenian citizens. Nor is the 2000 year time difference mentioned."

Any future for Afrocentrism?
Inevitably, and in a rather belittling manner, "Herodotus is paraded in the all too familiar manner as the `Father of Lies', whereas more recent reassessment of the amazing extent of objective historical fact in Herodotus is ignored. Henry Frankfort, who was one of the greatest Egyptologists and Assyriologists of his generation, and whose books still rate as lasting standard works among the specialists, is denounced as `outdated'. Frobenius, one of the greatest Africanists of his generation (early twentieth century) who has been the main single intellectual influence upon Afrocentrism, is depicted as of negligible intellectual capabilities, of damaging influence even on European Africanism, hardly taken seriously by the specialists, and an art thief to boot. Sergi, a highly original physical anthropologist of the early twentieth century, is filed by Howe as merely `long-forgotten and academically discredited'," concludes W. van Binsbergen.

Where are the Orientalists?
Bernal's strategy in his preface is to acknowledge numerous authority figures who have helped him. These are just two examples of many of the problems in both books. If Lefkowitz et al. were held up to the same scrutiny that Bernal is, a number of distortions and biases can be uncovered there as well.
"It is a supreme irony that the only chapter on the Near East in Lefkowitz et al.'s 500+ page book is only 10 pages long and written by a classicist, Sarah Morris, and not a Near Eastern scholar. Lefkowitz, like Bernal, has her own rhetorical strategies for establishing her authority such as beginning her preface with the story of the professor of literature in 19th century Dublin who is untrained to interpret archaeological evidence, the implication by analogy being that Bernal is also a coffee table archaeologist too inexperienced to function within another discipline." adds Dr. Hitchcock

Academic Scandal, Contributors withdrew?
It is no wonder that investigations into external influences, whether passionate like Martin's, or serious and legitimate like those of a few bold Classicists who have dared to learn about Oriental cultures, resulting in their planned chapters were excluded from Lefkowitz & Rogers' *Black Athena Revisited*, after they were submitted, such incidents, are met with hesitancy or skepticism in some quarters.
As stated on owner-ane@ane-digest, two originally planned contributors to Lefkowitz volume withdrew when they heard that she denied Bernal the opportunity to respond in 'BA Revisited'. A contribution of Eric Cline (expert in Bronze Age relations between Egypt and the Aegean) was refused, with the argument there was no room, but Cline believes that resulted because his piece was favourable towards Bernal. Cline later published a damning review of 'BA Revisited' in Journal of Archaeology. Whether his paper was published elsewhere is not stated. Bernal does list over a dozen "general sympathetic" reviews of BA by specialists in several fields, as well as some hostile reviews of 'BA Revisited'.
"With that as the background noise of the uneducated masses in Greece (akin to the racist background noise in the US, which we like to think has been largely overcome but regularly finds expression, sometimes brutally, it is no wonder that investigations into external influences are met with hesitancy or skepticism in some quarters," concludes Peter Daniels

Is there a positive side?
Yes, affirms Christopher Robbins, "to my view,...Somewhere along the line the idea arose that the unprecedented Greek accomplishment was of a wholly endogenous provenance. This is an absurd idea when one thinks of a post-palatial-economies people emerging from a centuries-long dark age of villatic illiteracy into the archaic period.
Where was the raw material for the 6th c. and the classical going to come from is not largely from elsewhere? In fact this idea is an insult to one of the most fundamental aspects of what we may call the genius of the Greeks - or of the West ever since, for that matter.
After all, for the Greeks, for the West or for any manufacturing company in the world, it is not the raw materials (Advanced Egyptian civilization) that make a difference. Raw materials are available to anybody. The only difference is what is produced from those raw materials, whatever their source.
A basic common sense comment: Greek Classics, 700 BC lags two millennia beyond the Egyptian miracle, Pyramids built 2800 BC. Forget the petrified classics, What do you conclude?

Afrocentrists, and their critics, the People Without History ! .......2007-01-14

"Since the question of Egyptian origins is a topic in which considerable emotional capital has been invested, attempts simply to discuss the issues can easily be misunderstood as a form of hostility, so that even what was intended as praise is interpreted as blame." M. Lefkowitz

Classics & Civilization:
Do we study ancient cultures because, to some extent, all cultures share certain aspects? Does our Western culture reflect aspects of these other cultures? The answer to the first of the two questions has historically been found in a discussion of universality. The problem with the second question lies in its formulation. What is a culture after all?
Classics, a seemingly outdated domain, is defined, by Wikipedia as the study of the language, literature, history, and art of the ancient world, around the Mediterranean; especially of Greece and Rome during classical antiquity. Classics; a plural noun refers generally to texts of the ancient Mediterranean, whose study constituted the main body of the humanities and still of importance in that domain of learning today.

The case against Bernal:
In 'The case against Martin Bernal,' David Gress, a Danish who has further identified the campus debates as a target, with an attack on Afrocentrism, alleging that, "the political purpose of Black Athena is, of course, to lessen European cultural arrogance." Apart from the fact that this charge has become a straw man--the chief problem in the academy today isn't European cultural arrogance but its opposite-- Bernal's account, and the political circumstances in which it appears, raise some important questions about scholarship and propaganda in the academy and, a fortiori, in what remains of the general culture."

