Excellent book about the first years of the Spanish Foreign Legion, also known as El Tercio (for Spanish infantry units which ruled European battlefields in the XVI and XVII centuries). It catches the spirit of the first Banderas (batallions), which were the fer de lance of the Spanish army in the Spanish Maroc Protectorate in the first quarter of the XX century. Afterwards, it took an active part in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), in the Russian front in the Second World War, where it fought together with the Wermacht, as well as in the Spanish Sahara in the late fifties.

Currently, and since Spain does not have colonies any more, the Spanish Foreign Legion is deployed in Spain, divided into four Tercios (regiment-type units) stationed in Ceuta, Melilla (two Spanish cities in northern Africa), Ronda and Almeria. It has seen action in Kosovo, and some companies will be probably sent to Afgahnistan in the near future. Always the crack unit of the Spanish army, the Legion is considered one of the best (if not the best) units within the NATO, comparing favourably with famous units such as the British SAS in field exercises and peace (?) missions in former Yugoslavia.

Dr Alverez has written an extremely detailed, comprehensive account of an important unit and era in Spanish military history. This is, by far, the best account of the Spanish Foreign Legion in English, and his worked does much to bring their story to a wider public.

The little known Spanish Foreign Legion forged a well deserved reputation for valor and professionalism during Spain's early 20th century struggle in North Africa. Unfortunately, very little has been written in English about this extraordinary force. Dr. Alvarez has written a superb account of the formation and early history of the Legion capturing the unique Spanish elan of both its leaders and men. Here was a tough, truly elite military force in the best Spanish tradition. This book fills an important gap in military history which I hope will encourage other historians to explore the role the Legion played later during the Civil war.

I was very disappointed with this book. When you read "A Guide", you expect this to mean a "historical review" and possibly some summaries. Unfortunately, this is not what the book contains. This is a TOY TRANSFORMER COFFEE TABLE BOOK. If you expect details regarding the cartoon, the characters involved, the comic book storylines, the cartoon storylines, any cartoon images, movie images, etc... you will be sorely disappointed.

This books covers toy imagery and that's it. It discusses, or rather SHOWS, since the book is focused on displaying pictures of a transformer collection rather than text, the production of the transformer toy line at various instances.

The detailed information regarding the history of the Transformers toy production, including at least a 1-2 page summary of each product line, is very nicely done. But considering that this is the only informative text in the book, it isn't very helpful.

The book contains many, *MANY* pictures, both excellent and poor of the various Transformer toys from Japan, USA and England. In this scope the book is a winner. Almost every toy, including many rares, are displayed and named.

But the book contains a ton of whitespace that should otherwise have been filled with text information. I would have liked to see Transformer comic book and TV story summaries, pictures from the cartoons (Japanese and US), interviews with TF story-writers, character and personality summaries, details on Bot-CON, obscure trivia, etc.

The book supplies useless prices, since that is what a pricing guide is for, and this book is not advertised as one. Auctions as well as the internet have enabled easy availability of product utterly changing the prices of any product both up and down.

All in all if you would like to see many of the obscure and older product for the Transformers, purchase this book. Do not expect cartoon, comic book, or much in the way of historical information. This book is strictly for the toy line and it should have been advertised as such.

This book is flooded with amatuerish writing, corny jokes and lots of pointless prices. I'm not looking forward to story reviews, etc. but at this price, the writer should at least include pictures of all weapons, accessories, instructions and tech specs. I'm very disappointed with the effort. I won't call it a waste of money, but I do feel shortchangedby the poor quality. Seriously, if I've his collection, I could have done something similar, if not better.

If you don't mind not reading the words, I suggest you get Transformations: Generations. The pics are superb and they showed all weapons, too. No box, tech specs or instructions, but the presentation is much more professional, and the pictures are definitely of a higher standard.

Buy this book only if you're a hardcore TF fan, flipped through it once and then forget about it.

This book has it's ups and downs, the ups include,it identifys a wide range of the toys, I didn't know some of the toys existed(I'm was new to collecting when I bought the book), there's little bits of background info dotted here and there, it runs through most of G1, G2, Beast Wars and Machine Wars, The main down is it doesn't show all the toys. E.G Runabout, Runamuck,the Throttlebots and a few others are missing but not that many. If your starting a collection this is the book to get!

This will clearly be a major book within political science and political economy. Unfortunately, the book's prominence will be due more to the preeminence of the lead author, Adam Przeworski, than to the scholarly contribution of the work. The bulk of the book is a series of statistical analyses that probe the effects of regime type (democracy or dictatorship) on a series of dependent variables. While the book is competent and this is an interesting topic, it is also a topic which has been studied in depth in the existing literature. In fact, dozens of journal articles over the last five years address the questions that drive this book, and many of those articles make use of better data and are methodologically more sophisticated than "Democracy and Development." If this book has a genuine professional contribution to make, it will probably consist in drawing more attention to other people's better, more innovative work on the same subjects.

Too many conjectures and too many theories have been addressed concerning the relationship between polities and material well-being in the world. But they have been raised without a proper test of them, without empirics. This book completely cleans all kinds of intellectual garbages, clarifies the existing arguments, and above all provides a series of the sohpisticated tests. Adam Przeworski and his comrades did a marvelous job.