Reviews for Biodiversity and the Concept of Farmers' Rights in International Law Factual Background and ...

The average rating for Biodiversity and the Concept of Farmers' Rights in International Law Factual Background and ... based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-02-06 00:00:00 Kenneth Maliga Robert Hendrickson (b. 1933) is, to my mind, a wholly underrated writer of nonfiction. This masterful and granularly researched history of the department store was a very rewarding read. I would recommend anything this author has produced . You will find Hendrickson has quite a gamut of interests. This author has published a number of books on literature and linguistics. I have just started collecting books by him. This is an age of rapid slough. Technological change is in hyper-evolution now and cultural change follows apace on its heels. But those centuries adjacent to ours were slow movers quite often. This book was published in the late 1970s, when most observers would have believed that well-established brick-and-mortar stores and the rapidly proliferating malls were here to stay. The few big name chains that are still standing are mostly wobbly and the great flagship stores of yesteryear have mostly been gobbled up by the last store standing, Macy's, who has rebranded them. Don't by fooled by the "Illustrated" in the title. This is not a coffee table book. Its five hundred pages are mostly text. The illustrations that are present are pretty fantastic, though. There are so many surprises in here. I hadn't known of the great Equine Influenza Epidemic of 1872 and how that effectively crippled businesses in a time when everything was still run on horsepower. One comes away from this book marveling at how recent our "prosperity" is as a species. You come away with a feeling of gratitude for modern life and a feeling of vicarious sadness for how much deprivation even our recent ancestors suffered. Hendrickson labors painstakingly to help the reader visualize what early stores looked like, from the first department store ever, which was Parisian, to the recently vanished mercantile spaces of the twentieth century. He describes these vanished spaces in granular detail. I shudder to think how much research went into this book. (And this was before the internet and its fantastic archives! Imagine the legwork and phone interviews.) There are great business stories in here, the expected rags-to-riches tales, but also accounts of the struggles for women's rights and minority rights and how those played out in these novel environments that impacted culture so strongly. Department stores changed our culture in unprecedented ways. It's something you might not think about and might take for granted as background noise, but once you start to do so, things begin to fall in place. I began to suspect that Hendrickson was lexicographically-minded as I progressed through the thick tome. I kept encountering great etymological asides, too many to be coincidental. Sure enough, R.H. is seriously invested in the derivation of the words we use. This makes the book a double pleasure. And it makes me want to read the books he's published in that sphere.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-01-04 00:00:00 Kathleen Driscoll This gets five stars because it is the best existing history of the New School. Time to write a new one, somebody!!!