My neice and I read this a-page-at-a-time while on vacation. Now I'm buying it for her birthday. We enjoyed a daily chuckle and an occasional laugh out loud as we considered the musings of these insightful children. I have three babies of my own and my niece is a pre-med pediatric student. She and I identified with these letters and we wondered how God might answer. Our favorite: "Dear God; Maybe people in this world wouldn't kill each other so much if they had their own rooms. It works for my brother and me." If you have children under 10 and woder just what is going on in their busy minds, you HAVE to have a copy of this. If you don't have children and enjoy hearing the voice of innocence, you'll like this book too.

This book rather than the first in the series begins to flesh out the character of Richard Camellion. Here, he's called on by the US security agencies to stop a millionaires military takeover of the plot. Always exciting and full of action, the final assault on the millionaire's mansion is reminiscent of some of the best James Bond films.

The authors contend that the consolidation of pro hockey teams in Eastern Canada to form the National Hockey League was often a heavy handed, nasty affair. Nieforth and Holzman make a convincing case to restore the honour of Toronto's EJ Livingstone, who Frank Calder and the Ottawa and Montreal interests despised and wanted expelled from their company at all costs. "Deception and Doublecross" seemed to be the order of the day to reach this end. Holzman and Nieforth illustrate how the arm's length relationship that is incumbent on today's media was quite different in pro hockey's formative years where newspapers editors and columnists often held controlling interests in pro teams and arenas.

I also found the book quite rewarding in that it provided some insight into the character of many players and the forces that conspired to have them play on a particular team.

What is particularly impressive about the book is that the authors have clearly spent a lot of time carefully searching primary sources to arrive at their conclusions. All are footnoted and properly catalogued to allow interested parties to do further research.

I recommend this book for any hockey fan interested in the history of the game.

Irv Osterer
Ottawa, ON

Clearly written! Excellent choice of exercises! This will make a good reading for anyone even remotely interested in making decisions in health care or medicine. The methods and techniques elucidated here will be useful at all levels of the health care system. Get a copy of this book and do not drop it until you've read it all. Probably, the most comprehensible state-of-the-art textbook of medical decision sciences devoid of undue jargon.

In my humble opinion, although the copy editors should have been a little more attentive to some glaring typographical errors, this is a very important book, an important contribution to the mathematical development of the social sciences. Saari shows how one fundamental insight involving the subtle loss of available information when a whole is broken down into parts leads to surprising resolutions to a broad spectrum of mind boggling problems, dilemma's and paradoxes. Fundamentally, this book is all about recognizing cyclic thinking for what it is, and straightening it out.

Reading this book reminded me of another book I reviewed, titled _A Darwinian Left_, by Princeton University philosopher Peter Singer, in which he issued a call for "the development of a field of social research that shows the way towards a more cooperative society" (pg. 47). Singer should be pleased with Saari's book, as it makes a fundamental theoretical contribution along that line, and shows how to apply it.

The single most memorable part of Saari's book, to my mind (as something of a community activist), is Saari's analysis of the logic of a noise ordinance in Keweenaw County, Michigan. He uses this ordinance to illustrate how individual and societal rights can be logically consistent after all, in spite of a Theorem by another Nobel Laureate, Amartya Sen, which asserts something to the contrary. Another stand out, in my mind, is Saari's explanation of how the well known "Prisoner's Dilemma" is resolved by a slightly revised version of the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as they did to you."

Saari shows how Kenneth Arrow's seminal "Impossibility Theorem," which is often interpreted as a proof that can be no such thing as a fair and consistent voting method when there are more than 2 candidates, is based on fairness criteria which are inconsistent with one another. I learned in logic class that you can resolve a dilemma by eliminating an internal inconsistency of the argument. Saari does just that with Arrow's Theorem.

"Obviously," writes Saari, "whenever the actual conditions defining our decision procedures differ from what we intended, then unexpected conclusions and paradoxes can occur. This point, although obvious, is sufficiently important that I repeat it often enough to resemble a preacher banging on the pulpit." (pg. 26).

Many introductory math textbooks draw too strong a conclusion from Arrow's Theorem, and claim that it proves that a fair and consistent voting method is an impossibility when there are more than 2 candidates. To the contrary, his theorem only proves that there is no method which can satisfy all of his fairness criteria. In other words, Arrow proved that his criteria are inconsistent with one another. In particular, Saari shows that Arrow's "Binary Independence" criterion is inconsistent with non-cyclic outcomes. We must remember that "fairness" is not a strictly objective thing. It necessarily involves an evaluative judgment, and is based on questionable intuitions. Arrow's Theorem may be interpreted as providing a good reason to subject his fairness criteria to further scrutiny, to try to understand why his particular criteria are inconsistent with each other, and to come up with more satisfactory results with other elementary fairness criteria or axioms. Saari interprets and scrutinizes Arrow's Theorem in exactly this way, and comes up with more satisfying results. Among other things, he finds that, if Arrow's "binary independence" condition is slightly modified so as to require a procedure to pay attention to the strength of a voters preferences (he calls his version the "intensity of binary independence" condition), then the Borda Count procedure solves the problem and satisfies the theorem.

Now, I am no professional voting theorist, but I have studied this subject and his work in some depth, and I think Saari has made a very important contribution to voting theory. At least two other ground breaking voting theorists, Amartya Sen and Kenneth Arrow, have received Nobel Prizes in Economics for their contributions. It seems to me that Saari should the next.

This Study Guide is essential if you are a Maritime Academy student.

'Delphi in Depth' is the best book I have found on understanding Delphi. I have 14 books on Delphi and this book is a must have, for anyone serious about learning and using Delphi. It is useful for both the novice and expert programmer. The explainations and CD examples are simple and direct, showing you HOW, but also explaining in plain english WHY and WHEN to use properties and methods.

J. Miro is a great modern artist, whose painting express many feelings. This book presents us to the Miro s biography and pictures. Going trough Miro and othes modern paintings paintings the author discuss depression and its expression in art. There are many paintings that express feelings as sadness (example Dali self report), anxiety , helplesness and fear (The Scream). One thing very interesting about this book is that the author mixed clinical features about depression and compare to art tecniques like what colour was used and why. This subjects leads us to K. G. Jung s theory about mind and expression on feelings and desires, he proposed a colective self, what justify why many different painters (and sculpters, writters,...) propose, in different cultures, the same way to express feelings, in this case depressive feelings. Talking about depression and art expression in this moment, going to the next millenium, is very important; after all, depression is the century desease - the first cause of working disability according to World Health Organization (1996) and, art expression is the way men talk to human heart and share theirs feelings.

This book is excilent reading and is very informitive. It also is a helpful tool in family research this book has all the answers and more, I know that if you choose to read this book you will not only enjoy it you will have a great knowlage of your family history.