As a Traffic Safety Specialist, this book is a MUST, this old book needs to be mandatory reading for any person interested in Road Safety, Ralph documented the resistance of car companies to the introduction of safety features, like safety belts, that looks timely today, for example with the lobby that produce a delay in the mandatory fitting of air bags. Also you will learn how the primitive road safety components, still used in USA, called the three E's (Engineering, Enforcement, Education ) was born as a device to direct the efforts to the community away from the real problems of safety of the vehicles, some of the that was sell with tires that don't resist the weight of the fully loaded vehicle !.

Finally you can understand the lacking level of road safety in US versus European countries that have in service safety policies that will reduce the absolute number of killed by 30% over 5 years.

This book is the necessary building stone to the effort to make car manufacturers accountable for the safety level of his products.

I can't understand why some publisher is not doing a new edition of it.

I got this book a while ago and I really love it! The pictures are beautiful and it's a lovely story. I'lld definately recomend it to anyone aged 5-105!

A landmark in Vaughan Williams criticism. The book handles questions both of intellectual milieu (Frogley's essay on English musical identity relates it to a wider movement) and of Vaughan Williams's musical art. The essay on VW's use of rhythm is outstanding, thoroughly refuting the picture of him as some musical bumpkin, but essays of this type require some familiarity with the nuts and bolts of music as well as the ability to read it. The book well rewards the effort it requires. This has become a favorite book, one that I reread.

This is a brilliant piece of work, and extremely relevant today. Had America had an Operational Intelligence (OpIntel) Plot (24/7 operationally-oriented put it all together all the time watch center), I daresay the terrorist attacks on America would have been prevented in good time.


I started reading this book the week prior to the attacks, having bought it off the shelves of the Army War College bookstore, whose judgment I have always respected, and I have been absolutely absorbed--thrilled--with the deep insights that this work provides on how best to manage an operationally-oriented watch center that does "all-source fusion" against a constantly changing real-time real-world threat.

It became clear to me as I worked through every word of this superior work that modern intelligence has become too bureaucratic and that all-source analysis has become too distant from both the sources and the consumers. The Operational Intelligence Center (OIC) whose story is told here worked with no fewer than seventeen distinct sources streams, each with its own idiosyncrasies, its own fits and starts--and it worked directly with its operational clients, fully appraised of friendly plans and intentions and able to provide workmanlike inputs at every turn. We need to get back to this approach!

There are a number of vital lessons to be learned from this book, which I recommend in the strongest terms as one of my "top ten" relevant *today*. Among them:

Sharing Secrets Matters. It was the Russians who helped the British get started in 1914 with a gift of a German Naval Signal book, and it was the Poles who saved the day early on in World War II with a gift of two working Enigma machines.

Ops Must Sleep With Intel. Too many times I have seen operators ignore intelligence because they do not understand it-there are too many breakdowns in communication along the way, and if the operators have not trained with, lived with, slept with, caroused with, their intelligence counterparts, the two cultures do not come together effectively in times of crisis.

Ops Cannot Do Raw Sources. The corollary of the above is that Ops simply cannot keep up with the nuances of sources and is not able to evaluate sources in context to good effect.

Intel Must Sleep With Ops. The intelligence propensity to compartment everything to the point of meaningless, and the "green door" mentality that is especially characteristic of the crypto-analysis community, amounts to a death wish. Some secret sources must be "ultra" secret, but some form of bridge is needed-the OpIntel Center (which the U.S. Navy, alone within today's US secret bureaucratic archipelago, does well) appears to be a vital and relevant solution.

Plots Must Be Co-Located and Ideally Integrated. Early separation and distance between the intelligence plot, the commercial shipping plot and the operational plot leads to waste and death. Ultimately an integrated plot, or at least a blue-green plot next door to the red plot, is absolutely vital to effective prosecution of real-time war.

Lose the Old Guys. The first thing that needs doing when preparing for a long war is to lose the old guys. No disrespect intended, but as has been documented time and again, those that get promoted in peacetime bureaucracies tend to be too conformist and too subservient to peacetime protocols to adapt well to unconventional and very fast-moving wartime conditions. [Present company always excepted!.]

Hire the Retired. This is not a contradiction. Old guys with big egos and high ranks have to go-but bringing in the best of the retired, generally at the field grade level, can have an extraordinary positive impact in the rapid maturation and stabilization of the full-speed-ahead wartime watch.

Doctrinal Disputes Kill. Unless there is a homeland defense doctrine that fully integrates and exercises the capabilities and internal cultures of the Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, and civilian agencies (and civilian agencies!) there will be a year or two of major and almost catastrophic losses until it gets sorted out the hard way.

Home Arrogance Kills (UK Version). The persistent unwillingness of home side personnel to admit that their own security measures can be broken by clever enemies, and the general sloppiness of all hands with respect to Operations Security (OPSEC) will take a heavy toll.

Home Arrogance Kills (US Version). There is a theme with regard to the Americans. While their money and their manpower are gratefully accepted, their arrogance knows no bounds. They entered the war believing that there was nothing the British could teach them-further on into the war, the Americans risked Ultra by acting too aggressively on its information.

