I've read this book. It is a small book that is like a large encyclopedia, it contains humor, facts, 800 phone numbers, URL's, and even more. My cat has an annoying habit, from the book I learn that this behavior is just instinctive behavior. If someone were looking for a useful and fun gift for people that are cat-lovers...
I strongly recommend this book. I'll be using it as Xmas presents this year for some of my friends here.

This book was just awarded the BEST CAT BOOK award for 1998 in the category of "other books" by the Cat Writers Association. So obviously they thought it was great. Here is what some reviewers have said about this book:

"Spirited look at Fluffy packs a breezy, unassuming charm while veering smoothly between serious and charismatic...should prove a...big hit with feline fanatics. Seattle Times (& Knight Ridder News Service)

An informative, unique book about cats ...In easy-to-read segments guaranteed to enlighten cat owners. Pet Age

"Filled with information about all aspects of cat ownership -from behavior to nutrition to additional resources. "277 Secrets Your Cat Wants You To Know" is a useful guide that provides answers to cat owners' most common questions. Cat Fancy

"Pounce on "277 Secrets...for a whisker-tickling, fact-filed compendium of fascinating feline information....a lot of fun and made for browsing or sharing with another cat lover for a good laugh together. Cats

(refers to this & "277 Secrets Your Dog Wants You To Know" by the same authors) Two Great books for animal owners....filled with funny, practical and unique information you won't find anywhere else. Naples Daily News

"Packed, too, with useful and sometimes merely fascinating information on feline health, behavior, discipline, and feeding." Dallas Morning News.

Full of fun trivial about man's best friends...enjoyable pick-up reading. Dayton Ohio News

(online) This book is fun but loaded with helpful information....This is the book your cat would pick if he let loose in a bookstore. (Dr. Mike Richards, D.V.M., Tiercom.)

(online) The authors...bring readers a purrfectly bewitching "cat-alog" of unusual and useful information about cats. Freddie Street Cats

(online). This fascinating book answers many questions that most of us would never think to ask . . . If you want to consider yourself expert in all things cat, you MUST read this book. Happenings.

Ever since I got Lily, my first cat ever, I've been buying kitten/cat care books and magazines like a madman just so I know that I'm giving the best to my Persian pet. In six months I have accumulated over a dozen books and this is the first time that I found one book with EVERYTHING I REALLY NEEDED to know about cats (care, health, playtime, training, behavior, etc! etc!) without sounding too clinical or boring. The money-saving tips were especially helpful and I'm sure you'll have a blast with the funny anecdotes as well. "277 secrets," they say? I didn't count, but it seemed to me there were more than 277 included in the book!

This is the best book in the Edwards' stable. The other books really didn't stand out from the pack. This one is inspirational and filled with stories of folks just like the rest of us who found their perfect work. Finding Your Perfect Work is thought AND action provoking - definately one to be read again and again. I hope they can continue in this way and move away from the formula home business how-to type of books.

As a Career and Business Start Up Coach/ Consultant I help people through the often rocky road to self employment. Now I don't have to do it alone!

This remarkable book by Paul and Sarah Edwards is a must have. It once again proves why everyone else models their work. They are without question the nations experts on Self Employment.

This book will motivate, inspire, spark your creativity, stretch your mind, and help you clarify your perfect work. It also provides great practical information and resources.

I've seen first hand the benefits people get from this book. Believe me, if you follow this process you will arrive at successful self employment!

I highly recommend this book to everyone. Especially if you, or someone you know, has ever had a dream or a passion and just can't see how you might make a living from it. Gift yourself with this one. You'll never regret it!

Wow!! Whenever I think I have no choices I pick up this book and reenter the world of possibilities! I love the stories of 'real' people and how they've found their 'perfect work'. They should teach this in schools - everyone needs to know how to do this.

The "Personal Style Survey" really explained how what activities I do naturally are some of my greatest assets. The Directory of Self Employment Careers (1600 + Independent Creative Careers) provided great ideas for making money just by being myself! And that's just a small portion of the book. This is a must have for any one considering the wild, wacky and wonderful world of self employment.

Plague Time provides important and fascinating information about diseases, how they are acquired, their evolution, and their consequences. Professor Ewald contends that many chronic diseases such as several types of cancer, arteriosclerosis, schizophrenia, several types of arthritis, bipolar disease, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, or even many symptoms of aging are the result of infections. The explanations of how these infections are acquired, and situations where the infectious agents are likely to be especially virulent are of great practical value.

Dr. Ewald's thesis is that infectious agents quickly evolve to maximize their reproductive success. Their virulence and the nature of the acute or chronic symptoms they cause are a function of how they are transmitted. The discussions of microbe evolution deepened my understanding of biology and evolution. There are many examples presented.

