if i wasnt rushed to read it i probably could've focused on the details and the parallelism. but that's why i'm here cuz i'm tryin to understand it better.

When I first read "The Secret Sharer" I was left thinking about our minds wonderful experiences and how good can come from bad. Conrad writes about the truth of human experiences and the corruption of mankind in such a briliant way it is unbelievable. You can feel the captain trapped with the choice of keeping the murderer, that reminds him so much of a gloomy side of himself, or turn him in.

May need to be retitled "International Vegetarian Wok Cooking," as many of the recipes are not Chinese at all. Helpful suggestions, good photographs, but the layout is a bit crowded and hard to read.

This book may more appropriately have "international" in the title, as it is definitely not traditional Chinese wok cooking. Still, it is full of good suggestions, innovative recipes, and helpful photographs.

It's not that the effort wasn't there or that the subject wasn't interesting but the style was rough. It does seem gushy at points and is a jumble of facts. I love Huizenga's story and do think the book is a worthwhile read, but the lack of smooth flow in the storytelling is distracting.

Wayne Huizenga's life is a real life course in entrepreneurship, and business owners should make this book a must read. He has been a master at dealing with people, setting and achieving goals, and growing a business. This book is not one of the typical "vanity biographies." The author interviewed a wide variety of individuals in writing a rather balanced portrait of a dynamic individual

Opposites attract is the main theme in the book. This theme may be as old as time but still held an alluring fascination. Marrying Tom starts off brilliantly but fails to deliver a quarter way through the book. The development of the relationship between Daniel and Tom could be handled much better. More passionate and soul searching perhaps! Tom remains a shadow throughout the story. I am just frustrated that the author did not attempt to delve more into Tom's feelings for Daniel. Tom must surely sees alot in Daniel to be attracted to him. Tom is 16 and Daniel is 13. But Tom's emotions is not analysed at all. However the ending is quite good, when Daniel's father has to analyse his son feelings for Tom. I do not care about the background plot of the struggle between our heroes and the gansters - too much emphasis! I just wish Geraci could have place more effort on the emotions development between Daniel and Tom.

This was an exceptional book! There is a great deal of young love, mixed with heavy drugs and gangs from the late 1960's in 'small-town' America.

Essentially the book is about a boy named Tom, a sixteen year old new arrival in a small American town of Madalin. He is Protestant boy and a major rebel with an extremely bad reputation, both in his new town, as well as back in Long Island where he lived before.

Danny is thirteen and from a well established town family. He is 'the' model Catholic boy and a member of the choir and star Diver on the swimming team. The two boys belong to what you would consider being rival gangs (Tom a bad group of people, and Danny, his established group of friends), but, for all their differences, are inevitably drawn together.

A love story flourishes in the midst of unlikely pair. This is a modern, yet not as depressing a version of Romeo and Juliet. (two people not meant to be together, but are drawn to one another).

The fatal attraction of opposites is told in this touching story of growing up gay in small-town America.

I was very impressed with this book and would highly recommend you pick it up and read it.

After reading the book, I found a clearer picture about mass customization. Mass customization is now widely used by many businesses, but we may not know how it operates!
In this book, it tells you how you should change your business operation to mass customization step by step, also tell you 5 methods to customize your products or services. And these 5 methods are useful and practicable for designing how the business enter the market.
The stucture of the book is clear, give a full description on the development of the operation, from mass production to mass customization , and the pros and cons of those two operations, followed with the detail explanation on mass customization.
However, I think it's a bit outdated because all the things around us are mass customized and we do not have to decide whether we should change to customized operation or not, but to decide the degree of the customization.

What a refreshing book that is inendated with facts and research, yet the concepts have implementable steps to move your organization into the personalization future. Indeed this author "gets it" when it comes to the individualized services and products that every company should adopt.

Well well well... I never read the book. But I had a course with Dr. Joseph Ginat and he told me he was never been to Syria.
I am just curious how a person can write about a country, especially as complicated as Syria, if he has never been there ???
I think 3 stars are too generous for this book.

