I very much wanted to like this book. It attempted to do what few other children's picture books would even contemplate: to introduce major themes in history to very young children: the origins of early technology, the invention of writing, religion and so on. Unfortunately the prose is stilted and the narrative uneven. It postdates the mastery of fire by about 400,000 years. Worst of all, one illustration after another depicts well-muscled men doing things, while only a few feature any women at all, and then only to show them recoiling with children on their arms. One does not have to be a revisionist feminist to point out that in the vast majority of subsistence economies, present and past, women have played an active role, and at times even a preponderant role, in cultivating, gathering and transporting foodstuffs. The same goes for religion, whether we consider the female shamans of East Asia or the mother cults of the Mediterranean. I also think its time for children's authors to stop portraying "human history" in a simple European/Mediterranean trajectory that begins with the Neanderthals, dips temporarily into ancient Egypt and Sumeria, and resurfaces with Greeks, Romans and Goths, etc. Having taken a very early interest in prehistory myself, I can say from personal experience that it took me many years to overcome the idea that the only ancient history that really mattered was the one which directly influenced later events in Europe.

In short, this book deserves to be out of print.

When I was a portfolio manager at Sun Banks in Miami Florida one of our good clients, a Probate Litigation Attorney, went to senior management and asked if a bank investment professional could help him on a case. I was assigned to the project. This was my first exposure to the area of Litigation Support or serving as an Expert Witness. At the time I wanted to find a reference guide on what my responsibilities would be; the nature of the work; what should I expect. The local law schools had nothing. The library, nothing. Fortunately I was engaged by a good attorney who could walk me through the process. Almost ten years later, I am still doing expert work as an independent and even placing other experts in fields unrelated to my own. With the need to maintain both my skills and to train our beginners, I turned to the computer and screened for "expert witness" on the Amazon catalogue. To my surprise, 59 items came up. After deleting the fiction titles (mainly mysteries) we were left with 45 titles. After removing the books dedicated to specific expertises (Accounting, Engineering, Medicine, Psychology, Toxicology, etc.) we were left eight titles that addressed the general subject. "How to be an Expert Witness - Credibility in Oral Testimony" by Dennis G. Merenbach, ESQ and Anthony Stephen ESQ was the shortest (61 pages) and least expensive book on this screen. The book is a quick read. It has two chapters, eight sub-chapters, comic drawing and concludes with 16 "points to remember". It is not deep. The authors in the preface say, "This book is not a primer on the law of evidence. The information contained herein serves as a set of reminders to persons who may be called upon to function as expert witnesses in a courtroom, arbitration, or some type of administrative hearing." The potential expert is encouraged by the authors to take the book to court with them as an instruction guide. "Important reminders are highlighted in bold type." While no topic is covered in detail, some are useful introductions to the novice witness. The distinction between types of questions: Narrative Answers, Leading Questions, and Hypothetical Questions was useful. The difference in question structure between direct and cross examination also useful as is the Impeachment discussion. The warning on "Coaching" is important. Other items such as "Reminder No. 6, Abstain from drinking alcohol or taking tranquilizers before going to the court or hearing" or "Reminder No. 1 Dress in Good Taste" are just filler. The emphasis of the book is on oral testimony with little or no reference to the actual work of doing analysis, helping prepare a case, construction of displays, etc. Had I had this book on my first assignment it would have been helpful. It is not a stand alone handbook for the testifying expert. There are other excellent books online for that. But for the professional (either scientist or carpenter) who knows their field , has prepare a good case with a good attorney and is still apprehensive about facing a deposition for the first time, "How to Be an Expert Witness" is useful preparation. It is the type of book that litigators should hand out to their first timers and then follow-up (as the authors suggest) with a more specific trial plan.

This book is a compilation of ideas and suggestions from other organizing sources. The book did not give me a broader understanding of how to make nor maintain an organized life. Bits and bites of different things put together.

