Of the numerous books regarding the recent online learning movement that I have read, this book provided me with the most useful, applicable insights. I enjoyed the author's perceptive knowledge sharing. The resources provided in the book are definitely worth the price of the book. This author illustrates both the advantages and disadvantages of the unique contributions that technology can make in this evolving and exciting realm of online learning.

This is one of the few books providing a framework for implementing technology in a college or university environment. The author uses a straightforward approach to technology. The text is easy to read and understand.

Tony Bates writes an immensely practical guide for coping with changing technological needs and developing a rational and strategic process for making sound decisions. As a manager in a university department, I appreciated a resource that focused on the academic environment. In addition, I think the issues he raises and the process he proposes have relevance for other educational institutions and training facilities, especially those in the public or non-profit sector which tend to be financially conservative by nature. Bates offers best practices and expert advice on factors to address when confronting technological change, especially as it relates to teaching. As he points out, technology is a means to an end, so in order to best manage technology one must be aware of the inevitable impact technology has in society and, consequently, position the institution within changing markets and needs. Major investments in technological infrastructure must be paired with a corresponding vision of the organization. This book is about the art of managing cultural change as much as it is about incorporating new tools, taking into account the human factors and the hazards implicit therein.

The format of the book is also helpful. It begins with an executive summary, provides concluding summaries at the end of each chapter, provides a balanced perspective on the pros/cons to choices that the institution must make, and presents real-world case studies to give a flavor of principles in action. I highly recommend this reading for anyone in an administrative or teaching capacity who finds himself or herself faced with the difficult choices inherent in a technology transformation. The only thing that would have increased the value of the book for me is a deeper discussion and emphasis on the role of the library or technology center within this transformation.

Michael Bird-Boy is a wonderful story, that takes an environmental message in to action. Michael Bird Boy is able to find solutions to problems in the story, with positive interaction between Michael and the problems. Michael is far more empowering and optimistic than the environmental classic The Lorax, without sugar coating the issue or leaving the reader (child and parent) without possible solutions.

I can't give enough praise to this book. I've worn out my old copy and am now ordering a new one. The characters are fun and whimsical, kids can relate to them. The message is positive and empowering--kids come up with compromises and solutions to problems. And it has a subtle anti-sexist message without being overpowering and pedantic in its political correctness. Micheal Bird Boy and Boss Lady both seem comfortable in their own unique skin, and that's also a great message for kids. This is a fine example of a pre-k/early elem. book that shows environmental action in a positive light. A nice gift for the Micheals in your life!

Wow! I read this book as a child and I remember learning about the story and the environmental message. I just found my childhood copy and I am thrilled to find how wonderful it is again! I am glad it is still in print. Enjoy, teach your kids about changing things. Sadly, the black cloud this time is caused by a much more harmful problem, fossil fules...

Freeman's book is an excellent look at the 8th Air Force in England - from its first arrival in late 1942 to its departure at the end of the war. He writes so well that you actually feel as if you are there, riding along with the crews at 25,000 feet, in the harsh subzero atmosphere. The stories are remarkable - the fighter pilots; the Fortress gunners; the pilots remarkable duties while flying crippled ships - all fascinating. When the last of the planes and crews leave England at the end of the war, you can almost see the tears at this bittersweet end. Definitely recommended. My only complaint: I bought the British version - the font is smaller and as a result, more print is crammed onto a single page as opposed to American books. (But, I'd still buy it again and read it!)

This is the book to get if you want to really know the activities of the Eighth Air Force during World War II. It covers the Mighty Eighth from its inception all the way through the war. Arranged pretty much chronologically, the book is not a quick read by any means. The tiny print and comprehensive detail would make slow going for someone just trying to get a general overview of the Eighth Air Force. This is a book for the serious aviation history reader. Written by one of England's top authorities on the US Eighth Air Force, Roger Freeman, this book is crammed with excellent photographs and stories of all the major missions and developments in the war. It also has a beautiful color section showing all the planes of the Eighth, with an illustrated example from each bomb group and fighter group. This is followed by a brief unit history on every group. There is another color section on assembly ships, which have always reminded me of rodeo clowns with their gaudy paint jobs. This is followed by a short selection of vintage nose art, an illustrated listing of all the aces of the war, and another illustrated list of Medal of Honor Winners. The index is quite good, though at first a bit confusing as it is broken up according to names, places and aircraft and the listings are very specific (for example, it doesn't work for finding something general such as Switzerland). This is a high quality book, actually more of an oversized book than a standard trade paperback. It has been wonderfully put together. It is a masterpiece, the result of much painstaking research, full of excellent photographs. Anyoone with a serious interest in the Mighty Eighth would find this book to be one of the cornerstones of his or her collection, along with Ian Hawkins' books on Munster and the 95th. I highly recommend it.

