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Robert Peckham

Book Description

April 2, 2013

Imperial Contagions argues that there was no straightforward shift from older, enclavist models of colonial medicine to a newer emphasis on prevention and treatment of disease among indigenous populations as well as European residents. It shows that colonial medicine was not at all homogeneous “on the ground” but was riven with tensions and contradictions. Indigenous elites contested and appropriated Western medical knowledge and practices for their own purposes. Colonial policies contained contradictory and cross-cutting impulses. This book challenges assumptions that colonial regimes were uniformly able to regulate indigenous bodies and that colonial medicine served as a “tool of empire.”

Review

Europeans in Asia developed powerful anxieties about contagion and made many plans to keep it at a safe distance. Commercial ventures depended on mobility of people and goods, yet for the personal safety of their members, the Europeans in Asia wished to stabilize and control the spaces they inhabited and the behaviors of those around them. By exploring the tensions and contradictions that arose from these efforts to stay safe, the authors — among the best authorities now writing — offer not only fascinating accounts of historical events but fresh views of the processes often termed colonial or imperial.

(Harold J. Cook, author of Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age )
This substantial collection greatly enriches our understanding of medicine, disease, and policy in colonial Asia. The contributors, from a range of disciplines, grapple fruitfully with questions surrounding medical space and the shift from enclavism to public health. In doing so, they make important theoretical and empirical contributions to medical and imperial history.

(David Arnold, author of Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India )

About the Author

Robert Peckham is codirector of the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine and an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong.

David M. Pomfret is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong.

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Ralph Peters

5.0 out of 5 stars Equal to Cain at Gettysburg, Takes Fact-Based Fiction to New Level, May 13, 2013

I started this book, having given a rave review to Cain at Gettysburg convinced that the sequel would disappoint, as most sequels do.  Although I counted only five goosebump moments in this new book (Cain had six, The Killer Angels: The Classic Novel of the Civil War By Michael Shaara only had one), I have to rate it the equal of the earlier book, and also the linch pin book in what should be a series of at least four books, each – as the first two have been – a detailed study of men at war at all four levels (strategic, operational, tactical, technical). The concluding sentence in this book is brilliant, and it left me with precisely the sense of angst and anticipation for the next campaign as the author no doubt intended. If Cain was the thunderclap of divine providence, then Hell is the tough hard slog through mud during which the North adapts and learns lessons while Lee’s health worsens substantially, his weakness all the more grave because Longstreet is wounded and Stuart killed, leaving Lee with no bench, less Gordon as a late bloomer too easily ignored by his elders.

There is little doubt that with this book Ralph Peters has established a nearly impregnable position as the leading practitioner of historical fiction, taking it to a new level of accuracy and relevance to the military and political professionals who wage war, setting the gold standard for factual historical fiction that reveals the soul of those making history.

If I were to sum up the book in three words it would be leadership, logistics, and learning.

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Tom Atlee

What kind of power, for whom, and for what?

In this article I explore current trends in the evolution of power that have profound implications for our future. This is an appreciative critical review of Moises Naim’s new book THE END OF POWER: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be. I describe Naim’s views on challenges to current power regimes and how to meet them – and then offer my own views on the upsurge of sustainable forms of power and how to support them.

Moises Naim’s new book THE END OF POWER: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be should properly be called “The Decay of Power”. His thesis is that while it is becoming easier to get power, it is also becoming harder to use it to control others and harder to keep it once you have it.

Naim suggests that globalization, economic growth, a growing global middle class, the spread of democracy, and rapidly expanding telecommunications technologies have changed our world. Together these developments have created a fluid and unpredictable environment which has unsettled the traditional dominions of power.

Three revolutions, he says, “make it more difficult to set up and defend the barriers to power that keep rivals at bay.” He details these revolutions as follows:
* “the More revolution, which is characterized by increases in everything from the number of countries to population size, standards of living, literacy rates, and quantity of products on the market”;
* “the Mobility revolution, which has set people, goods, money, ideas, and values moving at hitherto unimagined rates toward every corner of the planet”; and
* “the Mentality revolution, which reflects the major changes in mindsets, expectations, and aspirations that have accompanied these shifts.”

In other words, says Naim, there is too much going on, too much moving around, too many changing demands and perspectives – and at any time someone new can show up and effectively challenge or undermine your power. In addition, “when people are more numerous and living fuller lives, they become more difficult to regiment and control.” Among other things, such people value transparency, human rights, and fairness to women and minorities – and they share a sense that “things do not need to be as they have always been – that there is always…a better way” and that they need not “take any distribution of power for granted.”

All this is happening at the very time when large hierarchical institutions are losing their “economies of scale” and becoming increasingly difficult to manage, while smaller, more flexible organizations and networks are proving increasingly successful.

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Sibel Edmonds

Sibel Edmonds’ new book, “Classified Woman,” is like an FBI file on the FBI, only without the incompetence.

The experiences she recounts resemble K.’s trip to the castle, as told by Franz Kafka, only without the pleasantness and humanity.

I’ve read a million reviews of nonfiction books about our government that referred to them as “page-turners” and “gripping dramas,” but I had never read a book that actually fit that description until now.

The F.B.I., the Justice Department, the White House, the Congress, the courts, the media, and the nonprofit industrial complex put Sibel Edmonds through hell. This book is her triumph over it all, and part of her contribution toward fixing the problems she uncovered and lived through.

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John Mack

By The Guardian TOP 500 REVIEWER

As Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard University Medical School, John Mack had the highest possible academic credentials. He was also a Pulitzer Prize-winning author for his biography of T. E. Lawrence, ‘A Prince of our Disorder.’

