There has been some very good writing on the USAF side of the airwar over North Vietnam(for example 'Thud Ridge' by Col, J Broughton). This book gives at least a glimpse of what that war looked like from the other side.
The dialogue has a slightly scripted feel, but given that English is a second (at least) language for most of those involved, and the descriptions are to some degree at least the formalised language of the combat report, this is perhaps understandable.
The production is to Osprey's usual high standard with an interesting selection of colour profiles, and some very striking b/w's, the shot of a MiG 21 being airlifted into position under a Mil 6 being particularly memorable. Another feature is the attempt to reconcile the claims of each side with admitted losses.
Primarily a modelling resource, this is also a useful historical document, drawn from primary sources. I found it interesting enough to look for the author's other volume on MiG 17/19 units.

Thoroughly recommended

Dr Istvan Toperczer has produced several books on the North Vietnamese People's Air Force and surfaced more photography and information on their side of the battle for the skies over North Vietnam against the United States than all the other researchers combined who have tried to elicit this type information. This volume is a welcome addition the Osprey series that deals with type aircraft (in this case the MiG-21) in conflicts. As the thirtieth anniversary of the conclusion of hostilities over North Vietnam approaches in 2003, it is fitting that this work has arrived for the many veterans and interested readers to be able to add to the considerable work on the subject which is always light on the aspect of the NVPAF perspective. The ability of this fledgling air force to introduce the MiG-21 into combat with "home-grown" pilots with a modicum of success in challenging the latest US fighters is a worthy read.

As a US Navy Radar Intercept Officer flying in the back-seat of Phantom IIs, I had two engagements with Mig-21s during the Vietnam war...won one, lost one. Winning is a lot more fun, that's for sure, but both types are very interesting. Reading Istvan Toperczer's book, "Mig-21 Units of the Vietnam War" was like taking a little peek inside the Mig pilots' play book...it gave me an idea of how they planned and set up their attacks... and it reinforced for me that we already had pretty good ideas of what was coming when we took them on in aerial combat.

This book has a lot of superb photographs, drawings, illustrations and words which all flow together very nicely and make reading it a real enjoyment. If you are interested in fighter-flying it will be very interesting, and for those who actually fought against the Migs in Vietnam, or tried to engage one, it will be intensely interesting. It was a unique experience for me to read this book and be able to critique it from the vantage point of one who actually lived through it. I highly recommend it as a purchase, and certainly it will make a great gift for any aviation buff, most particularly any military pilot. This book is not just another "book about flying", it is the product of some very thorough research and painstaking efforts to match-up all the reports by Dr. Toperczer, and reading it is like reading a colorful history book on a subject which you love.

Minding the Machines reminds us of one crucial fact: technological disasters are almost always the result of human error. But the flip side of this truism offers hope: humans learn from their mistakes, and technological disasters can be prevented. Evan and Manion, both professors in Pennsylvania, study a number of key technological disasters spanning the twentieth century-from the sinking of the Titanic to the poison gas release at Bhopal. The result is Minding the Machines: a systematic analysis of technological risk.

In each case study of technological disaster, the authors go straight to the heart of the problem: human error. Evan and Manion rightly recognize that "technological disasters are failures of sociotechnical systems." In other words, technologies are human creations, and therefore the root causes of technological disasters should be sought in the human systems that gave rise to the technologies in the first place. Once the causes are isolated, future solutions can be developed. But only at the social, economic, and political levels can acceptable solutions to technological risk be generated. To prevent future disasters, we must mind the machines; the machines will not mind themselves.

The pace of the book is slowed somewhat by the exhaustive analysis to which academics are prone. Yet the diligent reader is rewarded. The case studies of the Titanic, Challenger, and Three Mile Island disasters make for fascinating, if sometimes morbid, reading. The meat of the book can be found in chapters five ("The Root Causes of Technological Disasters"), eleven ("The Role of Corporations in the Management of Technological Disasters"), thirteen ("Assessing the Risks of Technology"), and fourteen ("Technological Decisions and the Democratic Process"). With these four chapters alone, Minding the Machines may prove invaluable for those in industry and government who want to better understand how a little prevention can be worth billions in cure-not to mention saved lives.