If you ever knew, or know anyone who served in the 8th Air Force in Europe during the period 1942-1945, this book will asnwer the question, "What Did You Do During World War II? If a member of your family flew with the 8th during that period, this is a must to keep as part of your family history, for generations yet to come. It deserves a prominent place on the family tree. It is well illustrated, and tells it like it was. I know, for i was there, and this is the way it was.

The question of self identity is a classical philosophical question and also a fundamental issue for any social/ sociological theory which deals with the subject, the active agent. The approach to this issue can be either set out in a philosophical manner or that of a social science. By "social science" I refer to the narrow sense of a somewhat empirical and experimental tradition.

Giddens adopts the latter. He argues from results of psychological experiments that human beings are subject to a sense of security since a newborn. By the sense can one assure the continuity of the self-identity. The continuity furtherly guarantees that the person not get into psychological disorder.

The self-identity in "high-modernity" has to cope with new problems. Giddens avoids using the term "postmodern", but he does points out the failure of the Enlightenment project which other postmodernists recognize. Giddens admits that human knowledge cannot reach so far as to set out a orderly plan of the society. The uncertainty signified by the sphere of the unknown/ unrealizable forms a great challenge to the self identity he mentioned above. Giddens tries to describe the society in high-modernity as a "risk community" and politics of life. The former concept may be inspired by Ulrich Beck. And the latter means an incorporation of global or domestic issues into everyday decisions, such as whether or not to buy environment-friendly products.

The style of this book can be seemed as a detail part of his structuration theory, which attempts to combined the conflicting individualist and structuralist perspectives. Those who are familiar with the agent/ structure controversies may find this book helpful.

On the contrary, those who have a better taste for philosophy or postmodern discourse would find the arguments of Giddens implausible. He seeks justifications from the validity and reliability of psychological experiments. Unfortunately, psychology itself is suspicious, since the explanation and attribution of experiment results are also subject to our cognitive framework. This critique may leads to phenomenological or postmodern reflexions, the former of which remains in line with subject philosophy while the latter of which de-construct the subject and put their eyes on language, discourse and desire.

"What to do? How to act? Who to be? These are focal questions for everyone lining in circumstances of late modernity - an ones which, on some level or another, all of us answer, either discursively or through day-to-day social behavior. They are existential questions, although, as we shall see later, their relation to the existential issues discussed in the preceding chapter is problematic." Giddens (1991:70)

Perhaps one of the most difficult books I have had to write a review on despite, ironically, sounding more like a self-help book rather than one of deep existential examination. However, that might just mean that the book is based on self-help books of which Giddens is an avid reader. The importance of such books is that in modern societies - self identity is a central issue. With the advent to new technology and increased education, the modality of formulation of Self-Identity has changed. A dark cloud of self-reflexivity both on institutional level and the personal level looms over those who see change as a risk and fear it while those who see promise, there is a silver lining. The rules of the game has changed - forever. Sink or swim. For Giddens the change is profound:
"For it is arguable that the period of high modernity is one of fundamental transition - not just a continuation of modernity's endless dynamism, but the presaging of structural transformations of a more profound type. The expansion of internally referential system reaches its outer limits; on a collective level and in a day-to-day life moral/existential questions thrust themselves back to center-stage. Focused around processes of self-actualization, such issues call for a restructuring of social institutions, and raise issues not just of a sociological but of a political nature." Giddens (1991:208)

