I recently ordered this book from Amazon. I had been looking for a more concise rather than lengthy explanation for many of the legal mechanisms and principles we enjoy (endure?) today. Without question, the "History of the Common Law" goes far to do just that. It is well organized and deftly written. I am reluctant to admit this about a history of law, but I confess that I found it hard to put down. Forty years after publication, the book remains a pillar and outstanding guide to our legal heritage

While it has been many years since I read this book, I recommend it to any who have an interest in our common law legal heritage. Of particular interest was the part of the book that explained the political genius of the Normans who instituted a much superior system of courts throughout England that replaced the manorial courts. These courts made available a body of law "common" to all of England and supplanted what could only have been a patchwork of arbitrary rules and procedures. If the Normans achieved an astounding political legitimacy after invading England with this stroke of genius, consider what is happening in the United States as our legal system gradually transforms itself into a dominant central government and weak state governments serving only as administrative units of that central government, and otherwise becomes an instrument of extortion.

When I bought my first mated pair of clownfish (maroons) last month, the folks at the store said, "There is only one book you need to understand them completely...." this one, and they were sure right. This book is simultaneously comprehensive and specific, and it is delightfully readable -- filled with very instructive information about breeding of all clownfish.

For information on maintaining and rearing clownfish, this book is unbeatable. Every aspect of culturing and rearing marine fish, from hobbyist's tanks to large commercial operations, is described in detail. His opinions are supported by actual data, either from the records of his years in aquaculture or from the scientific literature. Thus, when he writes about the importance of a given parameter, it is more than just a casual observation or repetition of lore. The focus of the book is the production of healthy baby fish, which requires healthy adults, eggs, and larvae. In a systmatic way, Hoff describes the effects of filtration, light, water conditions and food on all life stages, providing an integrated view of the process. Although this is not the "only book you will ever need", it is a valuable addition to the collection of the experienced aquarist, and would help to eliminate much mystery for the beginner. The prose is not helped by the grammatical and typographical errors, but is generally straightforward and clear.

Through a lovely, personal account, Tuller invites the reader to see the West from a Russian point of view. Here, a gay reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle came to Russia to study the so-called gay and lesbian movement there only to fall in love with Ksyusha, a mercurial lesbian. As we too fall in love, Tuller, a sensitive and insightful writer, subtly liberates, allowing human experience to be more mysterious, comic, delicious, and tragic than the acceptance of appearances or the application of trite, political labels permit.

Tuller gives remarkable insights into the modern world of Gay and Lesbian Russia. He takes the reader to a world of transexual lesbians, weekends in the country, and a sexual identity just gestating, waiting to be born. It was very enjoyable reading, and even for the heterosexual reader, it gives excellent insights into the dramatic changes that occured in Russia after 1991 -- all of it explained on a personal level.

Frank Rhodes was a distinguished leader of higher education when he led Cornell. He set standards of excellence for institutions but equally he set standards that other presidents should follow - without personal agrandizement.

He argues that this book is addressed to the AAU (American Association of Universities - the 50 top research universities) members - but that is not accurate. What he does in a concise and readable text is explain two things. First, he explains several issues that higher education rarely is able to explain in clear terms. Yet, he does it with grace and elegance. Second he offers a list of changes that would make higher education an even more important resource.

If you are interested in higher education governance or finances or the contributions of research from universities - this is a good book for you. If you want to understand the role of the faculty, again this is a good resource.

Steve Sample's book on Contrarian Leadership - is also excellent but focussed more on the leader. This covers, both leaders and institutions, without flinching from the tradition of shared governance. Compared to the post presidential books like Derek Bok's book on Affirmative Action or Jim Duderstadt's book on leadership - Rhodes book is much more useful and much more concise.

Frank Rhodes' book should be purchased by every educator concerned about the future of higher education in this nation. This book cuts through 200 hundred years of ivory tower mentality and reminds educators that if higher education is not revolutionized soon, it will be replaced. Rhodes quotes noneother than the prescient Peter Drucker, who believes that, "Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics...Universities won't survive. It's as large a change as when we first got the printed book...Already we are beginning to deliver more lectures and classes off-campus via satellite or two-way video as a fraction of the cost. The college won't survive as a residential institution. Today's buidlings are hopelessly unsuited and totally unneeded...I consider the American research university of the last 40 years to be a failure. The great educational needs of tomorrow are not on the research side, but on the learning side." To back up what he believes, Rhodes examined 125 major research universities and offers a blueprint for a future where learning is truly universal and useable. This is a profound book that is a must replacement to the 40 year-old, The American College and University: A History, a tome that has been used to train higher education administrators. Rhodes' views, while controversial, are refreshingly presented in a fast-paced and delightful book.

The ultimate reference book for anyone concerned about the all too common acts of deadly violence committed by youth. Recent reports claim that both Colorado shooters had a history of animal cruelty. Animal cruelty is often a precurser to other acts of violence including child, spouse or partner and elder abuse. This book gives professionals, students and concerned citizens an understanding of that connectedness and emphasizes the need for a hoslistic approach to violence prevention.

