We bought this book for a trip we took to Chile and tossed it...by the first week. Their recommendations are substandard and the information contained in the book is very limited. I am wondering if they ever visited Chile before they printed this book. If you are looking for a very comprehensive guide book on Chile check out "Chile Experience Travel Guide" ISBN 956-7264-79-1

This book caused us many problems during our visit to Argentina. First of all, it is out of date........by years. Restaurants no longer exist in one case we were told at least 5 years. Hotels completely changed ownership and management, again many years ago. The monetary system completely changed.

Kelman's confusing writing style takes away from his credibility as does his dubious logic. In my view, Kelman's text provides a strong argument AGAINST the Crit movement and FOR the rule of law and rational legal thought.

I bet there are only 5 people in the world who have read this book from cover to cover. I am certainly not one of them. I was interested in the subject of critical legal studies--until I tried to read this book. The prose is so turgid, so dense, so infuriatingly incomprehensible, that reading a single sentence is like getting hit in the head with a hammer. I choose the following sentence entirely at random (honest): "There is a strong presumption of legislative validity in cases in which excluded (generally racial) minorities are unaffected, given both the assumption that indirect or representaive democracy is the proper solution to the problem of summing and registering the welfare-seeking desires of individuals and the assumption that existing legislatures come reasonably close to meeting the ideals of representative democracy." p. 191. Got that? I thought so. I even had to leave out of the sentence one of Kelman's favorite devices: the italicized word. There's hardly a sentence without one or more of them, and this constant barrage of emphasis requires the reader to stop, reread the sentence with the recommended emphasis, and continue. What you soon discover, however, is that this doesn't make the prose any clearer; indeed, it only makes reading this book that much more painful. Oh, and to the academics who smugly smile at this review and say to themselves (or even out loud), "Well, you [with your little brain] just don't get it, do you?" I respond as follows: good simple prose and intellectual content are not mutually exclusive. (E.g. Ronald Dworkin.)

I agree with the previous reviewer. Great concept but the book does not get the job done. question format is loose and does not match the format of Interventional Boards which the book is supposed to help you with. There is frequent sojourns from fact to opinion.

The authors are well informed and recognized experts in the field. Also there is a need for a book such as this in the interventional field. They should clean it up in their next edition.

This ought to be the perfect review for the interventional cardiology boards. It is a very complete review of all aspects of interventional cardiology in a question and answer format. The authors pride themselves on being extremely current in the literature. But I have never seen a book so riddled with errors. The answers are so often wrong is it pathetic. I can't honestly believe that anyone proof read the book. There must be at least 50 wrong answers. Get the Cindy Grines book. A bit less current, but at least you can trust what she says.

I don't know why Dr. Chow put this garbage in his series.

The author has an MD from China and a PhD from Louisiana State University Medical Center. However, his understanding of probability and statistics is less than what would be expected from a person with a Ph.D. in biostatistics. The book has one theme. It rejects the use of classical statistical methods of hypothesis testing that began with Neyman and Pearson's work in the 1930s. Although the author claims that he is rejecting it in the context of clincial trials, it appears that his strong statements indicate that he believes it is not very useful and provides no information to draw conclusions. His arguments, provided most strikingly in Chapter 10 "The Fiction behind the Current Statistics and Its Consequences", reveal this and best display his ignorance.

It is true that most clinical trials are conducted on restricted sets of subjects who must meet carefully planned inclusion/exclusion criteria. Also, clinical centers are chosen by the sponsor (often a pharmaceutical company) and are picked because they have performed well in the past or have a well known investigator. Therefore, the common paradigm of statistical inference that the subjects are a random sample from a larger population is not even closely true. This seems to be a good argument for not taking formal statistical hypothesis testing too seriously in this context and too much attention has been placed on p-values and rigid decision making in the regulatory arena so I was very much interested in seeing how Norleans would get around these problems.

But instead of recognizing the inadequacies of the models and finding better models, he resorts to a subjective form of decision making based solely on graphics and a misunderstanding of methods such as maximum likelihood and analysis of variance. These problems require increased sophistication for solution not the abandonment of statistical modeling.

Graphical techniques are clearly useful and the pioneering work of Tukey led to a deeper appreciation for good exploratory data analysis techniques beginning in the 1960s. However, Norleans ignores or is ignorant of this literature as he fails to use any of the techniques of Tukey. Rather he concentrates on unconventional and not always very informative graphical displays. These techniques seem to be designed to look at individuals more than groups and can often be very cluttered. There is no reference to Tukey, Cleveland or Tufte, the pioneers in statistical graphics.

I find his condemnation of Jerzy Neyman particularly insulting and it shows both naivety and lack of understanding. He doesn't even know how to spell Neyman's first name (sic Jersey)! He claims that statistical hypothesis testing is based on assuming the truth can be known when in fact it is just the opposite. The framework assumes that there is a true state of nature but the truth can never be known and that we can only express our degree of belief in probabilities that particular decision rules lead to incorrect conclusions. Sample size requirements and decisions are made when these error probabilities are sufficiently small.

