The title says "Basic Electronic Theory" but it seems more a glossed over tour through the world of Electronics. It started out ok showing basic resistors, capacitor, inductors for dc and ac circuits. It was surprisingly light on mathematics considering you need to use math to determine current, total resistance and the like. It began to unravel after the chapter on tubes. Classes of amplifiers were given a paragraph each. Power supplies were mentioned with nothing mentioned on how to design one. Horn went into basic radio amplification and antenna. Mentioning Hedrodyne in only one small paragraph!!! Everything was glossed over. A lot of this material could have been left out to focus more on the basics. He writes about antennas and wavelengths (so-so) yet never defined or mentioned wavelength in the book so the beginner can follow him. The chapter on stereos should have been dropped. CD one paragraph. The material is dated on computers and stereos.(Pre-internet boon) Microprocessors were explaned in block diagram format. Lousy questions like which method is popular. Who cares which is popular when you happen to have a rare unit that needs to be fixed with that technology. Stages of a radio receiver? Basic TV? The math it did have had errors and were jumbled up in the text. The book was easy to read though. The experiments could have been design better. What beginner is going to have a signal generator? Recommended only as light reading to see what electronics is all about or as a refresher. I'm not an expert on electronics. I read over 500 pages and really didn't feel I got anything out of it. Get a good text book.

Being a baseball fan, a Mets fan, and a Gary Carter fan, I thought I would like this book and learning more about the man. The closer I got, the less I liked.

There was a lot to like in the book. The parts about his family, especially his brother, mother and father are wonderful. I also felt he was given a bum rap in Montreal, he was roundly criticized for NOT being a baseball mercenary. He was scorned by his druggie teammates for his love of the French-Canadian fans.

But I started to dislike Carter after he talked about his love for Jesus for the 60000th time in the book. While I admire and respect his religious sincerity, he forces it down the reader's throats way too often. And it is quite clear that he is scornful, hostile and intolerant of those who do not give their lives to Jesus as he does.

Beyond that, there is little humility to the man that is not surrendered to Jesus. He comes across as a religious fanatic. Maybe he did not mean to come across this strongly, but he does. If I wanted to read a religious biography, I would look at Billy Graham. This is definitely not what I wanted.

This is a 192 page sermon based on the life of Abraham as given in the Old Testament. The only reference material used was the King James version of the Bible (and a certain amount of the author's speculation). This book attempts to use the life of Abraham to illustrate Christian theology. Book itself originally written approx. 100 years ago, rather than in 1996 when it was edited for publication. I strongly suspect all other works by F.B. Meyer to be in the same vein.

Not a great deal of new insight here. I did learn a bit more than I knew, however, about Meade's failure to pursue at Gettysburg. Mr. Boritt is the editor and author of one essay; other essays are by four historians: Stephen W. Sears, Mark E. Neely, Jr., Michael Fellman, and John Y. Simon. (Alan J. Jacobs

the book is infomrative but dry. great for research but not as interesting as i had hoped. also i would recommend it as one's sole resource in a paper. overall good background on the subject matter though.

This social welfare study does a decent job of critiquing the local system. It is only for those already knowledgeable though about Israeli history and society. Being only semi-informed, I was lost for much of the work, and I think most other Americans would be similarily confused.

For people who are interested in resolving the question whether there is some truth behind the image of the "smart Jew", this book is NOT to be recommended. One would expect that Gilman sets out to test the hypothesis "Are Jews (on average) more intelligent than gentiles?" on the basis of the available evidence. And this is certainly a testable hypothesis. However, as the book's subtitle suggests, Gilman's review is not intended as such a test. On the contrary, from the beginning, Gilman starts out with the conviction that the idea of a Jewish superiority in intelligence is absurd and solely motivated by racist thinking. Correspondingly, he treats all the reviewed studies alike, as though there were no differences in their quality, be it conceptually or empirically. Instead of evaluating the particular merits and pitfalls of each single study one by one, Gilman presents us a hopeless mix of reported science and morals. He paints a picture of a scientific enterprise which is hopelessly lost in its preconceptions and which from the outset was bound to fail, because (as Gilman just knows) there ARE no differences to be found.

Several times, Gilman responds to scientific arguments with non-scientific, moralistic ones. For example, after introducing the work of Raphael Patai (The Jewish Mind, 1977) and Kevin MacDonald (A people that shall dwell alone. Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy, 1994), he accuses these authors of being tactless in using the term "selection" as likely process which has shaped Jewish IQ, because it reminds Gilman of the "selection" in the Nazi concentration camps during the holocaust. Here, the author clearly instrumentalizes the suffering of Nazi-victims, because the kind of genetic selection Patai and MacDonald propose is one acting through traditional Jewish practices in choosing a suitable partner for marriage, not one through between-group homicide. After presenting this (scientifically invalid) moral argument Gilman doesn't make any attempt to present scientific arguments against the actual evidence for Jewish eugenic practice on intelligence as a heritable trait. To him the idea is obviously too absurd (and obscene at that) to deserve serious consideration, and empirical evidence doesn't seem to count anything in Gilmans social constructivist approach.