This book is the ideal graduation gift for anyone earning degrees in psychology, criminology, social work, education, or anthropology. It is a must read for veterinary and medical school graduates. The perfect end-of-the-year teacher appreciation gift is Cruelty to Animals and Interpersonal Violence Readings in Research and Application edited by Randall Loockwood and Frank R. Ascione.

This is truly the definitive book on the subject of animal cruelty and human violence. Nationally renowned experts, Dr. Randall Lockwood and Dr. Frank Ascione have put together an excellent resource for anyone concerned about violence. All the information you could ever need is finally in one place! Whether you are a social worker, police officer, teacher, student, researcher, concerned parent or neighbor, this book will provide you with information on how animal cruelty is connected to child abuse, domestic violence, elder abuse, youth violence and even murder. Because of this important book, animal cruelty is finally beginning to be recognized as a serious crime, as well as a predictor or indicator of other criminal behavior. A MUST HAVE resource!

Curriculum of Love is a wonderful book for mother's and children. It encourages a "oneness" with the universe at a child's level and gives parents great ideas for projects, dances, and books to read to their children. I can't say enough positive things about this book. The list of resources provided also helps find some of the less obvious items.

A wonderful resource for anyone interacting with children. With chapters like "Being of Service" and "Celebrating Community," it stresses thoughtful activities that are entertaining--not silly, sappy or boring--for both adult and child.

The literature on enterprise responsiveness is rather limited, but this book is an exception and had a lasting impression on the reviewer in that it ignited an abiding interest into the nature of responsiveness and characteristics of responsive enterprises.

This is the only book that I am aware of that dwells on the nature of 'responsiveness' and that too from the perspective of a customer! But the real significance of Davis's approach to 'responsiveness' is revealed only when one applies this to understanding the nature of the IT services firms. I have always been puzzled by the apparent contradiction between most of the received wisdom in management literature on such firms and my experiences of working with such firms throughout my professional career. But, put on Davis's lenses and all contradictions simply disappear!! Out comes consistent explanations for capability/ capacity/ core competency, best-practice guidelines, multi-skilling, centers of excellences, network of delivery firms specializing in different areas, the essential tension between the scope versus specialization, or, assignment/ control of projects versus project deliveries, percentage of resource utilization, yield management and so on, and, above all the phenomenon of outsourcing!

I recommend this book to anyone interested in customer-centricity -- which is almost everyone! Read this book for its declared purpose of 'customer responsive management', but if you are one of the thousands of IT professionals trudging along the information highway, this book is a must - this maybe your only handbook to make sense of this crazy industry.
Destined to become a CLASSIC of the 90's; for this reviewier its a prized possession.

The concepts in this book will change the way you do business. Davis and Mandrodt teach us how to respond and develop offerings unique to each customer. No longer will you view customers as nameless, faceless masses (look out marketing, its about time). The examples are clear and valuable. A must!

I have never quite understood why Nancy Wood's poetry collections are classified as "young adult". Her deep wisdom and clarity are more likely to be more fully appreciated by adults. This is a wonderful gift book for transitions times: graduations, marriage, death of a loved one, etc. Her poems are liking looking deep into a Medicine Lake where one sees the very fabric of life and all the its intricate connections. Frank Howell's paintings will fill you with awe and haunt your dreams.

I first read Nancy Wood's Dancing Moons after visiting Santa Fe and seeing Frank Howell's gallery. The words and thoughts that Wood has shared with the reader are thoughtful and energising. I find myself going back to her writings for guidance often,for myself and to share with friends and loved ones. I am appreciative of the emotions she has shared with us. Her talents as an expressive writer are world class.

Darwin Country is a provacative and hilarious midlife search for meaning. It probes some colorful nooks and crannies of the author's privileged Santa Barbara life-style, while examining philosophical and environmental isssues which affect Ecuadorian peasants a world away. Scientists, movie stars, environmentalists, New Age hipsters, bellydancers, wealthy Santa Barbara elite all make appearances in this thought-provoking tale, which prompts us to examine basic ethical assumptions - while laughing all the way.

Darwin's Country is a highly entertaining extreemly witty philosophical voyage through some of life's vexing questions; from true meaning to a captious look at the growth movements in California. The renowned Galapagos islands and the affluent-protected Santa Barbara provide a backdrop for incisive looks into the often muddled conservation movement and the search for meaning in a shifting universe. Personal, wry, witty and entertaining.

What Frank Ryan demonstrates in this book is that evolution by symbiosis has been a "blind spot" for evolutionists since the time of Darwin, and even today is greatly underestimated by the Darwinian establishment as a force in evolutionary change, especially in speciation.