Responding to what they perceive to be an exceptional"historiographic moment" (p. 17), editors Anthony Molho andGordon S. Wood pool a "highly selective" and "partial" (p. viii) collection of essays on American history-writing in their book Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past. The tangent essays focus on topics of social history, the three centuries of American history, important epochs for western civilization, and a few chapters on other nations, mostly European. However, the threefold axis for spinning such disjointed historiographies into the same volume might possible be defined as follows: (1) a revisionist debunking of Americanism as a teleological historic apex, namely "exceptionalism"; (2) a concerted shift to rewriting history from the viewpoint of the "marginal" and "forgotten" people (p. 11), or the new social history; and (3) an emerging "transoceanic cosmopolitanism" (p. viii), i.e., a growing international perspective among American historians. These three themes as developed by the different contributors to the book and a few brief comments on each will delineate the parameters of this paper. Just say nay to exceptionalism. Rodgers' chapter is the keynote for this major theme of the book. "Is America different?" he begins (p. 21). But then he wrestles with the semantic slide from "difference" to "uniqueness" to "provincialism" to "newness" to "providentialism" to finally "exceptionalism". For him, "exceptionalism differs from difference. Difference requires contrast; exceptionalism requires a rule" (p. 22). This Russian epithet, a "Stalinist coinage of the 1920s" (p. 23) albeit anachronistic according to Rodgers' historical construct (cf. irrelevant colonial "language of eschatology and millennialism"), somehow stuck as witness of American historians' ready adaptation of Marx's "general laws of historical motion" (pp. 25, 27, 28) and the Augustinian "teleological arrow" (p. 31), the content of such "laws" and "arrow" Rodgers does not specify but only assumes, i.e., "general laws" (p. 29; cf. "imagined rules", p. 30). Pejoratives of this exceptionalism abound-"storybook truth" (p. 29), "thin line between history and faith" (p. 26), "exhortation" replacing "analysis" (p. 24)-and, according to the text's contributors, this type of thinking has left its marks on just about every American historiography. Countries like Spain, Japan, and Russia and their "systems" are seen as "antithesis", "Other", "rival", and "challenge" (pp. 329, 340, 416, 417, 450; cf. the absence of America's medieval past, its "alterity" or "otherness", pp. 239, 253) while America is portrayed as the consummation of important westernizing forces, i.e., the Romans as "antecedents of American liberalism" (p. 224), the "nexus between the Renaissance and modernity" in the American Bildung (pp. 264, 267), and the Reformation as the "historical self-definition of so many Protestant churches" (p. 299). Compare the American role in the development of "Western Civilization" (pp. 207ff.), but contrast the difficulty of the revisionists in integrating the French revolution into any exceptionalist framework due to what Baker and Zizek call the constraints of "observational perspective" and "ethnographic distance" (pp. 350ff.). Correspondingly, historians of the colonial period, the nineteenth, and the twentieth centuries contest issues of relevance (p. 157), participation (p. 168), and fragmentation (p. 185), respectively, while others have given a voice to those who have been excluded by exceptionalism, "especially blacks, Indians, and women" contra "white males" (p. 164), under the themes of race (see p. 108), gender (see p. 47), economics, immigration (see pp. 120, 131), etc. Clearly, according to the naysayers, the tentacles of exceptionalism are to be found everywhere. The proletariat gets a face. The postmodern undoing of residual exceptionalism falls to the champions of what is dubbed the "new social and cultural history" (pp. 12, 30; cf. the effects on cliometrics, pp. 63-69, and particularly the debate about Time on the Cross, pp. 72-75) or "history from the bottom up" (p. 11, like the Annales school; cf. p. 443), which is supposedly "authentic history" (p. 30). It is really a story about the masses, in contrast to the story of the elite, which is nothing really new (contra Ross, pp. 91ff.; cf. the work of the Russians Kliuchevskii, Kareev, Luchitskii, Rostovtseff, p. 421, the work of Reformation scholars, pp. 299ff., and the consistent trend of people's history in Medieval studies, p. 249), only that more people are writing about it, and American historians think that they have discovered it (see Wood's exaggerations, p. 156), an excellent example of provincial mentality (a la self-contradiction)! According to the new social engineers, it is a story about reversing those "hidden structures of power" (p. 53) in such realms as race, gender, class, and money, an attempt to break down the old scaffolds in order to radically reconstruct modern societal relationships (i.e., Kerber's gender analysis; cf. the excellent assessment by Ross, p. 98). The historical "resurrection" of the proletariat, better a Russian than American accomplishment, spells the deathknoll of American exceptionalism as the teleologically caricatured and eurocentrically warped enterprise is rendered invalid by the mass of voices in protest to the contrary. There really is a world, Horace. The inferred omnipresence (p. 13) of a concatenation of international historiographic voices toward globalization completes the tightening of the hangman's noose on the "old-fashioned unified sense of American identity" (p. 14). Most noteworthy are American collaborations with the French (pp. 361ff.), with Russians, i.e., important gap-filling (p. 431), with the Japanese, i.e., critique of "nationalizing" (p. 445), and especially concerning nagging questions of cosmopolitan moment, predominately from the twentieth century (see pp. 397ff.). However, this worldwide revisionist overthrow of exceptionalism does not at all explain the already existing and quite lengthy cooperation of international scholars in precisely the historical fields upon which exceptionalist thought was founded (see p. 207), namely the classics which are "transnational in character" (p. 222), Renaissance studies, transformed as early as the 1930s by Jewish immigrants from Germany (p. 270), and the Reformation which has always been primary domain for European scholars (pp. 295ff.). Furthermore, the question of identity bashing does not appear to be fully established. Resisters abound, notably in the areas of western civilization ("they flee Eurocentrism only to meet Europe in Samarra," p. 218) and about Spain (which "remains something of an Other," p. 340). The evidence toward global solidarity and a worldwide multiculturalism is not so ubiquitous after all. All in all, Imagined Histories is a good attempt to give momentum to the postmodern debunking of Americanism on the basis of social reconstructionism and multiculturalism, but in the final analysis, these subtle shifts might be accurately described as vacillations not in substance but only in kind, and the overall thrust is best seen as merely straining out the gnat.

