This is the classic piece written in a time before our newly found plenty. These gentlemen of the beach and boat have set the basics out very generously and with royal tone - see also Hal Lyman's Bluefishing in which he declares that he shall never write of fishing for blues again no matter what! Such labor?!?!?!? Elder statesmen desrvedly get a 10 but discount 2 for dated material.

This short manual of pistol shooting includes many pointers that would serve the novice as well as the expert shooter. For me, the most helpful chapters were the first three that focus on proper stance, grip, breathing and sight picture. Shooting is somewhat of a zen experience in that you need to put together lots of different parts into a coherent whole. It helps to break down the process into each component in order to analyze what you may be doing wrong. If you start with proper technique, it is much easier to correct problems down the road. That is why the opening chapters are so important to study. Once an improper technique is learned, it is very difficult to unlearn it. Many shooters never properly learn how to make an accurate sight picture. Though the pictures in the book are somewhat outdated in terms of style, they are current for technique. If you can ignore the flared pants and 70's outfits, you'll have no problem figuring the proper technique.

The second half of the book is devoted to different types of competitions with helpful tips for every one. Obviously you can't use the exact technique for rapid firing shooting as for slow fire shooting. The book is written for a British audience, but the author includes all the major American and NRA competitions as well. Very helpful overall and well done.

This is a "must" in a muscle car fan library, especially of those who like the Chargers. This book reviews the history: the designing process, the changes, and the final result, not to mention the technical data, lots and lots of great pics, we can also read about brilliant drivers who maaried with this car, such as the great Richard Petty. Anyway i reccomend this book to anybody who likes muscle cars.

This is a review for four books into one review, all published by Marcel and likely released by them as a theme package: two by author J.Kent Crawford - The Project Management Maturity Model, and The Strategic Project Office and two by Frank Toney - The Superior Project Manager and The Superior Project Organization. The information Amazon posts is not the same as the books in terms of copyright and number of pages. My books all show a 2002 publication. Marcel has a fifth one coming out on managing multiple projects.

I do not understand why they charge so much, perhaps because they feel the audience is so limited they have to. The publisher will sell these and the one on multiple projects as a package for a substantial discount. My review below will be positive, but I also found myself irked at not only the high cost, but the duplication of content. Substantial content of each author is duplicated in his companion book. It would have not been a challenge with both authors to have merged the two books into one, and then better justifying the high price. While these four books are an important part of my reference library on project management, my four star rating is because of the cost of each book aggravated by the duplication of content.

Crawford's books are ideal for organizations wanting to adopt a project management maturity model. Their proprietary model mirrors PMI's PMBOK in terms of structure, but adds three important and valuable "special interest components" of Project Office, Management Oversight, and Professional Development. So, for an organization wanting to map their organization's project management maturity to the PMBOK, this model is exceptional well covered in a manner that by just reading the added competencies required at each higher maturity level, you get a sense of the enormous undertaking to increase one maturity level at a time. The three special interest components round out the model because the PMBOK is mostly about individual project best practices/methodologies, whereas Crawford wanted to add organizational issues to include Project Offices. Thus, organization's looking for guidance on their Project Office or PMO would find his two books very useful. The Maturity Model book has large font, is a small book, and mostly duplicated in the other book, but is ideal if you want a dedicated focus on just the maturity model mapped to PMBOK. His Project Office book has outstanding content for the many organizational issues and challenges, but also includes much of the maturity model in the other book. The content of The Strategic Project Office is outstanding, and covers the issues that plaque organizations in developing an environment for project success. If you have a budget for only one of his two, get the Strategic Project Office book.

Toney books offer specific best practices, and again, the content is duplicated to an incredible degree - whole blocks of paragraphs totally duplicated. They are just best practices on the other side of the coin, one for the organization, the other for the project manager. The best practices are highlighted in black boxes, with good content to explain why it is a best practice - so it is not just a listing, but in effect takes you on a journey of many best practices, giving them context to each other. Competency wheels explained in the beginning are potentially very valuable for an organization; I wish there was a tool for this, or added as a CD to justify the incredible cost. If you have a limited budget, the Superior Project Organization is probably the better choice.

Of the two authors, I would say Crawford has more in-depth content, and the cost is half. But as a series of four volumes, if you can get your organization to pay for these, they do make for an outstanding library, and are synergistic in their message. If I were charged with the challenge of taking an organization from a matrix to a strong matrix or project organization, I would clearly invest in all four books. But for individual reading, the cost is a major limitation.

In sum, I would recommend only spending the high cost is if you are focused on maturity modeling, identifying best practices, and trying to move an organization to be a project organization. These books are not a typical read about traditional project management practices, so it is not close to a PM HOW TO book. The books could also be used to study for the PMP, as the PMBOK is very dry reading, and these books would add a real-world context to the PMBOK framework.

For those on a mission within their organization, Creating an Environment for Successful Projects is a must read. This book does a better job of explaining why organization's struggle, but lacks a maturity model to do an assessment.