In Modern Syria: From Ottoman Rule To Pivotal Role In The Middle East, Moshe Ma'oz, Joseph Ginat, and Onn Winckler collaborate to identify and explain the social, economic, and political issues that face the modern nation of Syria, and explore the historical reasons behind Syria's pivotal role in Middle East issues. Modern Syria outlines the country's grand ideological and strategic goal to achieve all-Arab unity and the political, military, and economic obstacles it encountered. Attention is paid to the Islamic op=position to the Ba'th regime; the loss of Soviet support; Israeli military superiority; the breaking of security protocols with Turkey; increasing Syrian involvement in Lebanon; the struggle for the return of the Golan Heights, and much more. Modern Syria is highly recommended reading for students of Middle Eastern affairs, Syrian history, culture, and politics; Islam and the pan-Arabic movement; and the United States involvement as a peace broker in the Israeli-Arab conflict in general, and Israeli-Syrian diplomacy in particular.

In his book The Modern Temper, Joseph W. Krutch defined the title concept to mean the angst-ridden state of mind exhibited by people in the 1910's and 1920's who wanted to return to the simpler ways of Victorian certainties and principles, such as the concept of man radicaly differentiated from animals, the existence of universal moral truths, and the certain existence of God. Unfortunately for them, Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution hit the Victorian fan, thus beginning the gradual unravelling of God, absolutes, and other Victorian principles. William James himself added fuel to the fire by espousing pragmatism as a method to actively find out a belief system that fits in with people's experiences.

The situation of people exhibiting that modern temper was akin to an adult nostalgically looking back to at his simple childhood, a world of poetry, mythology, and religion that was upset by the world of science. The ideal world was replaced by the world of Nature. The anthropomorphic God and human needs and feelings were ousted by Nature. Yet, there was a need to crawl back into the womb, as "the myth, having once been established, persists long after the assumptions upon which it was made have been destroyed, because, being born of desire, it is far more satisfactory than any fact".

The failure of the laboratory and hence of science underlined this dilemma. The scientific method came to be applied in fields such as history, philosophy, and anthropology, so why not lay out the human soul on the dissection table and start hacking away? However, science was used to seek out a light, such as ultraviolet or infrared, that man, limited in sight by the visible spectrum, was unable to see. Mankind thus lost its faith in its findings to discover that sought-for moral world.

The implications for love were likewise devastating. Formerly the thing that brought man closest to the divine state or the highest level possible, depending on how man saw himself, the value of love became a hormonal thing. Sex replaced love by demystifying and desanctifying it, increasing its accessibility.

The long-term implications of the modern temper and the yearning of returning to the pre-Darwinian womb hints at the collapse of the American Empire. Krutch mentioned how philosophical debates sapped the vitality of Greece to the point that it was conquered by the Romans, who after building an empire yielding enormous riches and comforts, suffered the same fate under philosophically innocent barbarians.

Metaphysics, which operated outside the realm of observable and objective reality, established certitudes such as ethics, whose realization caused a blooming of the human spirit. Yet science and applied Darwinism knocked down those certitudes like nine-pins, causing that human spirit to wilt as man realized the dissonance between the idealized world of his childhood and the harsh unrelenting world of Nature. The solution was to create the beneficent "fiction," transforming life to an art. All one has to do is to assume the existence of some moral order "and ... construct in his imagination a world where they actually do." And if the foundations of that fiction can be destroyed by science or the physical world, so what? One protects his world by erecting a Great Wall between it and the physical world. The trouble is twofold. One is the lack of ultimate conviction belied by any self-created world. The other is the believer's self-deceptive slide away from reality.

The advent of postmodernists and their struggles against premodernists and modernists in America seems to be that same debate that will make us soft and while we are busy arguing, the underbelly of our empire will be slit open by another country in the vitality stage. The question is who? A very thought-provoking book on the conflict between modernism and absolutism.

Written in the pivotal year 1929, Krutch captured in this series of essays the sense of foreboding that led into the nightmare decade and a half spanning the Depression '30s and the conclusion of World War II. His essential theme is that "the modern temper," one of questioning and skepticism, had led Man to a frightening crossroads where the old myths of the past -- religion, dramatic tragedy, devotion to family -- no longer worked, yet the technology and psychological insights that had remorselessly torn these values apart offered no consolation other than the promise of more objective knowledge.

