This was first published in 1959 after the election of John XXIII, and updated in 1964 and 1979 to include subsequent pontiffs. While Father Brusher's work is of somewhat limited use to the historian (being a Jesuit, he tends to over-emphasize the majesty of the office while being eager to explain away some of the truly awful men who served), it is perhaps the only volume ever published to attempt an illustration (mosaic, painting, sculpture or photograph)of EVERY pope from St. Peter to John Paul II. That is where its true value lies: to tie human faces with the stories of the 263 men who governed the Church. And the collection of illustrations is without parallel, from many different sources. If only for these reasons (Brusher's historical sketches are adequate, but others have done it better), this book needs to be back in print!

The first time I was exposed to this book was in 1965. My 8th Grade teacher used to book a simple way to teach the Lives of the Popes. The book has its flaws as an in depth examination of each pontificate. If one is seeking for more in depth studies; many of the popes from Pius IX to John Paul II have separate books devoted to their lives. The Oxford Dictionary of the Popes has longer biographies but no pictures. Many of the pictures used by Fr. Brusher are the mosaics of the popes in the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside-the-Walls in Rome, Italy. I highly suggest the book for teaching children and non-catholics in learning about the 264 men who have served as Holy Father.

Linsner's creation, Dawn, is wonderful. If you've ever viewed his work, then you have most likely ran into Dawn. Linsner's paintings are "lush" and detailed. Dawn can be enjoyed by anyone with an open mind and appreciation of art.

Peace.

This fabulous little booklet is exactly what Dawn fans have been seeking, without realizing it. Probably the majority of Dawn readers are more akin to art collectors - and not necessarily comic book art collectors, at that. While Linsner's most famous creation certainly appeals to the comic art crowd, she also is a masterpiece of erotic pinup work, and simply of beautiful figure and facial art in general.

Until now, Dawn fans have had to scour used comic bins and internet sites just to find their favorite individual drawings and paintings. Linsner must have realized that, and made the job easier by putting all his best-known illustrations of Dawn into a single compact volume. It's a pocket-sized book, but crammed full of its subject, and that's all any Dawn fan wants.

For those who want a little more detail as to exactly which illustrations are to be found, the answer is Dawn's most famous cover poses, numerous panels from Lucifer's Halo, and quite a few stand-alone one-shots, including those that (until now) were found only in Linsner's sketchbooks ...

There's no real text here, just lots and lots of everyone's favorite enigmatic redheaded goddess with the Veronica Lake hairdo. And if you're looking up this title, that's all you really wanted to know.

So, enjoy!

This book is of historical interest. Karl Marx obtained his doctorate in philosophy in 1841, based on a thesis on post-Aristotelian Greek philosophy. He became a newspaper editor in 1842, until the government closed the publication. Marx moved to Paris, and wrote THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY in 1847. (p. 5). Most Americans believe that the American revolution was fought to establish principles of equality. As equals of anyone, we certainly don't think of ourselves as having fought the American revolution against our own government. Marx and Engels created the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO in 1847, a mere 14 years before the American Civil War, when it seemed like Americans on both sides were being blamed for fighting against a Union or the rights of states, and the Americans who were on the same side as General Sherman had the clearest picture of their military policy (war is hell).

THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY was written just before Marx might have been considered the founder of a settled doctrine, but it is full of signs that Marx saw how necessary it was that those who would rule should think like a government, or like a burning bush, and more honest than the law could ever be. Most of the observations in this book are based upon economic considerations. In pure economics, the almighty dollar would be the standard for determining matters of exchange, but this book is in search of a basis for political economics. In opposition to the political economics of Proudhon, which was based on the idea of equality, Marx wrote:

Hypotheses are only made in view of some end. The end proposed to itself in the first place by the social genius which speaks by the mouth of M. Proudhon, was the elimination of that which was evil in each economic category, in order to have only the good. For him good, the supreme good, the true practical end, is equality. And why does the social genius propose equality rather than inequality, fraternity, Catholicism, or any other principle? Because "humanity has realized successively so many particular hypotheses only in view of a superior hypothesis," which is precisely equality. In other words: because equality is the ideal of M. Proudhon. He imagines that the division of labor, credit, the workshop, that all the economic relations have been invented only for the benefit of equality, and nevertheless they have always finished by turning against her. From the fact that the history and the fiction of M. Proudhon contradict each other at every step, he concludes that there is a contradiction. If there is a contradiction it exists only between his fixed idea and the real movement.