The importance of the questions of identity posed above is both cause and result of changes at the institutional level and interplay, if you will between the global and the regional. Within this framework, both the institution and the individual can change and adopt. One responsible for the other. All are interconnected. Giddens sees links between links between the individuals sense of identity and the global players - a shift from traditional sociology - which sees these players in isolation. If we take as an example, the changes that have taken place in the recent past, the high level of the rate of divorce (which it is argued can serve as a metaphor for modernity) sets people on a crisis mode - a mode that holds as much risk as it does promise. It becomes a significant time - for Giddens it is a "fateful moment":
"Most of these dilemmas become particularly acute, or are experienced with special force, during the fateful moment of an individual's life. Since fateful moments, by definition, are highly consequential, the individual feels at a crossroad in terms of overall life-planning. Fateful moments are phases when people might choose to have recourse to more traditional authorities. In this sense, they may seek refuge in pre-established beliefs and in familiar modes of activity. On the other hand, fateful moments also often mark periods of reskilling and empowerment. They are points at which, no matter how reflexive an individual may be in shaping of her Self-Identity, she has to sit up and take notice of new demand as well as new possibilities. At such moments, when life has to be seen anew, it is not surprising that endeavors at reskilling are likely to be particularly important and intensely pursued. Where consequential decisions are concerned, individuals are often stimulated to devote the time and energy necessary to generate increased mastery of the circumstances they confront. Fateful moments are transition points which have major implications not just for the circumstances of an individual's future conduct, but for self identity. For consequential decisions, once taken, will reshape the reflexive project of identity through the lifestyle consequences which ensue." Giddens (1991:142-143)

Based on the three dynamics of modernity: the separation of time and space, the disembedding mechanism and institutional reflexivity plus added to that the notion of an acute sense of crisis the self is beset with this fateful moments. To this, Giddens replies with Life Politics.
"Life-political issues place a question mark against the internally referential systems of modernity. Produced by the emancipatory impact of modern institutions, the life-political agenda exposes the limits of decision-making governed purely by internal criteria. For life politics brings back to prominence precisely those moral and existential questions repressed by the core institutions of modernity. Here we see the limitations of accounts of 'postmodernity' developed under the aegis of poststructuralism. According to such views, moral questions become completely denuded of meaning or relevance in current social circumstances. But while this perspective accurately reflects aspects of the internally referential systems of modernity, it cannot explain why moral issues return to the center of the agenda of life politics. Life-political issues cannot be debated outside the scope of abstract systems: information drawn from various kinds of expertise is central to their definition. Yet because they center on questions of how we should live our lives in emancipated social circumstances they cannot but bring to the fore problems and questions of a moral and existential type. Life-political issues supply the central agenda for the return of the institutionally repressed. They call for a remoralising of social life and they demand a renewed sensitivity to questions that the institutions of modernity systematically dissolve." Giddens (1991: 223-224)

Changes therefore cannot be seen in isolated areas or pockets of consideration. We cannot focus on the individual only. The changes must bee seen within the context of the macro and micro revel. Within the realm of reflexivity, we do not only look at changes within ourselves as individuals and institutions but how we institute change. Using divorce as a metaphor for modernity, we can see all the hurts and pains and promise, much like Nietzsche said....live dangerously.

This book is indeed a work of social science, and not a work of formal logic, dialectic, or philosophy. And as such, it seeks to avoid the subject-object aporias and non-explanatory vocabulary of "postmodernism" so fashionable in some academic circles in favor of an integrated model of the self and society that not only makes sense, but resonates with the modern reader and social scientist in a way not easily dismissable by concerns of validity claims. Phenomenology, it must be noted, is less than a water-tight system of defendable truth-claims; postmodernism in its extreme denies the notion of objective knowledge altogether. This book has different aims.


The strength of Giddens' work has always been his identification of reflexivity as the central mechanism behind social and psychological transformations - the nested critique of society that sets up progressively complex turnovers in psyche and structure, one on the heels of the other, institutionalizing doubt as a central feature of existential and social life. Giddens makes clear that "postmodernity" is a meaningless term for his purposes; instead he takes the more sensible route (alongside contemporaries such as the brilliant Scott Lash) and employs the term "high modernity" to describe the present times as of the same conceputal order (albeit much more "intense" in critical ways) than preceding centuries. He compares and contrasts the self and the other, the mechanics of disembedding and reimbedding, the dynamics of intensionality and extensionality, and the twin states of trust and risk in a way that convincingly demonstrates that modernity is a game whose time is not yet up - and whose textures social science is capable of elegantly describing, and possibly even explaining. Giddens' theory of the "pure relationship" and his related analyses of self-society relationships are extremely important theoretically to many areas of the social sciences, including nation-state theory, globalization, development ethnography, refugee studies, and cultural studies. His work is even beginning to exert an influence on parallel disciplines as well, for example discourse analysis.