Many sections were unnecessarily wordy, with clumsy and overly long sentence constructions and much redundancy. This made parts of the book slow and heavy going. His frequent and often lengthy criticisms of the medical establishment are justified in my view, but sometimes got tiresome. In spite of the effort required, Plague Time is well worth reading.

I was lucky enough to read this book in galley form. As a professor of evolution and behavior, I can honestly say this is the most important trade book I have read in the last ten years. Ewald's book not only introduces the reader to evolutionary approaches to disease, but it lays out some revolutionary ideas about both what causes disease in genera,l and how to handle chronic infectious diseases. It should be read not just by the lay science reader, but by every medical doctor worth his salt.

Not genes but germs cause most chronic diseases. So argues evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald in his new book, "Plague Time: How Stealth Infections Cause Cancers, Heart Disease, and Other Deadly Ailments," (Free Press, 282 pp, ...).

The Amherst professor is trying to drag the medical establishment into the Darwinian age. While modern research often aims to uncover genetic factors in major diseases, Ewald contends that "human genome mania" often violates the fundamental principle of biology, Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. Darwin argued that families with harmful hereditary traits will die out over time, asserts Ewald, and would be replaced by lineages whose hereditary constitution better enables them to survive and reproduce.

Ultimate goals aside, Ewald has made sure that lay readers will find his book interesting and intelligible. He believes that patients are often more open-minded than their doctors.

In an interview, Ewald claimed that the health benefits of the Human Genome Project are over hyped because "most diseases aren't genetic." He said research funds dedicated to improve antibiotics would bring greater payoffs than those spent on the glamour field of genetic research.

Ewald, who is not a medical doctor, said, "My goal is to bring into medicine all of biology, especially evolution."

So far, he has had more success persuading other biologists than the medical establishment. The late William D. Hamilton of Oxford University, England -- considered by the likes of Edward O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins to be the most important evolutionary thinker of recent decades -- commented on Ewald's theory, "It opens our eyes to many quite weird possibilities about disease that most medical scientists, tending to be unaware of current evolutionary thought, don't think of."

Ewald contends there are only three fundamental causes of disease:

-- First, nonliving environmental agents like radiation, poisons, and nutrition. Too many cigarettes cause lung cancer; too little Vitamin D causes rickets.

-- Second, infections. Long ago, people figured out that smallpox, measles, and chicken pox passed from one person to another. Since then, an ever-growing number of diseases have been shown to be induced by bacteria, viruses, or protozoa.

Historically, infectious agents have been harder to identify than nonliving poisons as the cause of diseases because germs can evolve ways to hide. Simple chemicals cannot.

-- Third, hereditary causes. The Human Genome Project has been widely advertised as eventually leading to cures for many diseases, such as breast cancer. Ewald observed, however, "If one identical twin gets breast cancer, the other's likelihood of contracting it is only around 10 to 20 percent. This suggests that genes are not the whole story."

But the more basic logical problem with what he dubs Human Genome Mania, argued Ewald, is natural selection theory.

Such reasoning was forcefully introduced to Ewald in the early 1990s by a letter from a physicist named Gregory Cochran. After America won the Cold War, this New Mexico rocket scientist had turned to developing formulas for estimating which diseases are hereditary and which are infectious. The key number proved to be the ailment's "reproductive fitness burden." In other words: Compared to a healthy person, how many fewer descendents will a sufferer procreate?

The tendency of people with healthy genes to reproduce more than people with sick genes, Cochran and Ewald determined, makes it unlikely that there are many hereditary syndromes that are both widespread and significantly damaging to their victims ability to reproduce successfully.

We can evolve new defenses against both bad genes and bad germs. What makes infections more dangerous than genes, however, is that germs can fight back, said Ewald. They can relatively quickly counter our new resistance strategies by evolving news methods of attack -- thus antibiotic resistence, for example.

Ewald admits there are numerous hereditary diseases. But the ones produced by spontaneous mutations tend to be quite rare since the bad genes quickly get weeded out of the gene pool, he said, citing Duchenne's muscular dystrophy. This male-inherited disorder of progressive muscular degeneration may be the most widespread example, yet it only afflicts 0.02 percent of the populace, said Ewald.

Still, it's possible for more common hereditary diseases to survive down through the generations if they are a defense against something worse. The best known example is sickle cell anemia, a blood disorder that sickens and can kill those of West African descent who inherit two copies of the sickle cell gene. Those who receive only one copy from their parents, however, have greater resistance to a debilitating form of malaria.