Henceforth the good side of an economic relation is that which affirms equality, the bad side is that which denies it and affirms inequality. Every new category is a hypothesis of the social genius to eliminate the inequality engendered by the preceding hypothesis. To sum up, equality is the primitive intention, the mystic tendency, the providential end, that the social genius has before its eyes in turning round and round in the circle of economic contradictions. Providence is also the locomotive which conveys all the economic baggage of M. Proudhon better than his pure and heedless reason. (p. 129)

In the time of Marx, the struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat classes was political, but the almighty dollar has managed to produce a politics which is fundamentally only for those of standing, who have "conflicting, antagonistic interests, inasmuch as they find themselves opposed by each other. This opposition of interests flows from the economic conditions of their bourgeois life." (pp. 133-4). According to Marx, any attempt by a humanitarian school of economics was doomed to have a theory which was actually based "upon interminable distinctions between theory and practice, between principles and results, between the idea and the application, between the content and the form, between the essence and the reality, between right and fact, between the good and evil side." (p. 135) Marx proposes an ability to see beyond this, imagining the power of "the revolutionary subversive side which will overturn the old society." (p. 137). Even without communism, the papers are full of the efforts of the doomed to try this stunt, and of the government to stop them. General Sherman was as American as any economist.

Marxs book here shows you how the distribution of wealth yes why some now 060601, have 145,000,000 in net worth at top of company and a worker in company has 43,000 dollars, is a human political construction. Nothing that exists is law of physics unalterable reality. He shows how this distribution is stupid, and how a more equal distribution and democratic economy can do much better than now. He says this in angery word webs. It is a fun book that get sone thinking. You will have intellectual, fun, a rare form of fun these days.

The fine writing style of the author is one of the best recommendations to be made for this book, especially since the subject is one that rarely excites even those who major in or practice it. The coverage is generalist, and the author does a fine job of tracing the origins of American concepts of governing from their Classical, Whig, and Tudor roots through the making of the Constitution and down to the present time. Like the thesis of "Albion's Seed," one can trace the ideas advocated by some schools of thought today back to their origin in traditions brought here by the first American settlers. Among these are the Tudoresque, late medaeval notion of common law and limited government and the classic revival of republican seperation of powers. (Russel Kirk's "The Roots of American Order" takes the thesis further, and would make good supplementary reading.) One of the best parts of the volume is a section near the end in which the four principal streams of thought on public administration are compared side-by-side and tied in to the traditions that have been part of our political life from the beginning. One objection here: in describing the advocates of what the author memorably terms the "Stateless State" crowd, he errs in stating that the Chicago School/Public Choice movement is decended from the Austrian School, which he characterizes as a 19th century school of thought. Stillman is wrong on both counts: Milton Freidman, James Buchannan, George Stigler, et al, of Chicago fame are students of Frank Knight, and come from a different tradition than that which flourished in the 20th century through the efforts of Austrians like Hayek and von Moses, and which is alive and well in our own time. The two schools' adherents are sometimes allies, but their traditions are seperate.
The analysis of how our early institutions came to have form beyond the minimal guidance outlined in the Constitution is memorable for the phrase, "chinked in," ad hoc as it were, and for giving name to a distinctly American tradition of doing administration on the fly, filling the details as needed. This runs counter to Woodrow Wilson's admiration for Prussian efficiency and organization, which became a later, dominant theme in public affairs.
One other flaw mars an otherwise fine volume: early on, the author states that the Roman Republic did not become the Empire until the mid-second century, A.D. The proper date would by 27, B.C., but hopefully, this typo will be corrected in the next edition of what ought to be a standard work in the field of public administration.
-Lloyd A. Conway

"The most striking feature of America's public administration thought at the founding of the United States was its absence" (p. 19).

In the "Preface to Public Administration" Stillman (1991) presents a very interesting set of explanations about the past of American public administration and the impact of that past on what is happening or not happening in the contemporaneous public administration (despite much efforts) in the country. Stillman (1991) connects the Republican ideals, embedded in the principles such as the elimination of the king, heredity, hierarchy, privilege, noble titles, and tradition as a basis of rule, and above all, elimination of anything that smacks of royal bureaucracy or administration and substitution of an electoral system based on consent of the people (p. 22), to the historical direction and progress of public administration in the United States. That political history matters too much to understand the practice of American public administration with its peculiar tensions and problems echoes in the Preface to Public Administration. A number of American public administration scholars, perhaps the most renowned of whom is Dwight Waldo (1948; 1984), have long attempted to tie the political philosophy and traditions of the United States more intimately to the seemingly politics-free public administration theory and practice in the United States. Stillman is surely one of those scholars that skillfully and convincingly demonstrate to the reader that the "stateless origins" of American public administration have had as much influence on the historical course of public administration.

