The Portable Abraham Lincoln is just that, a small book packed with nothing but Lincoln's words and ideas, from the famous debates with Stephen Douglas to his immortal 2nd Inaguaral Address.

Mixed throughout the speeches are letters, both public and private, which reveal his inner thoughts and animating philosophy. Included is his short and moving letter to Mrs. Lydia Bixby, featured in the movie Saving Private Ryan, which is the most eloquent expression of patriotic grief I have ever read.

The book is organized in themes, from his emergence of a polictian to his writings as Chief Executive and as Commander-in-Chief, and ending up with Fate.

This book is for people who want to go beyond the soundbytes featured in documentaries; it places those famous phrases in the context of the entire speech and the commentary is kept to a minimum, showing respect for the reader.

This is a nice collection of technical papers by statisticians and other researchers in the field of quality and product improvement. It includes many papers from Canadians with several contributions from the group at the University of Manitoba. It is not a star-studded group of well-known names. The editor Bovas Abraham is certainly well-known and has contributed to article in the text. I also recognized M. S. Srivastava who is known for contributions and texts in multivariate analysis, Subir Ghosh from Riverside California who works in experimental design and the Kocherlakotas from Winnipeg Manitoba.

To make it a little more attractive to general audiences the editors have reprinted one of George Box's articles on scientific learning. Box's article was originally published in the proceedings in computational statistics in 1996 but certainly fits well into a volume like this. Box's philosophy on the iterative nature of scientific learning is always interesting and thought-provoking.

There are a total of 60 authors and 35 articles. A variety of topics are included and most of the papers are oriented toward applications with real examples and case studies.

Part I is on statistics and quality and includes Box's paper, a conceptual paper on variance reduction in manufacturing, roles of academic statisticians as consultants to industry and understanding the prevention focus of QS-9000 contrasted to the control focus of ISO-9000. It includes a total of 5 papers.

Part II deal with statistical process control. In addition to papers on the latest advances in control charting including automatic feedback control type methods there are papers on process capability indices with a thorough and accurate treatment of the subject. Carlsson's article is a very scholarly treatment that points out the pitfalls of naive use of process control indices and he refers to the very nice elementary articles by Gunter. I also referenced Gunter's articles in my book on the bootstrap where I applied the bootstrap to an example of estimating Cpk. Carlsson refers to the vast literature on these indices including the book by Kotz and Johnson that summarizes advances up to 1993 including the bootstrap approaches. The work on Vannman is also cited.
Carlsson's contribution is to generalize the Cpm index for unstable processes (due to a moving process mean) where there are assignable causes for the shift that can be modeled through an ANOVA model.

Kocherlakota and Kocherlakota provide a very technical paper on the statistical behavior of certain process capability index estimates when the observations come from a contaminated bivariate normal distribution (i.e. a mixture of two bivariate normals with a common covariance matrix but a shift in the mean vector). Part II consists of 11 papers

Part III covers the design and analysis of experiments and includes 9 papers including coverage on robust design, process optimization, aspects of TQM and some practical issues. The paper by Ghosh and Lopez covers how probability plots in factor screening experiments can be misleading. They also deal with methods for handling missing data.

Part IV contains articles on statistical methods for determining reliability and consists of 6 articles. It includes an article by Ratnaparkhi and Park on the application of generalized linear models in reliability studies for composite materials.

Last but not least Part V deals with statistical methods for quality improvement and consists of 4 papers. Some of these papers are a little unusual. Murdoch introduces a variation of Gibbs sampling in order to construct confidence regions for measurement uncertainty efficiently when up to 10 model parameters are involved. Gupta and Iannuzzi use logit and probit analysis methods to determine if devices used to detect antibiotics in milk meet regulatory requirements on sensitivity.

I found this book to be interesting for its personal stories and perspective, but this is also what makes its downfall. Lamon was a personal acquaintance of Lincoln's and it is evident that he revered the man greatly. This gives way to much bias being placed on Lamon's accounts, failing to mention many negative things about the assassinated president. Lamon refrains from using opinionated words in much of the biography, but his personal opinions are sometimes evident. This book is kept interesting through his personal stories and the hand-written letters that are included. It is good as a resource about Abraham Lincoln, but take Lamon's opinions with a grain of salt.

Peter Abrahams books all have one thing in common, they make you want to read them again. (It is kind of like a movie that you want to watch again and again so you can catch the killer when he shows his hand early in the movie.) He has several story lines going at one time and when you get about halfway through the book you are compelled to finish! He is very good at depicting the female characters, even though he is male. I have read all but three books in the last month and I am ravenous for more.