A spokesman for the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, responded diplomatically to Ewald's charges that research dollars invested in genetic research would save more lives if devoted to infectious diseases instead. He suggested, "This shouldn't be a zero sum fight. As promising new areas come along, the government should spend more on health research in general."

The Bethesda, Md.-based spokesman also argued that when the Human Genome Project eventually maps the variations found among a large number of individuals, it will help us understand why some people have better resistance to particular germs. For example, he said, certain East African prostitutes appear to be immune to HIV. Understanding their genetic peculiarities might well help researchers uncover the Achilles heel of AIDS.

Nonetheless, Ewald's "Plague Time" may someday be remembered as a landmark in the development of more effective treatments for killer diseases.

Highly unreliable. Schmidt has produced some very good English-language poetry, but it ain't Rimbaud. He conceals this by not printing the original on a facing page. Worse yet, he prints the Illuminations as free verse, when they were written as prose poems (on the rationale that the prose poem isn't as successful a genre in English as it is in French.) I am sternly against this kind of translation, unless you're going to go all the way and admit that what you're doing is a poem by Paul Schmidt "after" Rimbaud. But he doesn't. Rimbaud newbies are directed instead to Louise Varese's superb versions of Illuminations and A Season in Hell; those who want a complete works should go for Wallace Fowlie's less memorable but more faithful edition; total Rimbaud freaks should learn French (and mortgage the house in order to be able to afford the magnificent Pleiade edition of the originals).

i find the translation quite smooth and literary; however in comparison to other translations, schmidt tends to be overly literal, which is not always helpful and doesn't leave much space for personal interpretation, which is rather important when reading rimbaud. but even if some of the verses' meanings are "forced" onto the reader, the meaning and rhythm are conveyed properly, which makes this book a good read.

I have a collection of various translations by Arthur Rimbaud. This book was a revelation to me. The difference is remarkable. By abandoning precise translations, Schmidt allows the full beauty and vulgarity of these works to be free. There is no stilted translation present here. This book is a work of art. It may not be translation in the traditional sense, but it is its own remarkable undertaking - and I believe it will stand the test of time. Congratulations Mr. Schmidt.

This book is a fresh new approach to the alien phenomenon. Its not about the little green men from Mars and its not based on hearsay. The book takes you through a spiritual and religious side of UFO's and creates a link which bridges religion and UFO's. Thoroughly researched and well presented, it actually makes you think about humankind and the origins thereof and the relationship between so called Angels and UFO's. A fascinating account of New Age, the occult, religion and UFO's. A must read!

Mr. Christopher has obviously put a lot of thought and energy into this fine , well written work. He takes a deep look at a phenomenon that incorporates so much disinformation from the 'spin-doctors' in order to send us on wild goose chases and make a mockery of anyone who attempts to get close to the truth. The book is well researched and documented. The author's style is not dogmatic and presents a style of questioning that allows the reader to consider the possibilities. Having done much research personally into this field, I believe Paul Christopher has come closer to the truth than any other book on the market so far to date. He perceptively ties in the UFO phenomenon with The New Age Movement, the New World Order on our doorsteps, and the Occult, as well as Secret Societies. Wake up Christians!

Paul Christopher's "Alien Intervention" instantly grabs ones attention as it ties-in paranormal UFO phenomena of the past and present with possible biblical end-times scenarios of the near future -- including the rise of antichrist and a new world religion. Well-written and very provocative.

This informative journey also includes a tie-in with UFO entities and mysterious creatures (including "the chupacabras" and "Mothman") that will make your hair stand on end!

Don't pass on this one -- a great read!

A thoroughly enjoyable chronicle of flying. Every pilot will enjoy Coonts' travels with envy. If you are into the true flight experience this book is a must, it would however, be somewhat boring for the non pilot. My only regret is that it had to end.

Books about the pleasure of flight seem to strike people in one of two ways- they love them or hate them. For people who don't understand the joy of flight, Coont's book makes little sense. It's just a story about a guy flying around in a plane, fergoshsakes. I mean, what gives?

But for those who hang on to the words of St. Exupery, or Ernest Gann, or Richard Bach (before that book about the bird), Coont's book about his coast to coast flight in a Stearman bipe is sheer joy. Anyone who has ever dreamed of flying across the country in a open cockpit- and there are a lot of people with this dream- will get a great deal of enjoyment from Cannibal Queen.

This is a great book about Coonts' flight around the US in a biplane without electronic navigation aids through mostly uncontrolled airspace. He shares his thoughts, experiences and observations along the way. This book will appeal primarily to pilots who can appreciate the freedom associated with this kind of flying.

... in spite of the appearance of the reviews associated with this work and the work itself, there is a valid connection between postmodernism and (let me be patient!) complexity.