I will try to summarize Stillman's thesis in a very concise way. Stillman (1991) argues that the Founding Fathers of the United States, who were passionate antagonists of a powerful administration that they associated with corrupted power, designed a system of government based on the checks and balances in which no individual, group or institution was much more powerful than each other so as to predominate the political arena to its own interest. The framers of American Constitution lived in an era when government was the power and the bulk of society was made up of simple, frugal, individual businessmen and farmers. They could not envision a country in which massive and competing private sources of power (corporations) came into existence and complex problems of massive urbanization occurred and the two World Wars broke out that all would encourage the emergence of "new American state" largely outside the Constitution, in piecemeal, extra-constitutional fashion. In the Europe, public administration theory and practice was derived from and integrated intimately to the political philosophy of that continent in a more orderly and symmetrical, a more prudent, a more articulate, and a more cohesive fashion. As a result, a more powerful state bureaucracy was created in European continent. What happened in the United States was the quite reverse of European-like progress of public administration: a more internally competitive, more experimental, a nosier and less coherent, less powerful bureaucracy within its own governmental system. Public administration emerged and developed in America not as an offspring of a state-centered political theory but as a product of temporal reactions and responses to the rising problems of society such as the emergence of corruption-prone big corporations, massive urbanization process and its problems and the like that required orderly and expert action from administration. As problems emerged, new programs and agencies were placed into operation, with public bureaucracies functioning in a system in which power is perceived to be grabbed and to be corruption-prone, and therefore, to be fragmented to its extreme. In such a landscape, public administration turned out to be dispersed and incoherent, and partly disabled to be effective. What at present times the observers of American public administration see as incoherency, diversity, tension, and powerlessness in administration, according to Stillman (1991) resulted from the stateless origins of public administration that were the by-products of American political beliefs.

The book is organized around eight major chapters. In the first five chapters, Stillman (1991) gives detail to the stateless origin of American public administration and its impact on the historical progress and contemporary problems of public administration. In the sixth chapter, Stillman (1991) shows the incoherent and diverse nature of American public administration theory that is manifest in its drive to a great degree of specialization in texts, teaching, and training. In the seventh chapter, the author compares four competing visions of state (no state, bold state, pre-state, and pro-state), with each one's advantages and disadvantages. In the eighth chapter, Stillman (1991) discusses the future of American public administration, with some recommendations for a synthesis.

Overall, Stillman's book deserves to be a public administration classic and I highly recommend this master to the students of public administration. Also recommended are "Administrative State" by Dwight Waldo (1948), "America the Unusual" by John Kingdon (1998), "The Enterprise of Public Administration" by Dwight Waldo (2001), and "Creating the American State" by Richard Stillman (2002).

In his Primer, Natoli introduces us to postmodern thought. The book raises a number of interesting questions about life, understanding, truth, and reality. Natoli, a Professor at Michigan State University, presents the reader with an excellent introduction to the way of thinking, and, as a good postmodern book should, the Primer leaves the reader with more questions than he or she began with.

This is a very good book. It is beyond the cute "for beginners" type of books, yet friendly enough to be read in a weekend. It is the best introduction to pomo I can think of, for people who are smart but don't know anything about the subject. Full of useful references.

Historically regarded as a "Gentlemen's Club," Joseph Martin Hernon examines the U.S. Senate, its leaders, scoundrels, demagoues, and unsung heroes in order to provide a broad history of this organization and it's significance to American history and to America's future. Hernon pairs contemporaries from 1789 to 1990 to demonstrate how different personalities can affect the course of history, and, more significantly, to illustrate how history was changed by moral conviction or lack of it. In the course of discussing these pairings, Hernon reveals three overlooked facts about the Senate. The most obvious is that history often changes who we view as heroes and villains, and who we just forget over time. Hernon's choices for his "portraits" prove that we can't believe everything our history teachers taught us. Hernon's excellent ananlysis demands new, fresh biographies of such personalities as Pitt Fessenden, Thomas Walsh and George Frisbie Hoar who were able to rise above the party squabblings for the good of the nation. This counterpoint is also clear: we need to look again at such heroes as James Monroe and John C. Calhoun who truly are overrated and overly admired. The second fact about the Senate this book illustrates is how powerful the Senate has been in history and can be again under the proper circumstances. Every generation since WWII has regarded the Presidency as the true seat of power, with the Senate serves merely as an "appendage of the Executive." Hernon's encapsulated histories show that key senators have been more responsbile for making major changes in our country than most presidents. While the short histories don't allow Hernon to exlpore these issues to a minute degree, he covers enough detail to make his points. Hernon's third point is simply that the pursuit of the Presidency has at times weakened powerful senators and undermined their effectiveness and place in history, while those who were content to stay in the Senate were able to focus on changing the country and the world. Although I think Hernon proves his points in only 200 pages, the book could have benefited from more indepth examination of the times and some of the supporting players in the dramas of the Senate. However, this is the book's only shortcoming and overall it's doesn't detract from the overall effect. Recommended.