This book is difficult to read if you don't follow Urbach's line of reasoning on a number of issues, but the its scope makes it a valuable tool for virtually anyone in the field of Jewish studies. The book has two indexes (one by topic, one by texts mentioned) which help the reader make use of the many obscurer texts that Urbach quotes, some of them virtually impossible to find in translation anywhere. Urbach himself is deeply steeped in a humanistic concept of the evolution of religions, that is, that Monotheism is something that an originally polytheistic Jewish people 'made up' at some point in history, and they have been refining this invention throughout the ages. This can render the book problematic to Orthodox Jews and Fundamentalist Christians, but the sheer wealth of material has made the book a valuable reference to me, even though I hold to the opinion that the biblical religion is revealed, rather than made up. The book is well organized by 'doctrine' or belief, and Urbach does an excellent job of quoting the texts that he uses to come to his conclusions about what the Rabbis believed, when and where they believed it, and how the belief changed over time. He is guilty of an over reliance on various (fallible) opinions about the dating and authorship of a number of these texts, some of them so nebulous as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Over all, Urbach has the same over confidence betrayed by humanist scholars who sometimes forget to check the limits of their knowledge about this ancient people, but the book he has written is so thorough and massive that it cannot be anything other than valuable to any budding Judaist.

Chapter headings include: Belief in one God, The Shekhina, Omnipresence and Heaven, Power of God, Magic and Miracle, Power of the Divine Name, The Celestial Retinue, Man, Providence, Written and Oral Law, and other fascinating subjects. Sticky subjects such as the two messianic concepts in Judiasm are handled in depth. Ancient Rabbinical sources (Talmud and older Midrash, Halacha, and Aggada) are preferred, and the Judaism that is explained here is that of the 2nd Temple period and early Christian era, closing with the completion of the generation of the Amoraim, as opposed to the Medieval Judaism of Maimonides and the like.

I highly recommend this book, despite Urbach's occasional blunder, to anyone seriously interested in Judiasm and the ancient Jewish literary corpus.

"The Story of Ford's Theater and the Death of Lincoln" really does focus on the assassination of the President has more photographs of Ford's Theater than it does specific history on the actual theater. Zachary Kent's narrative begins with the mortally wounded Lincoln being carried from Ford's Theater across the street to William Petersen's boardinghouse and then goes back in time to cover Lincoln's election and the Civil War, setting up what happened in the first two weeks of April 1865. Kent, who has been studying the Presidents and collecting items about America's leaders since he was a child, covers the assassination attempt in its entirety, from the plotting of the conspirators, to the assassination attempts on Lincoln and other leaders of the government, the death watch on the President, and the final fate of the conspirators. Warning: while there are contemporary photographs of Ford's Theater and the Petersen House, along with reproductions of broadsides and artwork of these events, there is also a photograph of the four conspirators hanging on the gallows. I have to question whether that particular photo was necessary to include in a book published by Children's Press for upper elementary students, especially since the book already has photographs of each of the conspirators and there are several photos of the four condemned on the gallows before the traps were released. This book is part of the "Cornerstones of Freedom" series, which covers events in American History from the Mayflower Compact to Apollo 11.

This book offer you a real cutoof for type your technical documents, and stimulate you to study in depth TeX. No more excuse for type my document with a professional style. . . This a serious book with a good, but no tedious, technical support and can be the fastest reference guide

Its the best tin can book in the whole world and I love it with my hole heart. This book helped me to make different arts out of tin even thought I am a poor crafts person! Its a must have!!!!

This Devotional really can help you in your walk with God through the experience of others such as the great Billy Graham or Max Lucado. This book is awesome and very insightful into every Christian's walk.

I remember this interesting book from the 1970s. It begins with a corporate president interviewing three auditing firm representatives. The president asks, "How much is two plus two?"

#1 replies, "It's four."
#2 replies, "It ranges from three to five."
#3 replies, "What do you want it to be?"

Just guess who got the engagement. Given the recent fiasco at Enron, and the stuff that's starting to emerge over Arthur Andersen's ebola-virus-meltdown of an audit at Enron, "Unaccountable Accounting" might offer information that is as pertinent as ever in the book-cooking world of big business.

P.S. It's a good thing Andersen is a partnership, and not a publicly-held company. That way, there won't be a whole lot of damage to the public when the firm gets sued into oblivion over this Enron mess.