For Gilman, even to hypothesize that there may be differences between groups such as Jews and gentiles amounts to no less than racism. To be sure, there have been several scientists with strong racist views, but certainly not all of them were of that kind. Here, Gilman is unable or unwilling to make any distinction between bad and better science. Any scientifically untested racist statement made by some historic scientist is scored equal to obviously more serious studies undertaken by (often Jewish) researchers. Gilman seems also unable or unwilling to distinghish between the study of group differences and group discrimination which strongly implies that he is not used to making a difference between the "is" and the "ought". This feature alone disqualifies him for handling the subject, because from his personally favored "ought" only one of two possible "is'" can follow.

In conclusion, Gilman fails to show that there isn't any truth in the idea of Jewish superior intelligence beyond social construction. Therefore, only readers who share Gilman's preconceptions about the topic will enjoy reading this book, while all other readers will find this book hardly challenging. But then: what is the use of a book which doesn't have the power to challenge one's mind, but only to please it?

There's little I can add to the German reviewer's excellent summation of this huffy puffy tract, except that nearly every sentence on the audiotape edition should be read with the proper gasping inhalation. (As in, "How dare you! ")

I also want to balance the number of stars the poor Deutscher mistakenly awarded it!

interesting book. it discusses how the myth that jews are smart, has developed. It does'nt answer the question 'are jews smarter?' and actually, in a very academic unbiased research, it concludes that such a question can't be answered.

This book is one of the worst I've come across about the Civil War era. The chapters on Lincoln will suffice in showing the overall value of the work. While some characterizations of Lincoln are on the money, the author completely and inexcusably overlooks the fallacies in Lincoln's views on slavery. For example, during the Lincoln-Douglas debates the author ignores Lincoln's view that blacks should be free yet shouldn't vote, intermarry, serve in the militia etc. The author also invokes too many times the worn-out cliche of the stereotypical southerner who wants to lynch blacks at every turn. Also a negative point in the book is the weird inclusion of a chapter on the myth of the Old West. The author strangely attacks John Wayne and Paul Harvey (!?) for daring to believe that individualism reigned in the Old West. Also the author exposes some liberal racism in implying that blacks and Indians don't need to "make it on the own." Pick up some other book on the Civil War and it will surely be worth your time.

This work of essays about Civil War era people isn't well done at all. While some material, especially on Lincoln, is good the tome lags in many areas. For example, the author entertains the asinine theory that the Southern states were plotting to extend slavery into the North prior to the Civil War. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Also the author ignores the possibility that the reason that the South seceded from the Union was not that they didn't believe Lincoln's promise about not interfering with slavery but that they were afraid of loosing the balance of power in the senate. This scenario would have surely happened if slavery was prevented from spreading. Another example of how lackluster the book is the chapter on the Old West included for no apparent reason other than to provide the author an opportunity to needlessly attack John Wayne, Nixon, and Paul Harvey about individualism. The author contends that it didn't exist in the Old West but he is wrong. While certain things brought people together, most settlers were too far away to do this on a daily basis. This is a prime reason why the pioneers were such easy pickings for Indian war parties, outlaws, and others like them. General Sherman, who was in charge for the defense of the West for a time, stated this as a prime reason why the army couldn't protect all of the settlers. There are many more books worth a serious reader's time than this book.

It is simply astonishing that a publishing house such as Doubleday would publish a book like this, and market it as a comprehensive introduction to the group. As Bryan Brickner pointed out in his review here, Abraham is a PK insider, and this book is essentially just one long press release or advertisement for the organization. Of course the book doesn't have one negative word about PK or Bill McCartney, or at least none that aren't "spun" to their advantage and for their benefit.

Abraham's book claims to provide an in-depth commentary on the Promise Keepers with the stated goal of helping the reader understand the recent Christian men's movement. In many ways it does accomplish this goal. But the book cover claims that Abraham is acting as the "eyes and ears of an inquisitive person who hears about Promise Keepers and wonders what it is all about." This is only partly true, and somewhat misleading.

How objective can Abraham really be when he fails to discuss his own involvement with another Promise Keeper project, Bill McCartney's book What Makes A Man? (1992). In What Makes a Man?, published five years prior to his recent work, Abraham appears to be more than an inquisitive person. In McCartney's book Abraham contibutes three essays echoing common PK themes ranging from the futility of trying to be good under one's own power to a man's struggle with temptation and the issue of Christian accountability.

"Who are the Promise Keepers" is simply a sympathetic examination and defense of the movement and not just the analysis of an inquisitive person. Perhaps Abraham's conclusion that the Promise Keepers are simply who they say they are (202) would be more appropriately summarized as "We Promise Keepers are simply who we say we are"?

Wordy editorial by Russell. He talks about many things other than Lincoln's life. Interesting to people that are VERY familar with the era (history professors), but not to the person looking for an historic account of Lincoln's life. Did not even want to finish this book it was so boring.