[This review is modified from my original review of Minding the Machines, Colorado Springs Business Journal, 12 July 2002]

The enormous technological advances of our time bring with them great vulnerabilities. Things break down, people screw up. This has always been so, but now the very power and scope and pervasiveness of our devices and systems give leverage to the breakdowns and screwups. Cost-saving refusal to install an $11 part in the Ford Pinto cost 500-900 lives, untold injuries, and $137 million in damages. Miscommunication among pilots and traffic controllers, and mismanagement of stressful demands on pilots, resulted in 587 dead, 57 injured, and $110 million in property and damage costs in the Tenerife runway collision. Chernobyl, Bhopal, asbestos poisoning, the list goes on.

Unlike natural disasters, technological disasters are predictable and preventable - but only if we recognize the new vulnerabilities and risks inherent in technological advances and effectively neutralize them. For that, it is essential that we learn from those man-made disasters that have already occurred. Evan and Manion have analyzed a wide range of technological disasters to their root causes, and describe how they can be prevented by appropriate training and action by scientists and engineers, by corporate executives and managers, by administrators of government agencies, by legislators, by academics like themselves, and by the general public. Here we have the example of the Year 2000 problem. Many believe this was overblown because it came to nothing. But it had so little effect because corporations and governments world wide spent more than $600 billion to avert it, aided by teams of engineers and scientists, largely from the US.

We also have the example of September 11. With the likelihood of terrorists exploiting the vulnerabilities in the technologies on which we increasingly depend, it is vital that we understand and act upon the very important work that Evan and Manion have done for us here. Executives and shareholders will be especially interested in how a corporation can avoid causing a technological disaster, with its potentially crippling costs - while by the same means being an exemplary corporate citizen.

The book is thorough, well documented, and easy to read. Every page is an eye opener.

Evans' and Manion's Minding the Machines is one of the most accessible and readable texts I have seen in an area known for its significant obscurity and evasion. While its wealth of case study information makes a welcome addition to any philosopher's or engineer's library, its topic of preventing technological disasters is a contemporary must-think for layman or "expert." I highly recommend it.

Mr. Odom has a easy to read, natural style. I love a mystery and although this is not a true mystery in the "who done it"style, it kept me guessing until the last page. Bravo, Mr. Odom.

The author was the batboy on mine and his brothers baseball team,so I was intrigued when I heard he had written his first book.I must say,I'm impressed with his first effort.I'm hoping for the follow-up very soon.I will be one of the first to buy it.

What do a neck shackle and high level government AI computers that refuse to do their job have in common? They have Jack in common. Jack "Suicide" Simmmons, the aging, foul mouthed, whiskey drinking, cigarette smoking, Abraham Lincoln lighter toting protaganist of this highly entertaining novel. Two agents of B.A.D. (Bureau of Astronomical Destruction) repeatedly screen subjects for potential martyrdom, complete with purely theatrical thorough background checks that monitor metabolism from a suitcase computer. Taking on the form of a sci-fi thriller, Minus 55 is really more of a meditation on the death experience in a media saturated post-modern society in which the boundaries between 1st and 3rd person are indistinguishable. Highly recommended!

I love cook books. I am a reader and veritable connoisseur of cookbooks. But, to be honest, if one is to really cook out of a cookbook, would author(s) henceforth please chose to have their works spiral-bound; maybe even with coated pages? This removes their book off the 'coffee table' (HardBack editions??) and brings it into the kitchen, where a cookbook belongs. Thank you for listening. Now I have to get back to my PawPaw Pie.

I purchased this book from in a Memphis bookstore last year and was thrilled with it. It has all the traditional recipes - some of which I had long since forgotten - from my childhood in the Tennessee hills. All the recipes which I have tried so far have resulted in dishes that were like a taste of the past. I highly recommend this book to any displaced Southern mountaineer longing for a taste of home. You won't regret it!