Neyman-Pearson theory has also been criticized for using a sharp null hypothesis but extensions of the theory got around that problem as can be seen from the famous text by Lehmann on hypothesis testing in the late 1950s. It is commonplace now to use both composite null and alternative hypotheses and appropriate methods for equivalence teting have been devised by switching the usual null and alternative hypothesis. But Norleans appears to be unaware of these advances. Also the generalization by Wald and others to statistical decision theory based on loss functions or utility functions is likewise overlooked.

On the one hand he reject parametric statistical inference because he does not believe in the use of parametric distributions to represent test statistics but yet he accepts the method of maximum likelihood which he does not recognize as parametric. But maximum likelihood methods are not always robust and in some cases not even sensible.

The analysis of clinical trials is challenging. Mixed effects models, censored survival models, handling of missing data, multiplicity adjustment are among the many tools and issues associated with these problems. Probability and statistics have subtleties that cannot always be simplified. It takes sophistication and the clever use of probability to conquer these problems but Norleans offers us none of this.

He appears to be ignorant of the asymptotic theory of statistics which is based on convergence concepts from probability. The only asymptotic result he mentions is the central limit theorem and that he seems to think is based on a Taylor series approximation. With the Poisson model he mentions the problem of overdispersion but instead of recognizing that with medical data more complex models such as compound Poisson can adequate address the issue and make sense clinically he rejects the methodology itself.

Medical researchers who want to understand statistics and its useful role in medicine and other research would be better served by reading David Salsburg's "A Lady Tasting Tea" than the garbage in this book.

I really have serious issue about Dr. Chow's selection of this book for this series and I cannot understand how he can characterize it so favorably in his introduction.

I bought this book to try understand how I could help a friend of mine out with her crack addiction. Instead of finding out any information on helping her I got a book listing the 12 steps in any 12 step program.

There is virtually NO INFORMATION ABOUT COCAINE OR CRACK and the information in the book can be gotten freely from an addiction anonymous program.

A much better book is Cocaine Solutions: help for Cocaine Abusers and their Families.

This book is basically worthless for anyone looking for information on cocaine or crack addiction. It's full of fluff and a basically just regurgitates what is found in any 12 step program.

This book is not only badly written but in some cases, grossly incorrect. It is by no means comprehensive, nor does it even sufficiently cover what it purports to cover. I was very disappointed by it, and I hope those who are serious about learning about Bipolar Disorder look elsewhere. It is almost scary to know that this book is available. There are a number of much better books out there that are more accurate and useful.

This book is so full of errors that I absolutely do not trust it. Mistakes include grammatical errors, index not matching text, and inaccurate substantive context. Nor does it add anything new. Most of the information could be more accurately obtained from more trustworthy sources. Much better books on the topic are available.

I should have realized from the start ( after the first 50 pages ) that this story was going nowhere. Mazza spends too much time going in circles. Everything here is from some where else. It was like watching 60s TV police shows ( except they were better ). Do not spend your hard earned money on this. I should have spent the time I used reading this to do some thing more productive- like washing my cat. I guess anyone thinks they can write a book these days. This book is less than one star.

I cannot believe I spent money on this book, Mazza takes pages and pages to explain anything. I had to wade through it. Mazza should not give up his day job, because it obvious from this book that he is full of himself.

When I first bought this, I thought it was going to be a scientific book. It turns out to be just ramblings from some guy. It wasn't even a book, it was more like a pamphlet. I was not happy that I had paid... for some propaganda. If you are looking for a book about truth, stick to something else in the New Age section because this book/flier is not worth it....

This book was once available for pre-order when it was still in the developmental stages. Since that time, it has been officially canceled. "Across the Threshold" was going to be the Moody Blues's version of the Beatles's Anthology, a coffee table book full of color and black and white photos, written by Mark Murley, one of the main writers of the essential U.S. Moody Blues fanzine "Higher and Higher." So, don't fret about this being "out of print" or "unavailable" and don't go searching used book stores for it because it was NEVER PRODUCED!! Check out the paperback called "The Moody Blues Companion" instead, though it is a far cry from a slick coffee table retrospective.

Many therapists like myself will be drawn to the attractive idea of a compact, practical guide to treating children with conduct disorder, but I was disappointed in this effort and I think most clinicians will also be. The book accomplishes the easy, page-filling tasks of reviewing DSM criteria, incidence statistics, etc., and it presents thumbnail characterizations of some interventions that have been found successful. While much of the book is wasted on information we don't really need to take care of the kids in our clinics, the level of detail needed to learn a new intervention is missing from those sections of the book, and the most that could be gained is references sending you to a source from which you could learn an intervention.

The book makes very ineffective use of special text arrangements like summaries and comments in the right-hand margin. Apparently, someone advised the authors that readers, even professional therapists, all have ADHD now, so that they cannot read straight text for more than 120 seconds, and text must be chopped up in chunks that can be given different looks and scattered around. The problem is that the material in the margins is not consistently a summary or anything else. To read the book, you have to keep shifting around from one little chunk to another, and you end up wishing the author would have organized the material.

In summary, the book seemed poorly written and not clinically useful.