I haven't done a lot of reading in this area, but there MUST be better books out there on this topic. In 239 pages O'Hear told me all about how Kuhn and Popper and Feyerabend have it all wrong, and (of course) Anthony O'Hear knows exactly how we should be evaluating science from a philosophical perspective.

I am not an expert on Kuhn or Popper or Feyerabend, but I know this--they write books that are a lot better than Anthony O'Hear's "Introduction to the Philosophy of Science."

I am a public administration student in a top ranked gradute program. This book was one course's required textbook and only because the editior, Anthony Kovner, was the instructor. While few students enjoyed the course, no one felt that this book is worth purchase. The only people that I would recommend this book to are foreign graduate students who have no working knowledge whatsoever about the US healthcare system. Otherwise, there are numerous books on the market that are cheaper and much more informative and intellectual.

This book is about a young girl called Mally Trenglos. She collects seaweed to sell as manure for her uncle who is now to old to do the job himself. A young man named Barty decides to collect the seaweed himself instead of paying for it. This leads to a disagreement between Barty and Mally. They decide to have a contest to see who can collect the most seaweed. Barty falls in and knocks himself unconcious. Mally saves his life, and as he awakens he asks to see Mally. He thanks her. They then get married and Mally moves in with Barty. I would recommend this book to people who enjoy late 1600 stories and love stories.

This book was not very interesting. It started off with Margaret Cooper, the main character getting married. She wrote a letter to her friend Tom Cribbins, saying she wanted a divorce from her husband to be free like him. Margaret threw away the letter, but didn't know that her housekeeper had picked it up. Within a week, Margaret's husband died. Margaret was blamed and Etta, her housekeeper, went against Margaret saying Margaret did it. She went on trial and was found innocent. Margaret moved out to a house flat where she could live in piece. Her attorney, Aubrey Fielding, came to visit Margaret one day and they hit it off. After 2 months, they got married. That was when Margaret received a blackmail letter. It said arrive at a place so she went. It was Etta blackmailng her. That went on through the whole book. Margaret then went to Arthur Crook complaining about the blackmail and being accused of murdering her husband. Mr. Crook said all they had to do was wait. Murder was a waiting game. So Margaret waited, until she visited Etta again, saw the conversation being recorded, and smashed the recorder. Etta's husband then came and saw Margaret saying Etta was dead. Arthur was also hit and injured being pushed down a flight of stairs. Through the rest of the book, Etta's husband blackmailed Margaret and Arthur was frantically figuring it out. This book was not that interesting. I only gave it 2 stars. I would only recommend this book to people who follow long murder's with no action.

I bought this book hoping that our two college professors would give Brownsville a bed of rich and accurate description and at least some analytical scrubbing. I thought this because before I bought the book I examined sections in it that were written by Professor Knopp. His are the enjoyable chapters that focus primarily on Brownsville's culture and people and give us some insight into what Brownsville is about -- how it works on a structural level, how its people interact with each other, and so on. The sections written by Professor Adams, however, are awful. Why? Many reasons: they are written in a dry and dull prose with an unneccessary focus on things like boats and machinery; they are replete with subjective references to politics that should have been left out; and they lack the sophistication and insight that Knopp's chapters possess. Adams's writing is so poor in comparison to Knopp's, in fact, that it reads like a juvenile's -- there are places, for instance, where Adams glosses over big topics like Brownsville's shipping industry (instead giving us only facts and figures) and where he strays into politcal territory when he should have stayed out (at several points he reveals his dislike of such things as the welfare system, political liberals, and segments of our Mexican immigrant population). The result is that the book as a whole reads like a tourist guidebook or a manual for political upstarts who need a Cliff Notes of Brownsville. Very poor effort. If it weren't for Knopp's chapters (and I wish he had written the majority of the book), the book would have been a complete waste of my time.

I had never heard of Powell, or his twelve book symphony, until a discussion about the mechanics of the Alexandria Digital Library brought him to light. Although the recommender hadn't listed Powell as something I'd care for, one of the participants in the discussion who knew of First Impressions, thought it might be something up my alley. Based on this first book, I'm afraid that the machine wins.

A Question of Upbringing introduces you to the main characters of Powell's magnum opus: the narrator, Jenkins, who one never really gets a handle on because he spends more time describing the others than ever going on about himself; Templar, the womanizer and lay-about; Stringham, privileged and haughty; and Widmerpool, the odd man out, with drive and ambition, but no class. One meets them at boarding school and follows them through college in this first volume, but what happens is never as important as what one thinks is happening. As a narrator, Jenkins is obtuse to the point of frustration, never quite describing the situation, but using plenty of words to not do so. Every time I thought something was going to get interesting, the novel would shift to some other scene.

The blurb writers compare Powell to Proust, but I can safely say that A Question of Upbringing is much more interesting than The Remembrance of Things Past. A "comic masterpiece," though? Not in this first volume. The book I have has the next two in the sequence, and I will likely go ahead and give them a try, but based on the first soiree, I must dance to some other fiddler.