No one person can tell you all the tricks of getting into the Radio and Television business, but advise is necessary. As a college student, I found the book helpful and it led me to do my own in-depth research. This book really got the ball rolling for me. It should not be your career bible, but it is a helpful resource.

Brennan acted with breathtaking intellectual arrogance and contempt for the American people. Most of his "achievements" have already been exposed as failures -- affirmative action (government-sponsored racial discrimination), supression of religous expression (I'm an agnostic, by the way, but I don't enjoy the Court's meddling with expressions of religious views) and the famous Roe vs. Wade decision which, by imposing a "solution" that should have been debated by society, created one of the most destructive and polarizing arguments of recent times and may ultimately lead to more restrictions on abortion than would have otherwise been imposed. As one who favors choice, I would have preferred to have had the opportunity to persuade my fellow Americans, rather than having the outcome dictated by an arrogant, Napoleonic pipsqueak who lingered among us far too long. Sincerely, Denis Arvay ARVAY@IBM.NET

Excellent photographs, maps and text, but uses the tongue-twisting common names devised by academics in the first half of the last century. Common names for North American amphibians, turtles, reptiles and crocodilians have been standardized since 1978, and have generally been adopted nationwide. Unfortunately, this book will cause much confusion about name usage. The publisher should have had this book reviewed by herpetologists of a younger generation; they would have caught the out-dated common names, and saved the publisher some embarrassment.

Dr. Lowi says we need a third party - a three-party system, that is - when America is loaded with third parties. Dr. Romance, on the other hand, says that the only problem is the recent one, "gridlock," and that the solution is "reform." Interestingly, although Lowi acknowledges that what America now has in the Democrat/Republican combine is a "duopoly," neither essayist proceeds on that assumption. Lowi keeps calling for a third party when the need under duopoly would be for a second, not third, party. And Romance takes us back to various won't-work remedies, all in an effort to "reform" a non-existent two-party system. However, the book does give a valuable look - flaws and all - at Partyism, a strange creature in itself, and I would recommend it.

There is a reason why people remember those James Bond movies with Sean Connery and forget the ones with Roger Moore. Follow-up to the World Bank's "East Asian Miracle" study, "Rethinking the East Asian Miracle" is an uneven conference volume. Despite its publication in 2001, none of the papers deal centrally with the Asian financial crisis. In several instances (Ito's overview, McKinnon on international monetary arrangement, Urata on FDI), authors simply go through the motions, rehashing their well-known positions on issues without adding any new insight. Woo on corporate governance is long on jargon and short on substance. The only paper that really presents new results is Lawrence and Weinstein on Japanese industrial policy, though Pack's dissection of the growth accounting debate as it relates to Asia is very informative. Some of the other papers (Okazaki on Japanese industrial policy, Perkins on corruption in China and Vietnam, Jomo on SE Asian capitalism) while not presenting new research per se, at least offer some interesting ideas.

Haeckel is a very influential writer at the turn of last century, but he's been forgotton by most people since then. This, his most popular work, shows the reason for his past influence and his present oblivion.

The thesis of the book is that naturalistic monism is a sufficient explanation of the universe. Any search for reality beyond the material world is superstition. Since Haeckel is a zooligist, the first half of the book tries to demonstrate the similarity between human beings and other animals. Based on the theory of evolution and physiology, he argues that psychic activities are only biochemical actions of the nervous system. Next he expouneds his belief in the "law of substance"; the theory that the total amount of energy and matter in the universe is always content. Next, Haeckel claims that genuine monotheism is rarely taught, even by Christians. After that he tries to discredit Jesus and Paul with historical speculations. (e.g. Jesus is the illegitimate son a Roman officer called Pandera.) Lastly, he expounds his monistic religion and ethics. Beauty of nature is his god, and balancing the good of the individuals and the group is his ethics.

Many of his beliefs in natural sciences have been discredited since his days. His construction of the history of religions and of the history of Christianity is untenable too. His optimism that in the progress of natural and behaviorial science also sounds hollow today. However, his naturalistic understanding of the soul, his monistic religion and ethics are live options today, enthusiastically embraced by many. Each topic in his book has been superceded by better work. While it lacks depth, its breadth makes it still an interesting book on the relationship between religion and science.

The book is on Outlook 98 - The synopsis talks about Excel 97. A little sloppy on the cut and paste???????

David Weeks does a great job of searching out the superyoung and finding similarities among them. He also updates you on all the myths of aging that have been blown sky high by research in the last 10 years. The most powerful statement in the book came from an interview, "WHo says that our birthdate has to have anything to do with how old we are?" The profiles are the most engaging part of the book. His suggestions for what YOU can do are not quite as helpful or earthshaking, but you get the point. I enjoyed reading it as a self starter , but didn't come up with much to help an aging parent, who does not naturally come by that kind of energy.

The author was an active member of a Ramakrishna Vivekananda Center in California. He describes the activities of that center from a cultural anthropologist's point of view. Unfortunately he has to to hide any actual references to people there, like for protecting himself from law suits or personal disadvantages within that center. Therefore the book seems to be rather artificial. The lengthy anthropological introduction wants to rise the level of the book, but following chapters do not fully utilize anthropology. So it's neither a real scientific book, nor an exciting real-life story. On the other hand, any book which helps to analyze religious groups is helpful.

As you can see from the caption I've offered above, I was disappointed by this one. I'm fascinated by adventure and exotic locales and this, a fictionalized real-life portrayal of one of Conrad's youthful experiences while sailing about on the high seas, promised a very bracing adventure indeed. It's the author's recollection of the difficult events surrounding the first time he took command of a vessel of his own -- reluctantly as he tells us, being almost forced into it by events and people around him. It proves an ill-fated step, as well, since the vessel he is asked to reclaim is laid up in a Southeast Asian harbor minus its captain, who has mysteriously given up the ghost, and with a crew that is ill from some undisclosed fever. The narrator gets slowly into the tale and then bogs down with the slow moving current as the ship of ailing men gets underway only to become trapped in a becalmed sea, unable to make headway to its port of call in Singapore, even as its crewmen grow increasingly ill and the on-board medication gives out. The narrator, our youthful first-time captain, struggles to keep the ship moving and at the ready for the first break in the uncanny weather they are experiencing while the first mate hallucinates over the ghostly machinations of the recently departed prior captain who, he suspects, is operating from beyond the grave to bring his former ship and crewmen down. Our young, first-time captain berates himself roundly for his supposed blunders including failing to check the medicine supply fully before shipping out and, though it remains unsaid, for possibly acting too precipitously to get underway, before ascertaining that the worst of the fever had passed among the crew. The ship's steward, a bold and knowledgeable seahand suffers from a bad heart which causes him to avoid any kind of hard effort though he manages to rise to the occasion when the need is finally there. Basically, this true life tale had the makings of a rousing adventure but Conrad doesn't ever allow it to become that, either because of his fidelity to the facts or because of his own inimitably verbose and abstract writing style. But, whatever the cause, I was disappointed in the book and put it down at last, barely moved. Ah well!

SWM