If you can't remember how Grandma made that cornbread or what to do with ramps, Sohn's book is made to order. He not only includes clear, easy-to-follow directions for preparing each of his recipes, he also adds background information on ingredients and techiques, offers strategies to reduce calorie content, and includes a list of suppliers for regional items. Includes glossary, bibliography and index.

Excellent pictoral of the Viet Nam era. Would especially like the author's email and a contact address for Rod Macon who is featured in the "special operations" section of this book for the purpose of research in the history of the War. and need Mr. Macon for a consultant.

Great book, my dad's friend gave it to me to read, i couldn`t put it down, and most the time i hate reading, but it read it very quickly, the fastest i have ever read a book, its so vivid, i can picture it, just the best book i have ever read!

Its very well made, chapter 1 starts with how each soldier joined, to the final chapter when they came home, Not a book about the author, but the lives of many vets, and told word for word by the vets.

A very well-written, comprehensive, clinician-friendly account of a treatment that appears to capture much of the essence of mindfulness and its benefits. Straight forward enough so that clinicians from all theoretical orientations should be able to appreciate the nature of the approach. It is very nice to see, in the past 15 years or so, psychologists finally trying to take a serious scientific stab at traditionally Eastern approaches like mindfulness and acceptance. The only drawback of the book, for me, was the relative lack of a serious scientific technical analysis of the approach, as the description of how the treatment theoretically works is largely discussed in metaphorical and somewhat lay-language. This may simply be because the book is aimed primarily at practicing clinicians, rather than academic psychologists and other researchers. Readers intrigued by this approach should also read Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (1999), by Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson.

If your interests include psychotherapy (especially cognitive therapies), or meditation (especially Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction), or if you are interested in research on depression, then I suspect that you will find this book as compelling as I did.

Here is what I found profound about this book, from a cognitive therapy perspective. Cognitive therapists have long known that automatic thoughts are related to various psychopathologies, but they typically theorized that CHANGING those thoughts was the royal road to psychological health. The alternative studied and developed by the authors is that carefully ATTENDING to cognitions fully as they arise and fall is itself healing. Rather than focusing on cognitive restructuring of thoughts and thinking, this cognitive therapy postulates that observing thoughts, feelings, perceptions, bodily sensations, and world events in a compassionate, "non-attached" manner liberates one from the suffering that accompanies them. The authors have begun to collect outcome data consistent with this unusual cognitive theory.

I found the authors' review of the depression literature quite informative, and the evidence in support of MBCT is described clearly. At the same time, I couldn't help noting that the MBCT approach is specifically designed to target recovering depressives, with an eye toward preventing relapse. So although MBCT is "for depression, " it is not currently intended to treat depression per se, and it is intended as an adjunct to other treatments (e.g., medication, individual psychotherapy, etc.). So, the authors focus, at least for now, on a narrowly defined population. This is not a criticism of the book or MBCT. But for now, MBCT is quite limited in scope by its infancy. I expect that someone eventually will attempt to systematize a form of MBCT for depression in general, for individuals, or for other clinical populations.

I'm always tempted to buy another book on meditation and psychotherapy. I have to be careful here. There is a glut of excellent, relevant books (e.g., books by Mark Epstein, Daniel Goleman, Ken Wilber). Buying or reading yet another book is the easy, habitual behavior when books are your drug of choice, and your cluttered house is screaming at you with volumes of printed matter. Practicing mindfulness continuously, noticing a habitual tendency, and attending fully to the present moment, presents itself as the mindful, non-habitual alternative choice. Did I really need yet another book?

Well, I'm glad I read yet another book on this topic. This book shares many elements with Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), an influential meditative approach that has considerable empirical support and is finding its way into many medical and psychological settings (seeJon Kabat-Zinn's "Full Catastrophe Living"). Initially the authors attempted to bolt MBSR approaches onto previously existing variants of Cognitive Therapy. But as their methods and awareness evolved, MBCT increasingly came to resemble Kabat-Zinn's MBSR. Their current MBCT approach is an 8-week group program that strongly resembles the UMASS MBSR program, with some elements of traditional cognitive therapy added. I think that the MBCT variant of MBSR will be valuable in that it provides additional tools and strategies for running Mindfulness-based groups in a clinical setting. Additionally, I think MBCT nicely integrates empirically-validated components of CT with empirically-validated components of MBSR. It is worth noting that the MBCT approach is specifically psycho-educational, and takes place in a group setting. This could be the beginning of a beautiful psychotherapy.