Professor Hernon, a distinguished historian, pairs up U.S. Senators from 1789 to 1990, in light of their careers and the salient issues of the day, to portray some admirable demonstrations of character in the lesser-known senators, contrasted with more famous figures of their time.
Compared and contrasted are such enlightening pairs as Thomas Hart Benton vs. John C. Calhoun in the gathering storm of the pre-Civil War era, Henry Cabot Lodge vs. Thomas J. Walsh in the pivotal 1900-1920's, and the Humphrey vs. Thurmond dichotomy which persists to this day.
With photos, notes, and index, this is a useful exploration of some leaders and issues less widely seen.

(The "score" rating is an ineradicable feature of the page. This reviewer does not "score" books.)

Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, was one of the most significant religious leaders of the nineteenth century. His efforts sparked the rise of a new religious movement that has proven to be lasting and dynamic. But who was this man Joseph Smith, and what made him unique? That has been a subject of considerable investigation by many observers. This book collects some of the more thoughtful recent explorations of this theme. The fifteen essays in this volume collect several of those previously published in journals as well as adding three that appear here for the first time.

This collection is a welcome addition to the literature on the Mormon prophet neither for its exhaustive consideration nor for the insights offered, but because it collects in one place several important articles on the place of Joseph Smith in the history of American religion. Several of the leading scholars of early Mormonism-among them Richard Bushman, Jan Shipps, and Thomas G. Alexander-are represented in the collection, as are outstanding non-Mormon scholars such as Alan Taylor and Lawrence Foster.

Signature Books should be congratulated for their "Essays on Mormonism" series. Each volume gathers together important, even classic essays on a single topic in Mormon studies in convenient book form--essays that usually appeared in hard-to-find, rare periodicals. This book in the series is devoted to Joseph Smith, with essays that range from orthodox defence of the faith like that of Richard Bushman, to naturalistic disbelief like that of Dan Vogel. Other volumes in this series include "Faithful History", "Tending the Garden" and "Multiply and Replenish."

This book presents most aspects of Quality Engineering in an easy to understand format. Includes many Quality Engineering examples. Highly informative, a must for the CQE exam.

20 years before anyone in the US heard of ISO 9000, Juran proposed the same ideas. He described comprehensive, documented quality management systems that were backed up by performance metrics and quality audits. Juran also pioneered quality circles and teams long before these ideas became cliche.

I find Juran immensely useful in my quality practice. This book remains one the standard works that I keep going back to. Juran's concepts are much more "applied" than "theoretical". Deming's works seem so distant, and esoteric. Juran has been there, done that. And, his methods work!

As an undergraduate math major with knowledge of only some linear algebra and elementary calculus of one and several variables, I found this text to be interesting and challenging. The chapter on metric spaces serves as a good introduction to concepts in point-set topology, while providing motivation for such studies. While the proofs are rigorous and complete, sometimes the developments seem to lack motivation. This can be annoying when attempting the exercises, but motivation for such developments could easily be provided by examples from other texts or a professor. After studying Stewart's "Calculus" and Bartle and Sherbert's introductory analysis text, I find the rigor and thoroughness of this text most refreshing. For instance, rather than assuming the completeness property of the reals, the authors develop the reals as an equvalence class on the rationals, and proceed to prove the completeness property. I am certain that anyone interested in learning analysis could benefit greatly from this text, especially in combination with other analysis texts.