So, while the philosopher might dismiss this work as dependent on the truth-claims of modern psychology, the sociologist (at whatever level of expertise) will find this to be an engaging, challenging, and clearly written work with far-ranging application to empirical social-scientific material.

I've been reading deMello's books for 25 years, and they always delight. No weighty theology, no preaching, just a little tickle here and there to make you laugh. And sometimes grimace, too, as the following story illustrates:

"When a visitor announced he was leaving because he couldn't take another word the Master said, an older disciple was sympathetic. "I know how you must feel," he said. "For years I avoided the man because his words were like crates that shipped rampaging wild beasts straight from the jungle into my tidy little garden. I would much, much rather have gone to preachers whose words shipped neat white bones from one graveyard to another."

Yes, Anthony deMello was a Catholic priest, deceased now, but his books are not encouraged for the instruction of the faithful. The distinctions between Christianity and Hindu/Buddhist thought is often blurred, and his writings as a whole smack of New Age. Yet no one ever disputes that he personally was a holy man. Is there a contradiction here? Personally, I enjoy struggling with the rampaging beasts...

Anthony de Mello's books generally fall into three groups - guided meditations; cross-cultural, interreligious, traditional teaching tales; and sayings of the Master in context. This book falls into the second category - traditional teaching tales. Fr. de Mello has categorized the stories into seven chapters: spirituality, education, authority, human nature, relationships, service and enlightment. Most of the stories are told without any "editorial" comments i.e. the author trusts the power of story. The selection is excellent coming from a wide variety of traditions and ages.

An example: "When the preacher returned to the Good News theme the Master interrupted him: 'What sort of Good News is it,' he asked, 'that makes it so easy to go to hell and so hard to get to heaven?'" Please recall that it is a Catholic priest who wrote this book.

You can read the book straight through and get a lot of laughs or you can read it as intended, pondering the stories and risking having your life changed. The latter is the intend of the author.

With this outstanding book on wisdom and spirituality, de Mello demonstrates once again his incredible writing talent. Read it and let yourself "enlighten"...

Rose-Marie Toussaint's autobiographical novel Never Question the Miracle: A Surgeon's Story is a touching tale about the struggles of an African American woman whose lifelong dream is to become a surgeon. In plain and soemtimes simple language, Toussaint transports the reader to various times in her life, each fraught with strong and unique emotion. Toussaint shies away from nothing in this detailed account of her personal triumph over numerous obstacles such as her troubled childhood in Haiti, her draining years at college as a pre-med student, her failed relationships and her long years in residency. It is the story of a journey through life and the importance of not giving up hope.
The book begins with Toussaint struggling amid the limitations of transplant surgery. She tells of sick patients desperately in need of a liver transplant but too poor to afford one, while in another hospital a wealthy patient who lacks the will to survive is given preference because the family can afford to pay for the transplant. She tells of the reality of organ transplantation, how doctors have to fight with insurance companies to convince them to authorize the operations. These social injustices and bureaucratic intricacies of the medical world show the reader that there is much to question about the system. She aligns herself on the side of the poor, often times African American patients, whom she sympathizes with since she herself has had to overcome similar barriers.
The author then turns the spotlight on herself and begins with her autobiography which starts in Haiti; it is a childhood marked by poverty and a strong sense of religion, a blend of both Christianity and voodoo. She examines the various relationships that influenced her childhood and speaks openly about her mother's abusive nature and her father's desertion of the family. The subsequent journey to Miami and the reunion of her family there gives Toussaint the strength she will need to apply to a difficult premedical college program. From then on her family remains a solid backbone of support throughout the rest of Toussaint's journey.
From her college years on Toussaint shares her struggles without apology; she tells of the disappointment she felt at not getting accepted to medical school and her frustration with the low level jobs she took as a result. Even her heartbreaking personal relationships with men are included in the story. When at last she is accepted into a medical school and starts to make sense of the schooling process, her relief is contagious. During medical school, Toussaint is faced with considerable amounts of prejudice both because she is a woman and because she is African American. As she proves herself to the older doctors and professors, she is also proving to herself that she can accomplish her goals.
Toussaint's story draws the reader into her mind as she progresses thorugh her journey to ultimately become a transplant surgeon. Her thoughts and reflections make up the bulk of the book and center around the challenges she faces everyday. The reader watches her make mistakes and learn from them. Her story is continuously growing and developing as she matures. it is a story meant to inspire people to achieve their dreams, no matter what boulders lie in the way. It is a story about not giving up hope and underneath it all it is also a story meant to incite change for the sake of the thousands of poor people in this country whose insurance companies will not pay the price to save their lives.