This is a fantastic book for a variety of audiences: (1) practicing psychologists and therapists who want to learn about a useful -- and empirically supported -- skill for treating depression; (2) people who think may suffer from sad moods -- even if not full-blown depression -- and who want a medicine-free and therapy-free way to feel better; (3) academic researchers who want to know more about varieties of meditation and how to adapt meditation programs to more specific goals; (4) people interested in mindfulness meditation who want to see a psychological angle on why it works so well; (5) academic researchers who want to know more about some theories about why cognitive-behavioral therapy works so well.

Whew! So many good things to say:

The book actually reads very well -- not just by the minimal standards of academic writing, but by popular standards as well. It's clear, unpretentious and has a surprising amount of drama to it.

Many people now try to adapt some kind of mindfulness a la John Kabat-Zinn to a variety of needs for people to overcome this or that disorder, pain, etc. Nearly all assume that one can just take the whole Kabat-Zinn plan and just throw anyone into it. As someone who has taken a class based on the Kabat-Zinn program, and someone who has tried to adapt it to teaching law students and others about negotiation, I can tell you this does not work too well. Among other things, few people really manage to meditate 45 minutes a day.

The book explains how the researchers tried to adapt the program to a more specific need: preventing people from getting depressed again after they've been treated. They explain how they changed their thinking about meditation and how to teach it.

One of the most beautiful parts of the book is how frankly the authors admit how their first attempts fell short. They also frankly explain how they needed to meditate themselves before they could teach it.

Highly recommended!

Coming after Alan Moore's run on Miracleman, how could anything coming after hope to live up? Well, the sad answer is that it doesn't. In comparison to the three preceding volumes it comes as a bit of an anti-climax. That having been said, I must acknowledge that The Golden Age should still be read by any Miracleman fan. There are a few things that you should know about before getting into it. First, the Big Blue Banana himself appears in the book hardly at all. Having created Uptopia on Earth, there is little for him to do now except rule over it. Occasionally pilgrims make the four-day climb up Olympus to "pray" - i.e., beg Miracleman for a favor. That's all we really see of him. The rest of the book is taken up with what life would be like in the new Miracleman universe. Of course, we also get to see what "life" is like for the reincarnated souls in Olympus - especially all those Andy Wharhols.

While published in tandem with Gaiman's award-winning Sandman series, his run on Miracleman was truly something special. It's also ridiculously difficult to find at this point, due to legal snafus. Nevertheless, it'll be worth the hassle.

Why? Consider this: what do you do when Alan Moore has pretty much wrecked the world as we know it? Make up a new one. And fortunately, as we've also seen in bestsellers like Neverwhere and Stardust, this is one thing Gaiman can do. From people admiring drug-users because they represent the last known frontier, to the permanence of death, and even the inevitability of evil, Gaiman hits on mythical concepts in a thoroughly plausible and enjoyable way.

How would superheroes REALLY affect our world? Read this volume and see. I guarantee you won't see any of it coming.

Miracleman Book Four : The Golden Age is a collection of several stand alone stories from the Eclipse comic Miracleman. After Miracleman solved most of the world's problems at the end of book three, one would think that there would be little left in this series. Fortunately Neil Gaiman is more than up to the task of continuing the story from where legendary comic author Alan Moore left off. Gaiman explores the strange landscape of the Utopia Miracleman has created in stories about the basic human condition in a fantastic science fiction future. This is a superb collection complemented by Mark Buckingham's phenominal artwork. Highly Recommended!

This book has a format very similar to that of Homebrew Favorites but has about 20 more recipes, many of them still carrying outrageous names. I liked the later chapters on fruit beers and the herb & spice beers, the idea of using hot peppers (they advise caution) as a flavoring has appeal to me, might help with the flavor some. Chapter 15, the last one, has mead recipes again, I appreciate that one, it'd be the one I'd most want to try.