Man was left instead, Krutch felt, with what is best described as the existential dilemma, although of course he didn't use this term. He saw Man as struggling to come to terms with the paradox of expanding knowledge. That is to say, the more we understand, the more it becomes clear that the universe of which we are only a tiny part spins according to its own laws, with no regard for Man's deep and abiding need for spiritual sustenance. Yet once Man has released the genie of technology and of skepticism, it is difficult to return to the old myths, in which Man was always placed at the center of the moral and spiritual universe.

This is a bleak book, yet it does much to explain the blind adherence to ideology that characterized the disastrous fascist, totalitarian movements of the 1930s. In this regard, a good companion read (and one that reaches a very different set of conclusions) is Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning."

I really wanted to enjoy this book, but, I don't know, there was just something about it. I don't think I learned anything from this book. It seemed more like one of those "Chicken Soup for the Soul" books than anything else.

I am typically not a big fan of self-help type books but I must say that I truly enjoyed reading Dr. Novello's account of the "spiritual" side of psychiatry. This book is written for everyone - whether professional or lay person in a style that is easy to read and yet challenging enough to keep one's interest. His review of the theories on the influence of "lifetraps" in people's behavior are brought to life with humor, humanity and fascinating case studies. For anyone that is in the midst of a personal quest for happiness, (and who isn't?)this book is a gem! As we search for love and happiness, Dr. Novello's book reminds us of looking inside ourselves to find the peace and love we seek. I highly recommend this book!

Normally I'm not into historical non-fiction, but I'll make an exception for this book. _The Ninth Man_ tells what was happening in America during the 1940's with a personal twist that brings the facts to life. I encourage the purchase of this book, it is not for all ages but is defiantly a must read for anyone interested in spies and WWII.

Lots of fun. Corresponds to the historical record on the 8 Nazi spies almost perfectly, but still reads like a good spy novel.

The left turn is the most dangerous for an automobile since it involves two different streams of traffic. This is JLS' humorous history in a very serious agency. The television series "The FBI" was phony; the only inspectors he knew were those who investigated FBI employees (p.8), Could the show have ended after J Edgar Hoover's death because Hoover could no longer pull strings?

After graduating with an MA in English, WW II veteran JLS applied for a job as clerk in Washington; jobs were scarce in Texas. He was accepted, and showed up late. (He had learned one thing in the Army: never admit a mistake or oversight.) His story of getting on the wrong bus worked! JLS attended college in the morning, then worked 1 to 10pm. Chapter 2 tells how he got promoted - by applying for another job! Most employees would report any word or deed that suggested disloyalty to the Director. (There are other places like this.) Page 42 tells of a farewell party for a SAC which ended his career. Was he set up by a rival?

Chapter 5 warns you to be careful in your compliments! Chapter 6 tells of the importance of being ignorant. Was there a scandal in your office? "I've been too busy doing my work to pay attention to office gossip." Chapter 7 tells of the Metropolitan Life Insurance weight tables and how they were applied to agents. One solution was to extend height or enlarge frames - on paper. One agent knew the difference between perception and reality. Were these tables ever scientifically validated? There were two items in the news recently: obesity is at an all time high, and so is life expectancy! Isn't science wonderful?

Chapter 13 tells of a visit by J Edgar Hoover to Senator Lyndon B Johnson in Texas. There was quite a lot of behind the scenes activity. This would not occur in other government agencies because of civil service regulations. Maybe high-level officers in some corporations could tell similar stories? I wonder if this will be repeated at Homeland Security in the future? Chapter 14 tells how the Bureau catered to every whim of the Director, from toilets to television sets. Does absolute power corrupt absolutely? After I read about J Edgar Hoover in the 1950s "Readers Digest", I was disappointed to discover the reality afterwards. Chapter 15 tells of the personal concerns of Hoover. Anyone who wanted a promotion had to see him for his personal approval. There were no guarantees; some whim could result in condemnation to the Field. When Clarence Kelley took over, one of his first actions was to send Administrators into the Field, and replace them with men from the Field. This gave knowledge and experience to all; the Administrators could live by their rules.

I guess any Police Chief must rule with an iron hand. Could it help if this ruler has a trusted, loyal friend or relative who could serve as a counselor to filter opinions for feedback? The one substantive fault in the lack of any mention of the events of November 1963.

Read it twenty years ago, thought it couldn't be true. I found out that unfortunately, it still is...