Reads like a fantastic novel! Meet Dr. Toussaint at holisticdoctor.org

Rose-Marie is a friend of mine. Because she is humble and unassuming, I had only a hint of what a treasure load of talent, inspiration and skill she really is. Her book tells her story - a young woman from Haiti, literally pulling herself up by her own boot straps to become a surgeon at Howard University Hospital specializing in liver transplant surgery. She has met every challenge that blacks and women must meet, and she has conquered them all with brilliance and understanding. I hope you have time to look at her book. It's a real inspiration for young people with dreams.

Not the most stunning or innovative of Professor Grafton's works, makes a sweeping review from the expectations held by the world of humanists received from Greek, Latin, and Arabic forerunners to the explosion and expansion of these expectations due to America's discovery. Grafton is a smooth and engaging writer, who can bind the vast realms of his study into fine sentences and clear argumentation.

The text consists of five chapters, intermittent miniature biographies of more interesting or less frequently known players, and luxurious black and white reproductions of images and manuscripts of the age. The text runs its course and neither references the small biographies nor acknowledges the handsome illustrations. It is very possible that one will skip over these images as accessory to follow the sweep of the author's narrative, only to revisit them later. Sweeps and anecdotes describe the nature of the investigation rather than patient analysis of sites and sights. This book seems to share only the prettiest berries plucked from Grafton's years as a tender of the tree.

This book more than adequately accounts for the changes in European thought on account of the discovery not just of new lands, but of new worlds, new diseases, drugs, and, as important, the discovery of the limitations of many ancient texts. Again, Grafton is beguiling, informative and masterful at his craft. will be equally welcome reading for those who enjoy the period and those who wish to find a compelling way to enter it.

I posted a review here on October 10. I want to make a small correction, in case I confused anyone. The book I recommended looking at, if you can find a copy, is "Off the Beaten TRACK in the Classics," not "Off the Beaten PATH...." The author is C. Kaeppel, and it was published in Melbourne, Australia, in 1936.

What an interesting idea for a survey. Evidently Anthony Grafton specializes in this sort of thing, by which I mean histories of scholarship, and scholarly trends, in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This survey is about how people at that time thought about texts, objects, cultures, individuals, etc. in the context of making sense of the New World. One unexpected sideline of this to the average reader is the occasional item which someone might remember from C.S. Lewis' "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader", from his Narnia books. I know for me, that helped me connect the book up to other things I've read. C.S. Lewis and Grafton were, after all, drawing from the same mass of material pertaining to medieval and Renaissance ideas about ocean travel, and what mysteries might lie beyond the great western seas. All I can think of offhand were some ideas drawn from one of the Plinys about creatures with one huge foot living out across the seas, from which Lewis obviously drew his "Dufflepuds". There were at least two or three other instances, though.

But this isn't about C.S. Lewis. This book is an amazingly broad synthesis of paradigms and traditions overturned, and of the efforts to come to grips with previously unimagined (except, oddly, by Seneca -- I'll leave it to you to read more to find out about that), new worlds. Also, the bibliography is worth looking at carefully, there are a number of suggestions for further reading. One surprise in there for me was "Off the Beaten Path in the Classics", which has been out of print since the 30s. If you can find that in a library, I recommend it, as well as I recommend "New Worlds, Ancient Texts".

This is a beautifully written book about a brillant frustrated man, who was a great novelist, newspaper columnist and a competent bureaucrat at the same time. Interesting to an American for that insider's look at those segments of Irish life, it is also valueable to an Irish American Catholic for it is explanation of how O'Brien's convinced Catholicism limited his intellectual curiosity.