Before I bought this book I looked at a couple of others first. I thought about Papazian's "Homebrewers Companion" but it had a lot of things other than recipes that I didn't need, and I thought about Higgins "Homebrewers Recipe Guide", but I didn't believe that even 3 people ever really brewed and tested 200 recipes, so I was left with Lutzen and Stevens two books "Homebrew Favorites" and "More Homebrew Favorites". I bought them both.

The books contain lots of recipes (240 in the first volume, 260 in the second) and in every single style. The recipes are evenly split between easy extract recipes and the more advanced all grain recipes. (Good! I can be challenged when my skills improve.) Most important to me was that the beers were brewed by a lot of different people, and a lot of them won awards in lots of different contests and lots of them include some comments about how the beers turned out. This gives me confidence that th! e recipes really worked and the huge number of recipes gives me lots of options and even helps me create my own variations, picking elements I like from one recipe and combining them from another.

The two "Homebrew Favorites" books are probably the best recipe collections on the market, at least for my needs (and probably most other homebrewers too). The books really are on target as far as knowing what homebrewers do in their kitchens.

The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars is that there are some recipes in the book that too simple for me or that are kind of goofy (I don't want to make beer with hot peppers in it!) Maybe you would like this though, so look at it and see.

I rely on this book to pull me through.

I've been brewing for just over 6 years. I do mostly partial-mash/extract brews. This book has been invaluable not just for the recipes it contains, but also for the examples of styles and their ingredients that it presents.

Recipes are convieniently grouped by style and clearly labeled by difficulty (all-grain, extract, etc.). Most recipes also feature brewers and/or judges comments which can be valuable when improving upon or creating your own recipe.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is just starting to brew their own or has been making kits and is looking for more of a challenge.

For the serious all-grain brewer, this book will be less than you're looking for. You should try "Year of Beer" by Amahl Turczyn.

This was not your average drug dealer. Howard Marks details his travels and adventures to exotic locations world wide. After each chapter I would find myself adding another location to my list of destinations I wanted to see. Mix in the travel, adventure and the vivid characters and you have a good read that was hard to put down.

Very timley right now in the US considering what great lengths the DEA went to to destroy Howard's and his family's life back then and how they are extending the same techniques to terminal Medical Marijuana patients in CA right now. Highlights how things have changed very little in almost 20 years and where this backlash against the Drug War is coming from. People are just fed up (no pun intended) with their tax dollars being used to ruin lives over such a harmless substance.

Warning: After reading this book, in addition to wanting to pack up and travel the world you may also want to revisit your youth and take up smoking again (if you ever stopped). Be careful before you head over to 1 Percent ;-)

Well, this reader could not put the book down. You'll be treated to a world tour of eclectic characters and places.

In fact, you may find yourself Google-ing the various players.

Type in 'Craig Lovato, DEA' and you'll find that he and his wife are/were in Pakistan running the DEA office there.

Try looking up James McCann, IRA. Yikes!

'He lives in occasional cross-dress in San Francisco & the Reno, Nevada area; pretends to be a security specialist; and otherwise remains (oddly) in the USA.'

HM certainly had an odd group of associates and friends which only adds spice to the book.

If you like hearing real tales about drug smuggling, wire tapping, unsavory CIA agents, IRA operatives, and assorted fringe elements, than this book is for you.

Who knows, even YOU could be the next Mr. Nice.

Howard trully hits the target by describing his life with the same feelings we can experience sometimes. This book is something you have to read, you will find yourself laughing and sometimes feeling really sorry about some situations.
You will not be dissapointed. Great book!

Teresa Nielsen Hayden (she wrote Making Book, which is very good and I have read it many times) is narcoleptic. I had not realized people who slept so much wrote so well. Of course I still think Teresa Nielsen Hayden may be the only one. This book displays so much proadnivity that I had to give it 3 stars. 2 were for that, the other one was for ridiculopathy. I'm fond of made up words.

This book killed my whole family, and I fear that I am next.

I was up all night reading this book. If you like a real page turner you found it.