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Originally Posted by $5 submissions
No, but I've read "Discipline and Punish." A lot of the issues he explored resonates now more than ever--the Panopticon, the reliance on statistics as instruments of control and conversion of human habit and behavior to numbers.
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Did a little research on the book. Very interesting.
But the book I was refering to, Foucault's Pendulum, is another book by Umberto Eco, the author of Name of the Rose.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/034...lance&n=283155
Student of philology in 1970s Milan, Casaubon is completing a thesis on the Templars, a monastic knighthood disbanded in the 1300s for questionable practices. At Pilades Bar, he meets up with Jacopo Belbo, an editor of obscure texts at Garamond Press. Together with Belbo's colleague Diotallevi, they scrutinize the fantastic theories of a prospective author, Colonel Ardenti, who claims that for seven centuries the Templars have been carrying out a complex scheme of revenge. When Ardenti disappears mysteriously, the three begin using their detailed knowledge of the occult sciences to construct a Plan for the Templars[...] In his compulsively readable new novel, Eco plays with "the notion that everything might be mysteriously related to everything else," suggesting that we ourselves create the connections that make up reality. As in his best-selling The Name of the Rose, he relies on abstruse reasoning without losing the reader, for he knows how to use "the polyphony of ideas" as much for effect as for content. Indeed, with its investigation of the ever-popular occult, this highly entertaining novel should be every bit as successful as its predecessor. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/89. -- Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"