Ms Lefkowitz knows better:
Mary Lefkowitz, who received her Ph.D. in Classical Philology at Radcliffe College almost half a century ago (46 years) struggled to explain, "...why some popular modern mythologies of the ancient world appear to have been created, and why they are mythologies rather than history. Also I ... attempt to show why it was that ancient writers like Herodotus and Diodorus claimed (mistakenly) that some aspects of Greek culture derived from Egypt, whereas such evidence as we have, suggests that the customs they regard as Egyptian in origin were either indigenous, or derived from other sources;..." she attacked the established belief in an Egyptian Mystery System, institutions or initiation ritual, which could have inspired similar Greek traditions, the ultimate source of its thought systems; Greek philosophy.

Black Athena Revisited:
A collection of twenty essays in scholarly response to Bernal's first two volumes of Black Athena, a testament to the impact of Bernal's multi colored coat of scholarship, that so many contributors have combined their expertise to review the work of scholarship of the ancient Mediterranean world. Some were already published as book reviews; while the rest were written for this united front against Afrocentrism. Introduced by Mary Lefkowitz and concluded by Guy Rogers, the eighteen papers in between were written by American, English and an Italian expert, in Egyptology, Racism, with Orientalists, Linguistics, a science historian, Hellenists, and Historiographers. This wide front of contributors to 'Black Athena Revisited,' from a diverse range of related academic fields are united to confront the admirable Bernal trying to discredit his talented interpretation of any dark, let alone a Black Athena. Black Athena Revisited is a stimulating collective response, offering a variety of critical essays by experts from a diversity of disciplines covering Bernal's main hypotheses. Although mostly all papers extend attacks on Bernal and while rejecting his methodology, vary in tone from a polemical to critical, a couple come across as almost approaching character assassination.
Toby Wilkinson, of Christ's College, Cambridge wrote, "..no other book on the ancient world has created as much of a storm as Martin Bernal's Black Athena. Since the publication of the first volume in 1987, nearly seventy reviews, articles and films have appeared discussing the book, its goals, methods and hypotheses. Responses to Bernal's second volume, published 1991, have added to the enormous literature surrounding the work."

Baines Contra Bernal:
John Baines offers an Egyptologist criticism of Bernal's thesis and methodology in his paper, 'On the Aims and Methods of Black Athena,' expressing serious reservations on the limited use of the Egyptological evidence in support of Egypt's contribution to the development of Greek civilization. He states his criticism that, 'Bernal's reluctance to engage with ancient Near Eastern civilizations on their own terms leads to bizarre interpretations.' Another Egyptologist, David O'Connor, no less critical in Bernal's conclusions, debates in a more conciliatory tone. 'Egypt and Greece: The Bronze Age Evidence' targets the textual evidence for Egypt's relations with the Levant during its Middle and New Kingdoms.
In 'Black Athena: An Egyptological Review,' Yurco provides a rather detailed evaluation of the Egyptian evidence, downplaying the role of Mesopotamian influences in the formation of Greek civilization, in accordance with recent Egyptological consensus. The Meet Rahina inscription 'does attest an Egyptian-ruled Asiatic empire' contradicts O'Connor interpretation and accepts more of Bernal's arguments, for Egyptian influence on the Greeks as 'in essence reasonable.'

Experts' Opinions:
"Howe, an 'anti-Afrocentrist' by his own definition, is not taken with Lefkowitz's work. The distances which separate him from Lefkowitz, however, are minimized by the historiographic and epistemological issues the two embrace. Both are concerned with who has the right?, who is privileged, to participate in the construction of both history and knowledge?" If this seems to be an argument only supported by classicists, Afrocentrists, and their critics, the questions involved in the privileging of certain histories and constructions of knowledge should resonate for world historians when they consider Eric Wolf's title and its implications: Europe and the People Without History.

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Essential reading for students of the short story genre
An influential but grotesquely dated work

The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story
Frank O'Connor
Manufacturer: Melville House Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 097186599X

Book Description

The legendary book about writing short stories, by the Irish master of the form, is back in print! A virtual master class in which the witty O'Connor discusses technique and his favorite writers, including Chekhov, Hemingway, and Joyce.

Customer Reviews:

Essential reading for students of the short story genre.......2005-03-05

O'Connor's in-depth analysis goes to the heart of what the short story genre is about. It is written with unstinting commitment and erudition, and never strays into shallowness of any kind. For those who love his stories, it is perhaps surprising to find the beguiling storyteller in this academic vein. What is convincing is not so much his arguments as his evident passion and long reflection on the topics he chooses. To grapple with the theories he propounds, such as that of the short story representing "submerged populations" is to try and share a little in the maestro's genius. Something to come back to again and again. I'm sure my little review hardly does justice to it, so I suggest you read the book and see for yourself.

An influential but grotesquely dated work.......2005-01-27

There have been few fulllength studies of the short story, and Frank O'Connor's was one of the first and remains among the most influential. But it has held up miserably over the years. Even granted that he published the work in 1962, was it really necessary for O'Connor to refer so patronizingly to Katherine Mansfield as "the brassy little shopgirl of literature"? Or to treat Joyce's DUBLINERS as if it had been written in lightning on the summit of Mt. Sinai? (Of a sentence from "The Sisters," O'Connor writes, "You may play about as you please with alternatives to this phrase; you will find no combination of adjectives that will produce a similar effect, nor any way of reading the passage that will produce a different one.") Objectivity goes straight out the window; as a result, this study is much more useful as a picture of the literary attitudes of O'Connor's time than it is as any sort of rigorous study of the form it purports to analyze.

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