It is very excellent book for your surgery rotation exam, especialy of you have limited time, But not very usful to be use in round as it is written on its cover!!

'O, How the Wheel Becomes It' was the first of Powell's books that I ever read, and the one that made me want to sit down and work through 'A Dance to the Music of Time' (which, after some bad experiences with long multivolume novels...ahem, Marcel, I wasn't so keen on doing, however attractive the books appeared to be). Fortunately, 'Wheel' is such an amusing read that any trepidation washes away in anticipation of a good long story.

'Wheel' is the story of G.F.H. Shadbold, a second-rate author who, in his declining years, has established himself as the sort of literary critic and general hack who appears on television chat shows as the venerable old man of letters, which, of course, he is not. Shadbold's fortunes begin to change, though, when the diary of a companion and fellow-novelist of his youth, Cedric Winterwade, who authored the forgetable 'Welsons of Omdurman Terrace' and later died for his trouble in the Second World War, appears on the scene, and Shadbold attempts to suppress it, fearing the unfavourable exposure that it will bring. The result is one of quiet hilarity, sure to bring a smile to any reader who enjoys a clever lampooning of literary fashion, and the literary establishment as a whole.

So, while not a book rising to, say, the level of Wodehouse or Stephen Fry, this comic work is well worth the time of the reader with a taste for the ironic, yet devastatingly accuracte, exposure of human nature that Powell has penned.

An excellent reference book for the beginner about oil drilling and how oil wells are maintained. A must read if you are dealing with oil people and need a working knowledge of the oil business.

The reader is treated to both a concise statement of Carl Gustav Jung's theories of life-stage development and a parallel narrative of Jung's experiences as he moved through each of these stages. Stevens traces the idea of the unconscious from its conception (which he believed to be around 1700) to the earliest investigations by Freud in the 1890s. The split between Freud and Jung (essentially spirituality versus sexuality) is described as having a profoundly shattering effect on Jung, as it had on others ejected from the Freudian camp for their failure to endorse, without question, Freud's theories that all neuroses is based in sexual development. (Two of these ex-Freudians actually committed suicide after being spurned by Freud.) Stevens's unique method of combining a primer of Jung life-stage theory with a biography of Jung is an effective introduction to the man and his work.

If you can get through this confusing leviathan of a slim book, I guarantee you will know more abut the meaning of music. But not only is this full of the familiar verbal pyrotechnics of Anthony Burgess, but an amazingly diverse conflation of genres - all those announced in the baroque title, and yes, even word music to Symphony 40! Intellectually involving and challenging, rather than an emotional or historical novel. The more you know of classical music the more you'll enjoy this sly book. It repays required rereading.

I thought this book was a good basic introduction to the field of optical properties of solids. The strong point of this book is that it is well organized and gives many examples. It starts with the basics of Maxwell's equation, then moves on to talk about luminescence, excitons, quantum wells, luminescence centers ... I enjoyed reading about the examples given. It gives many basic descriptions of how optoelectronics device work such as light emitting diodes and Ti:sapphire lasers.

This book is geared toward anybody who has taken one semester of basic quantum and one semester of electricity and magnetism. It is easy to read and contains many diagrams. Chapters end with a useful list of references that go into more details. This book is not a reference for graduate level treatment of optical properties of solids. The nonlinear optics part is short and shallow. The quantum mechanical description is basic.

Overall, I would recommend this book to anybody that is learning for the first time about optical properties of solids. Solid state physics textbooks by Ashcroft & Mermin and Kittel do not contain a useful and up-to-date section on optical properties of solids. This book fills the gap.

This book, published under the imprimatur of the American Psychological Association, is meant to be a textbook on human developmental psychology, which is the study of individual development from embryo to adulthood. The idea that there is an intimate link between individual development and species evolution was publicized more than a century ago by Haeckel, who coined the famous phrase "Ontogeny [individual development] recapitulates phylogeny [species development]." However attractive Haeckel's idea, it prove to be far too simple (see the excellent book "Ontogeny and Phylogeny" by S. J. Gould). For most of the 20th Century, developmental psychologists dealing with humans virtually ignored the evolutionary literature. This book is a largely successful attempt to rectify this curious situation.

Developmental psychology explains how nature (genes) and nurture (environment) interact in determining individual intelligence, personality, and social behavior. The authors take a thoroughly "developmental systems perspective," in which there is a "bidirectional interaction at all levels of organization" (p. 68) between genes and environment. Since the interaction between genes and culture is in fact highly nonlinear, this perspective is correct, as long as it is not take to the point where we deny the usefulness of heredity estimates (which the authors do not do, though there is virtually no behavioral genetics in the book).

The authors expound basic evolutionary psychology, they compare human and animal behavior, and generally suffuse their exposition with an evolutionary dimension. But what exactly is the connection between ontogeny and phylogeny? We are told that much of human behavior is adaptive (e.g. morning sickness in pregnancy), but it is unclear how this affects developmental theory, for which the important question is "is morning sickness good or bad for mother and/or child?" In several cases, they show how developmental psychology can improve evolutionary thinking (e.g., understanding the pace of individual cognitive development, or the relative importance of domain specific vs. domain general cognitive capacities). But the other direction is only weakly represented in the book.

The most important principle of evolutionary theory that applies to developmental psychology, according to the authors, is that infants are not tabula rasa, but rather are predisposed to learn and develop in certain directions (e. g., the acquisition of language, recognition of faces, willingness to share, potential for anger and aggression). They apply this nicely to cognitive development, but fall flat when discussion social development and interaction.

This is because the evolutionary psychology position on social development is in serious need of updating. The book presents the standard ev psych view that cooperation, altruism, and aggression can be understood in terms of self-interest, inclusive fitness (Hamilton), and reciprocal altruism (Trivers, but attributed to Hamilton and Axelrod in the book). The development here is very slim, but the position itself is simply wrong.

As has been repeatedly shown (see, e.g., the new Russell Sage book on "Commitment," edited by Randy Nesse, or Sam Bowles and my News and Views article and the Fehr-Gächter paper in Nature, vol. 415, January 10,2002), human behavior is much more broadly and deeply social than traditional ev psych understands. Human development includes not only cognition, cheater detection, and the like, but also guilt, shame, empathy, sympathy, a taste for vengeance and retaliation, the capacity to be socialized into prosocial values, and even more. These are basic developmental themes that are missing from this book, though they are known to social psychologists and are an active subject of research.

Of course, I should not fault the authors for not being on the vanguard of evolutionary developmental psychology, since it's hard to get teacher to use a book that has material that they didn't learn in graduate school. But the challenge for the (near) future is to correct this imbalance in evolutionary psychology.

Provides easy to read information on all key areas of orthopaedic surgery in a digestable length (900 pages). While it lacks in depth, it is a nice book to plow through during your intern year to get you ready for more advanced learning in specific topic areas.

This is one of Anthony Price's strongest works. The narrative is taut and suspenseful, with a complex chain of events occurring in the modern day which hark back to a little-known battle of the First World War. For historical and military buffs, this is one of the essential books of this genre.

Mind-twisting book about alternity, alternate dimensions, agents, normals, and of course--OX.