‘Passport to the Cosmos’ (PTTC) was Mack’s second and final book on the alien abduction issue, before his death in September 2004. It’s a thoughtful, coherent and readable essay; a more absorbing narrative than his earlier 1994 book “Abductions: Human Encounters with Aliens”. Whereas the earlier book episodically recounted the experiences of 13 different abductees in their own words but seemed reluctant to draw conclusions – beyond the obvious fact that the phenomenon was not psychiatric but (in some way) external to the experiencer and physically real – “PTTC” explores what it all might mean in terms of human consciousness and why our accepted “ontological notions of consensus reality” need to be expanded to accommodate this subversive intrusion into our world.

The author writes in Chapter One:

“…marshalling evidence that might conceivably satisfy the physical sciences `on their own turf’ has proved to be an elusive task. I will document experiencers’ reports with physical evidence where applicable, but my principal interest is in their pattern, meaning and potential implications for our understanding of reality and knowledge of ourselves in the universe.”

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Paul Hellyer

By Gerald MacLennon

Unlike our Asian counterparts, the West often fails to accord our wise elders the honor they deserve – the status they have earned by devoting their lives to love of, and service to humankind. Paul Hellyer of Canada is one such man. Born in 1923, he is very much a hero of the 20th century; yet he continues his vigorous momentum into the new century, preparing youth for the hopes and challenges that lie ahead.

As former Minister of Defense for Canada and cabinet member during both the Pearson and Trudeau administrations, Hellyer is certain that technology currently exists to replace the ecologically-destructive world oil economy. He argues that, while difficult and financially threatening to “big oil,” a gradual transition can, and must be implemented post haste, warning that ten years is just about all the time we have left before the ecological damage to our planet becomes irreversible.

“Failure to disclose a clean energy alternative to fossil fuels,” he writes, “is worse than a crime against humanity. It’s a crime against creation and the Creator.”

His book speaks volumes about crimes against planet Earth. He investigates them from many perspectives, laying out charges against perpetrators, and in his wisdom, offers rehabilitation plans to assure today’s youth that they will inherit a world redeemed from near destruction.

Minister Hellyer reminds his American readers of the long-standing economic dirty tricks, the incessant meddling in the internal affairs of other nations and myriads of injustices carried out by the United States government under the banner of democracy, freedom and, ironically, peace – also that, because of U.S. news media collusion, such outrages rarely reach the eyes and ears of the average Yankee.

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Charles James Hall

5.0 out of 5 stars Another testimony of TW visitors February 3, 2011

My summoned review of this book: “the most interesting one of the MH saga”.

In this book you can find the most revealing information about this human race.  While I was reading this book, a long sleeping memory re-ignited in my head: I ALSO met these people !! No joke I swear, this fisonomy matches exactly to that of 4 people that came across my hometown about 35 years ago:

On july 1975 (perhaps 1976) my family spent vacations in a little village named “Chera”, here in Spain located some 70 km inland from East coast (Valencia).
My uncle startled stood up during the street-laid supper and voiced: “what the heck is that thing”, spotting what he said “looked like a flying bus”.
Effectively all of us could see about 3000 feet high and 3 miles away, an strange object cruising from east to west in utter silence.  This sighting was at roughly 11 pm and lasted for no more than 30 secongs. This place is sorrounded by mountains and the object soon hid behind a ridge.

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Philip Corso

4.0 out of 5 stars Glimpse into government’s handling of UFO resources April 11, 2006

Before I begin my review, let me clarify that I have only a moderate curiosity in UFO’s and such. I’m not a skeptic or a believer, but someone who sees a field of study that’s intriguing, impossible to flat-out dismiss, and at the very least entertaining. Nevertheless I did pick up this book and read it. Here are my thoughts:

Many skeptics ask, “If the government DOES know something about aliens and UFOs, why, and how, do they keep it secret from everyone else?”

Col. Corso’s book gives a sober and convincing explanation for this. Rather than giving a broad overview, however, he wisely sticks to a specific description of his own hands-on experience and how he did the job he was asked to do. Specifically, as head of the Army’s Foreign Technology Desk in the Pentagon, Corso alleges he was in charge of “getting something useful” out of alien artifacts collected from the Roswell UFO crash in 1947.

Corso was faced with a challenge: How do you gather funding and personnel (many of whom are low-ranking) for a US Army R&D project on the Roswell UFO artifacts, while using “normal,” visible administrative channels, and keep it a secret from other branches of the government and even many of the individuals directly involved?

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Berto Jongman

2013  Computational Intelligence: A Methodological Introduction

2012 Computational Intelligence and Decision Making: Trends and Applications (Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering)

2012 Computational Intelligence and Its Applications: Evolutionary Computation, Fuzzy Logic, Neural Network and Support Vector Machine Techniques

2012 Computational Intelligence for Privacy and Security (Studies in Computational Intelligence)

2012 Modern Advances in Intelligent Systems and Tools (Studies in Computational Intelligence)

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Susan Landau

5.0 out of 5 stars Definitive text on the topic July 8, 2011

Ben Rothke

Surveillance or Security?: The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies is a hard book to categorize. It is not about security, but it deals extensively with it. It is not a law book, but legal topics are pervasive throughout the book. It is not a telecommunications book, but extensively details telco issues. Ultimately, the book is a most important overview of security and privacy and the nature of surveillance in current times.

Surveillance or Security? is one of the most pragmatic books on the topic is that the author never once uses the term Big Brother. Far too many books on privacy and surveillance are filled with hysteria and hyperbole and the threat of an Orwellian society. This book sticks to the raw facts and details the current state, that of insecure and porous networks around a surveillance society.

In this densely packed work, Susan Landau, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University details the myriad layers around surveillance, national security, information security and privacy. Landau writes that her concern is not about legally authorized law enforcement and nationally security wiretapping; rather about the security risks of building surveillance into communications infrastructures.