This book can serve as an important bridge between books like baby Rudin and big Rudin. Like baby Rudin, this book assumes only the basics from calculus and linear algebra (it is fairly self-contained) and covers the basics on convergence, continuity, differentiation, uniform convergence, etc. It then goes on to cover many topics in the first half of big Rudin like Lebesgue integration, Banach spaces, and Hilbert spaces. The style and tone of the book is sophisticated, and prepares the reader for the arid tone of big Rudin. On the other hand, this book always tries to develop topics in the most elementary way. For example, the Lebesgue theory is developed via the Daniell method on R^n and then, in a brief separate section, the general theory is sketched, leaving many proofs to the reader. I liked this approach, because working in R^n is comfortable and the proofs extend to the general case in an obvious way. Another example is the Riesz representation theorem, which is done on the real line with a very intuitive proof. In contrast, big Rudin is really a book to marvel at once you already know something about its contents. This book is ideal preparation for big Rudin because after reading it, you will know in essence what Rudin wants to say and basically why it is true. But big Rudin will show you how these results extend to more general settings with extremely elegant (although sometimes baffling) proofs. You should also note that when I was at Chicago they were using this book, so the big guys and gals must like it too.

At the close of the Great War, Andreas Pum - the protagonist of this, Joseph Roth's third novel - has lost his leg in the service of an empire that no longer exists. It seems to him a small price to pay for what he soon gains: a valuable permit from the authorities to operate a hurdy-gurdy anywhere in the city, a plump widow and her affectionate daughter, even an obedient donkey named Mooli who is his best companion, carting around the instrument for Andreas as he travels the city to play for pennies. Andreas is one of the few of his station who has not become disillusioned with his predicament, for he still believes in the old order, in the beneficence of his God and Government; indeed, he brands those who have lost their faith as "heathens." It is then that Andrea Pum begins his Job-like descent into despair, a Kafkaesque combination of bad luck and spitefulness which conspire to destroy him - he is deprived of his permit, his donkey, his wife and he is then jailed. He spends his final days as a bathroom attendant in a nightclub. Andreas rebels. But his rebellion is not so much against society as it is a rebellion against his perception of himself within this society, against the presupposed image of his self. Pum is a victim of a rules change where the order of the "belle epoque" has denigrated into the chaos of the modern world. Joseph Roth has crafted a compelling parable about a world in flux and its effect on the individual; we the reader can sympathize with the plight of Andreas Pum because we know that is just as easily could be us.

As relevant today as in the 1920's when it was first published, this slim but remarkable work, Rebellion, chronicles the downward spiral of Andreas Pum. A simple man destined for a simple life founded on trust in god and the government, his life slowly crumbles as that destiny gradually evaporates. World War I takes his leg, yet he accepts his fate and proudly wearing his medal on his chest as he parades on his peg leg through the streets practicing his new trade as an organ grinder, complete with his official permit from the state. As he selects from the 8 cylinders of music, playing to the mood of the street, he sees himself as a true musician and patriot: "Was he not fulfilling his duty when he played his hurdy gurdy? Was not the permit pressed into his hands by the government in person, so to speak, as much an obligation as a concession?...his occupation could only be compared to that of service to the state, and his role with that of an official..." Life hangs by that permit and faith.

Like Job he gradually loses that faith, not denying, by reviling god. His child-like trust and dependence on the beneficence of the state are shattered as his permit, his right to exist, is taken. Chapter 7 and 8 of the book in particular capture how easily our lives can change by a simple encounter with others whom we do not know. Herr Arnold enters the tale in chapter 7, totally from the blue and in only a few pages, Roth captures as well as any author the psychology or rage and its transference onto others - road rage without the automobiles. Rebellion, though little known or read, belongs in the same exclusive club as the The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek and Kafka's The Trial. Each is unique, but they have in common protagonists who face a world that cares little for them, or more accurately is unaware of them. Svejk bumbles through and unwittingly overcomes in spite of everything; K struggles against the injustice of it all, and Andreas faith in god and state gradually dissolve and his life with it.

But for the grace of god (or luck) there go I echo's throughout the pages of this marvelous little work. Few writers capture the paradox of man's need for others and man as alone from others as well as Joseph Roth. Andrea's cry, when all is literally gone, "I don't want Your mercy! I want to go to Hell," brings him life in death. A man of perpetual concessions, he rises in rebellion. Fortunately for us, Roth's works have not been thrown into the Inferno, but only have been mired in publication limbo, and nearly all his novels, short stories, and his marvelous book of essays, The Wandering Jews, have been resurrected. There is much despair in Rebellion, but in its humanity, it is not a despairing work. As good a place as any to begin reading the cannon of Joseph Roth!