This book is the definitive biography, whatever quibbles one may have with the author's judgments, aesthetic or otherwise, about O'Nolan's life or art. Think instead about what you get with this book: an author who knew the subject personally, in-depth research into O'Nolan's origins and childhood, an intimate knowledge of the Irish literary scene in the interwar and postwar years, and the ability to show how these shaped the subject intellectually and psychologically. I disagree with a few of Cronin's assessments: I think The Dalkey Archive was the pinnacle of O'Nolan's novelistic achievements. While I agree he should have written more novels, I also feel that his time writing newspaper columns was well spent; there's more wit in most of those columns than in many novels by lesser writers. This book satisfies one of the most important criteria of a biography, that it be a good read in and of itself: Cronin is an excellent writer.

Cronin is an affectionate biographer but thankfully not a hagiographer. His personal acquaintance with Brian O'Nolan gives him insight into the various personal and artistic personae that O'Nolan adopted: Flann O'Brien, Myles na gCopaleen, etc. Cronin spends too much energy speculating as to why O'Brien never managed to fulfil the artistic potential of his first two novels. It is, perhaps, unfair to fault Cronin, as this failure frustrates anyone who has read O'Brien's early work. However, Cronin's tone occasionally becomes pious and judgemental of O'Nolan. One wishes this tone would have extended to other aspects of O'Nolan's life (specifically the personal); Cronin evokes and explains the mind set of Dublin in the early to mid twentieth century, but he seems wary of really examining it. In all fairness, that might have been another book altogether. In sum, the book is readable, often as funny as O'Brien himself (and occasionally just as sad), and useful for the student of Flann O'Brien. It fills

Anthony Meckler's "The New Mercenaries" covers the violent post-colonial period in Africa from about 1960 to 1981. Included are summaries of mercenary actions in Mozambique, Angola, the Congo, and elsewhere in that troubled continent. Names of noteworthy soldiers of fortune who appear in the book are "Mad Mike" Hoare, "Black Jack" Shramme, Bob Denard and others. Oddly, very little is mentioned about counter-terror campaigns in Rhodesia following the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI). Perhaps this is because Rhodesia was a legitimate government, as opposed the the main thrust of Meckler's viewpoint - that the mercenaries in Africa were a law unto themselves, which was in some cases very true.

Although the work is scholarly (Meckler is after all an academician), and is the result of so-so research (by reading newspaper clippings, it often appears), the book reads like what it is - a boring compilation of stale facts and anecdotes, and is further compromised be being liberally sprinkled with the author's pointless remarks and opinions. Perhaps this was an attempt to liven up a real snoozer.

Although the book would be helpful to someone researching African politics, military history researchers won't find much of use in "The New Mercenaries".

This book offers the most complete description of mercenary action in the past century. Very detailed, very much fact, but reads like a novel. Read what Forsyth based his 'Dogs of War' on.
If it is out of print, try to order it somewhere else (thru Amazon) because this one is worth it!

This is the single most comprehensive book on mercenaries , period. Mockler combines the scholarship of an Oxford professor, which he is, with the flair of a journalist, which he is, to tell the story of modern mercenaries. He also goes into the definition, the history and the future of the subject. Mercenaries are becoming more common and more respectable today (please refer to them as private sector contract military trainers). You can see them on the evening news training the Bosnian army

For people who have opinions concerning US involvement in the Viet Nam conflict Tom Dooley's books should be available and recommended.

Dr. Tom Dooley wrote 3 books and was working on a fourth when he died. His mother and friends finished the 4th. The books were about his work in Vietnam prior to 1962, he died in the early 60's from cancer. I first read the Dooley books in 1964-65 and credit them for my interest in Asian cultures. I still have the four paperbacks. Dr. Tom's clinics carried on after his death but ended with the fall of South Vietnam.

Dr. Tom Dooley was a young navy doctor involved with the fall of Viet Nam, and the massive effort to help the fleeing Vietnamese people as the Comm unists entered their country.(whew). This is the story of his return to Viet Nam and his efforts to improve health care in his own small way. A magnificent story of humanity at it's best.