In recommending a book like this, one is tempted to fall back on cliches such as 'brilliant insights', 'original perspectives', etc. The origina lity of this book is on a different plane. The problem of subject and object has been central to Western philo sophic thinking at least since the time of Descartes. So much so that many students of philosophy see it as the philosophical problem. In his Mundus Cognobilis and Mundus Causalis Mr. Mes offers an ontological-epistemological view, the originality of which consists precisely in the fact that it is not an innovation. Rather, it seeks to put 'in order' the elements already at hand in such a way as to show the subject-object paradox to be non-existent where it seems to be significant and trivial where it really does occur. He has a new and interesting perspective both on what 'materialism' might mean and on how a 'scientific' view of the world has to be constructed. 'Energy-patterns' emerge as explanatory ulti mates, although there is no effort to arrive at any sort of ultimate meta physics.

Poetry. Translated from the Italian by Michael Daley. ALTER MUNDUS (Other World) is a collection of poems, some love poems and some political poems, by Italian poet Lucia Gazzino. The poems are translated by American poet Michael Daley, and the collection includes a preface by Ivano Malcotti and an introduction by Jack Hirschman.

"Take example, all ye that this do hear or see..." The Morality Play was popular in England between 1400 and 1600. It offers moral instruction and spiritual teaching with personal abstractions representing good and evil. Surviving plays from that period number about sixty and the three in this edition were among the first ten. Mankind is a plain, honest farming man who struggles against worldly and spiritual temptation. The bawdy humour and violent action in the play serve to make the moral point and instruct by example. Everyman portrays a man's struggles in the face of death to raise himself to a state of grace so that he may experience everlasting life. It is exceptional among the Moralities for this narrow focus on the last phase of life, and conveys its message with awe-inspiring seriousness. Mundus et Infans is more typical of the Morality genre. It shows an arrogant, bullying protagonist led astray by a single evildoer into a life of debauchery, before the inevitable conversion to virtue. In showing the whole of man's life it is the antithesis of Everyman, the action of which seems to take place in a single day.