Red Cell Oversight Needed. One thing that jumped out at me from this book was the urgent need for having a very senior person-a retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example, managing a Red Cell to provide oversight over operational decisions to exploit the most sensitive sources. [By this I mean, a senior authority who can overrule and forbid operations whose success might endanger the special source.]

Negative Reports Matter. I was really struck by the circumstances surrounding a German break-out up the Channel, in which a number of normally reliable and overlapping intelligence collection endeavors all were forced back by weather, broken down or what-not. From this I took the lesson that negative reports matter. By failing to report to the OIC on their non-status, they failed to focus the OIC on all the possibilities. Thinking the flank covered, the OIC left the flank open.

Tommy Brown Matters. The book ends on a marvelous note, pointing out that without the heroism of Tommy Brown, a 16 year old cabin boy and youngest recipient of the George Medal as well as two other adults who died in the process of grabbing vital enemy signals materials off a sinking vessel, the allies would have been deaf for much of 1943. At the end of the day the best technical intelligence comes down to a brave human who risks all to make it possible.

A typical trail drive story. Lots of problems but what would you expect when you're driving thru a thousand miles of Indians, harsh land wet and dry, raining hard and hotter than the worst desserts. You may have survived the civil war but this is a different story. Another very intertaining trail drive except Mr. Compton had just to many rain storm disasters.

This text covers most of the areas important for neurobiologists who wish to make electrochemical measurements. It includes chapters on the surface chemistry of carbon microelectrodes, understanding of the environment in which measurements are made (e.g. diffusion), and a number of different biological appraoches in which electrochemical measurements have been made. These range from single cell to whole animal studies. Each chapter is written in the style of the presenting lab, and gives a clear insight both into the methodology they use, and the questions they address.

The characters are as follows: an angry psychic, a melancholy serial killer, a beautiful but troubled female lawyer, a boisterous policeman, a caring nurse, an adolescent ghost, a wise secretary, an incognito hooker, and a very busy specialty foods caterer. Oh, there is a brief cameo by an angel.

Bek, a bank executive, kills himself after the affair he was having with his boss's wife ends badly. He is brought back after dying and finds that he has the ability to read things about people he could have no way of knowing. Because his life was empty and his death wasn't much better, Bek decides to use his new gift to bring torment to as many people as possible as a way to get back at God. He opens an office and gives tarot readings. The police use him to track a serial killer, but Bek instead chooses to help the killer. The killer befriends Bek and teaches him inadvertently that all actions have consequences. Bek learns that everyone is in fact interconnected, and that he has actually caused his own anguish. Bek then tries as much as he can to correct the harm he has done and discovers more than he ever expected about how the universe works.

This book originated from 12 radio talks given by Karl Jaspers, right after World War II. It is written in an extremely lucid and direct manner, and it is more of an introduction to the art, or process, of philosophising rather than to philosophy itself as a discipline. In this book existential philosophy, the brand of philosophy so successfuly cultivated by Jaspers, is described, so to speak, "from inside". There is hardly any analysis of philosophical terms, but rather a presentation of the inner process of approach to the metaphysical questions confronting the individual person. Jaspers belongs to the great idealist tradition, initiated by Plato, developed further by the medieval schoolmen, and lastly by Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schelling, Soeren Kirekegaard and others. According to Jaspers the core-meaning of man's identity is his sense of freedom. Freedom is presented as an immediate datum of consciousness, as that part of man's personality which "evades all object knowledge but is always present in him as a potentiality". Irrespective of what is omitted, this book offers a subject-matter of impeccable honesty and undiluted spirituality. This is a great book superbly well written. Also, the translation by Ralph Manheim is quite masterly. It is an out and out example of what every translation should actually be: a representation in another language of the meaning and style of the original text.

This great book, writen by Dr. Taggart, is probably the single greatest source of information about weather sats, both low orbiting and geostationary. Construction articles allow even a novice to build antennas for the low orbiting birds. Many photos show how your station needs to be set up as well as pictures from the sats themselves. In the back of the book is several pages of advertisements related to the subject matter. This a great reading book and one you must have for your collection.

Ostensibly a year's worth of notes from the writer's journal, consisting of personal reflections and diurnal observations of the author's life and environment, this book can also be construed as a novel in the form of a journal, and as such, a work of genuine innovation. Handke's miniaturist style lends itself perfectly to these discrete entries, each a completed essay or prose poem; the book is a perfect match of temperament and form, and arguably Handke's finest work to date. Some entries speak to the power of language--even in translation--to evince startlingly fresh images of time-worn subjects, e.g., trees in wind; others transform the banalities of contemporary experience, e.g., the sound of the television from a neighboring house, suburban detritus, etc., into indelible literary images. These are not rough notes but polished paragraphs in Handke's finest style. Though this book is a gift to readers with small amounts of free time or short attention spans, it has a de facto dramatic structure, central to which is the author's confinement in a hospital and relationship as a single father to his son. The work is, finally, moving as well as eloquent.

This book made Harold Bloom's Western Canon as one of the achievements of the century; it's one of the few I have read twice. Except for his controversial politics, Handke has tended to be overlooked in this country, but he deserves the attention of everyone who considers him/herself a serious reader. I consider Weight of the World optimal Handke.