I have found this text to be complete yet concise. If you are caring for patients in the SICU you can find much use for the information in this reference. It provides details when necessary, but spares you the review of the more basic concepts that you use daily and which tend to bog down other books. This lends portability to this book and I find it a very useful addition to my library.

Surviving Today's Roads is an incisive, no-frills treatise that aims to teach drivers how to stay as safe as possible on America's increasingly more dangerous highways and how to avoid being intimidated by more aggressive drivers. With driver training no longer offered by schools and with working parents having less and less time to spend with fledgling motorists, this is a handy book to have on hand for straightforward reference and instruction.

This book isn't very long, 32 pages, but it includes 31 exercises covering at least 2 letters (small or captial) on each page; then full sentences, numbers, days of the week, months, and bible characters. The featured letters in the early pages use similar handwriting techniques, and each step of the letter is numbered, so a student can see how to do it. These letters can then be combined with each other to form words in cursive. For example, the first exercise teaches "a" and "d" and how to combine them -- so the student should be able to write the word "dad" after doing it. Each page features a bible verse that uses the letters learned that exercise, as well as a "Try This" exercise to be done by looking something up in the bible and writing it down. The pages only have a small amount of space for copying beyond the basic exercise, but the author allows reproduction for home or classroom use, so this should not be a problem.

Mr. King has written and illustrated a delightful short story which my grandkids (ages 4-7) absolutely love. The book serves as a wholesome introduction to the creativity of the American Indian, and parents need not be concerned that its contents will prompt bad dreams when used a bedtime story. This book will make a great Christmas gift. Rick Smith

Latin America, despite being our southern neighbor, remains a giant gap in our knowledge. When Americans think of Latin America, their image is of a number countries that are miniature, less civilized clones of the United States. That is definitely not the case and, until recently, this misunderstanding of Latin America has been one of the causes of our poor relations with Latin America. Frank Tannenbaum's "Ten Keys to Latin America" gives its readers a solid base of knowledge about Latin America to build from and dispels many myths about Latin American countries. Each of ten keys in "Ten Keys to Latin America" is a chapter in the book. His first chapter is titled "The Land and The People." It contains this outdated quote on DDT, "A doctor with a few assistants, goes up and down the river, bringing the benefit of DDT to the river towns." (pg. 15 "Ten Keys to Latin America" Tannenbaum, Frank) Fortunately, this was one of the only times that Mr. Tannenbaum's book seemed that hopelessly outdated. A few pages before, though, his prediction of the size of the Mexican population by the end of the century is right on the money. Latin American countries are radically different from the U.S. Mr. Tannenbaum uses his personal experiences and his vast array of knowledge about Latin America to describe the differences between the U.S. and Latin America. In the U.S. we are connected to people all around the world via the internet and other forms of communication. Even as this is written, live techno music is playing on my computer's speakers transmitted on the internet from across the Atlantic Ocean. High School students in Latin America do not generally have this luxury. "Ten Keys to Latin America" describes Mr. Tannenbaum meeting some Native Americans who had never left their village. The regionalism that develops from this isolation is one of the "Ten Keys to Latin America" and is key to understanding the difficulties Latin America has had in modernizing. How can a country where 95 percent of the population lives in rural areas industrialize overnight? This is especially true when the people of that country do not feel their loyalty to a country but rather to their own town or region. A whole chapter in "Ten Keys to Latin America" is devoted to the hacienda, a remnant of the feudal system. A hacienda is a large almost self-sufficient with a owner or haciendero who rents land to the peons who work it for him. The hacienda "set the tone and determined the quality of Latin American culture during the nineteenth century and until the First World War." (pg. 76) Yet, in "Latin American intellectual life...the hacienda, which is so all-embracing in its influence is, except in an occasional novel, never written about or studied." (pg. 80) Mr. Tannenbaum writes an interesting, insightful and sometimes scary commentary on hacienda life. He tells of an advertisement he saw in an Ecuadorian paper advertising a hacienda with 50 horses and 20 peons. The peons generally stay on the hacienda all through their life working on rented land. This system is so firmly entrenched that most people do not want it to change. These problems and many others are the difficulties that face Latin America today, according to Mr. Tannenbaum. To help fix these difficulties, he contends the U.S. should shift its policy toward Latin America. He makes competent but not irrefutable points against the U.S. foreign policy of non-intervention and anti-communism in Latin America. He calls these policies negative in nature. He says that the U.S. should have a positive policy of pro-democracy because that is what our policy of trading with these countries amounts to anyway. He says by bringing American materialism in the form of our products to Latin America we are also, in effect, bringing our democratic government and capitalist system. Mr. Tannenbaum's book is well worth reading for anyone and should be required reading for any American, Latin or otherwise, who does business or is involved in politics in Latin America. He slowly and craftily builds his arguments, which are common sense, but have not been adopted to the detriment of the United States' appearance in Latin America.

Here is a multi-faceted, well-researched work whose Bibliography alone is worth the price of admission. The topic is current and deAngelis moves deep into areas that other books have failed to do.
The style may not be for the uninitiated but it is erudite and addressed to readers who will understand the allusions and have some background in areas of politcal philosophy.