Ryan, who is an expert on viruses having penned such well-received books as Virus X: Tracking the New Killer Plagues and The Forgotten Plague, begins with some interesting history from Darwin's time showing that Darwin did not (and could not, to be fair) appreciate the role symbiosis plays in evolution. Indeed Ryan demonstrates that the process of symbiosis, and its sister processes, parasitism, mutualism and disease, itself has been misunderstood. A relationship between species may begin as parasitism (or disease) and eventually evolve into a symbiosis. This experience between species has been going on since before there were multi-cellular organisms, and is a feature of every species in existence. All species interact with some other species in symbiosis.

This central realization of the book leads to something like a new way of looking at evolution. Natural selection is still a factor, but not necessarily the major factor anymore. This is implied in the discovery not too many years ago that the mitochondria that inhabit the cells in our body are almost certainly the remnants of a once free-living bacterium that, long ago in the primeval soup or near an undersea volcanic caldron, entered a cell and stayed. We are then the product of symbiosis, which may have begun as one cell invading the other, and over the eons turned into a domestic living arrangement with the invading cell providing power to the larger cell as that cell protects and feeds the symbiont that is now earning its keep.

How eye opening this conception is! Imagine the planet filled with life forms that are composed of a dozen, or perhaps hundreds of similar arrangements made over the eons. This is evolution not by gradual steps but evolution by saltation, with a new species arising almost (geologically speaking) immediately. Such a conception would explain many of the gaps in the fossil record.

Ryan builds a strong case. Along the way he looks favorably upon James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis (one of my favorite modern ideas) and explores the role that viruses have had in gene transfers and speciation. He contrasts the neo-Darwinian reductionists (Dawkins, et al) with a different bred of evolutionary biologist including Lynn Margulis, Erik Larsson, Luis P. Villarreal, Kwang Jeon, John Maynard Smith, Eors Szathmary, and others. He also recalls some scientists who pioneered the ideas of symbiosis but never got the credit they deserved and were virtually ignored by the Darwinian establishment. It is surprising to see how "blind" the evolutionists were and how hard it was (and is) for new ideas to gain a foothold in any scientific community. But that is the way it should be: a new idea is just a notion until it finds collaborative support by being tested scientifically.

The Gaia metaphor is perhaps the ultimate expression of symbiosis in that it involves the entire biosphere. Ryan recalls Lovelock's view that our planet with its atmosphere and self-regulating processes represents "an emergent property" of life "tightly coupled with the physics and chemistry of the Earth's environment." (p. 112) This view has yet to gain full acceptance in the scientific community, but as knowledge of the symbiotic and cooperative nature of life (instead of an emphasis on the competitive nature) becomes more widely known (and as the old scientists retire!) I think that will change. Ryan makes it abundantly clear that (to recall an expression I either dreamed up or cribbed from somewhere) "Everything works toward a symbiosis."

One of the bugaboos in natural selection has been the idea of group selection. This has been debated for many decades, but it is becoming increasingly obvious (and Ryan strongly supports this view) that group selection is a reality. Ryan reports on the work of David Sloan Wilson and Elliott Sober, who used mathematic models to demonstrate how group selection might work. (p. 255) I have argued elsewhere for group selection so I won't go any further than to note that the biosphere that survives versus the one that doesn't (either through pollution, madness, lack of foresight, inability to ward off incoming disasters, etc.) is selected.

The most controversial idea in this book may be Ryan's insistence that natural selection should be seen as "an editorial force" acting upon what he calls "the creativity of the Genome." (p. 265). He has German biologist Werner Schwemmler suggest a balance by noting that the "combination of the two explanations (Darwinian gradualism and symbiotic saltation)" together progress "toward a unified theory of evolution." If this is correct, the way we view biological evolution is going to change dramatically in the years to come.

Ryan makes a distinction between endosymbiosis and exosymbiosis, the former involving one genome living within another, the latter pertaining to relationships such as that between pollinating insects and plants. I want to add that the exosymbiosis between humans and our crops and domestic animals has been the essential factor in our becoming a new sort of creature, one that evolves culturally rather than biologically, and will within a twinkling of time evolve into something that we cannot yet envision because of this rapid cultural evolution. Perhaps, as some have suggested, we will form a symbiosis with our intelligent machines and let Darwinian evolution edit the result.

Bottom line: an exciting book, challenging and filled with information and ideas.

I received a PhD at Cornell Univ. in 1971, in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, with a minor in Population Genetics. For most of the succeeding 30 years, though, I have not worked in the field of biology. This book was like taking a new Master's Degree to update the last few decades. Ryan is clear, exhaustive in presenting new data and the development of a new paradigm; the book is well footnoted and thoughtful. His thesis that symbiosis is as important as mutation in the mechanisms of evolution, especially speciation and saltation (major jumps) is very well supported by the data he presents. Although the body of the book is focused on the biological data and its meaning, the author doesn't stop there. The argument also connects sociological, spiritual, environmental and political consequences of evolutionary theory--eugenics and Social Darwinism to Gaia, the world ecosystem, and the need to conserve the biological resources of the earth; and ends with an appeal for the need for awe before this mystery. Excellent and indispensable!