First of all, about terminology... isn't complexity theory a branch of computer science that deals with execution time as a metric of algorithms? I think the reviewers here want to refer to complex systems theory. Wasn't connectionism a fad which was piled on top of a catchily-conceived name for artificial neural networks .... which were the popularization of more serious works of people like Papert, Minsky, Grossberg...and doesn't the reviewer who pretends to know something about physical science understand what "irreversibility" is and that, indeed, classical mechanics is indeed reversible? J. Willard Gibbs would roll over in his grave if he could read the reviews on this page...

IF you are seriously trying to find out what this stuff is about, start out by getting Lars Skyttner's book on General Systems Theory. Use it as a guidebook. Then, if you want to understand the evolution of the ideas, read the opening sections of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. After that, read Saussure and Piaget on structuralism and read Terence Hawkes' book, "Structuralism and Semiotics" After that, try to get at least a rudimentary understanding of the work of the process philosophers...Bergson, Peirce, James and, of course, "Process and Reality" by Whitehead. At this point, you should seriously consider getting at least a passing familiarity with the work of Karl Marx with the goal of understanding what was really bothering him - and of seeing that Marx's ideas are important in ways that he probably never even thought about.

At that point, if you are one of many for whom there is a schism between the culture of liberal arts and the culture of mathematics and science, you should, at this point read a few of the popular works of Richard Feynman - perhaps, "The Character of Physical Law" or the opening lecture of Volume I of "The Feynman Lectures on Physics". Compare what Feynman has to say about science to what Piaget has to say about structures and - hopefully, by now you are beginning to realize that mathematics is a liberal art - and that the so-called liberal arts are sometimes excuses for people who don't want to be very careful in their thinking....(not always, mind you) - go and read Sunny Auyang's wonderful books, "Foundations of Complex Systems Theories" and "How is Quantum Field Theory Possible?"

By this point, you should feel somewhat secure in addressing "Postmodernism" and being able to distinguish what is there because people want to sound "cool" for their friends, and what is valid and sometimes deeply disturbing for the evolution of humanity.

Frankly, I'm astonished by some of the favorable reviews this book has received. First of all, I still haven't figured out if this really is a book or if it's a collection of essays, due to the amount of repetition of content between chapters.

Cilliers attempts to demonstrate the mutual relevance of complexity science (CS) and postmodern philosophy, but his knowledge of CS and thermodynamics seems to go no deeper than what he's read on the dustjackets of pop-sci books. The number of claims he makes that are either blatantly false or not necessarily true are outnumbered only by the number of uninsightful comments and statements that appear to have been gleaned directly from more technical sources. Here are a few to make one's skin crawl:

On p. 6, as an example of a non-linear relationship: "money can receive compounded interest". In fact, this is a classic *linear* relationship (so common it's often used as an introductory problem the first day of a course in linear differential equations). The equation representing it is simply: dM/dt = n*M, where M is the amount of money in an account, and n is the interest rate. The solution is Mo * e^(nt), where Mo is the initial amount of money in the account and 'e' represents 'exponential'. (Simply because compounded interest generates an exponential curve over time does not make the relationship non-linear; the underlying equation is linear.)

On p. 4: "Any analysis of a complex system that ignores the dimension of time is incomplete, or at most a synchronic snapshot of a diachronic process." This is completely false - One of the very purposes of 'phase space' analysis is to *completely* represent a system without considering time. The elliptical relationship between velocity and momentum in a simple harmonic oscillator is a common example that many might remember from high school physics.

On p. 8: "In classical mechanics, time was reversible, and therefore not part of the equation. In thermodynamics time plays a vital role." This quote still makes me tear at my hair. The *exact opposite* is true: almost every equation in classical mechanics (projectile motion, harmonic oscillation, planetary motion) explicitly involve time as a dimension, while, because thermodynamics is only concerned with initial and final (equilibrium) states, few thermo equations do so.

On p. 3, Cilliers says: "The grains of sand on a beach do not interest us as a complex system." but includes later in the book a quote from complexity scientist Per Bak, who has achieved his fame specifically for the study of the 'self-organized criticality' of sand grains.

And this is just the first few pages! The list goes on and on: He repeatedly confuses the thermodynamic concepts of 'closed' and 'isolated' systems; He seems to think that 'non-linear' equations are all somehow phenomenally complex and unsolvable and that the phrase 'non-linear' is therefore a synonym for being non-reductionist, non-rational, and, in short, 'postmodern'. (In doing so, he falls into many of the traps Alan Sokal identified in Fashionable Nonsense.)

I think that the basic concept behind the book could have been interesting, but due to Cilliers elementary-level grasp of half the subject matter with which he deals, the statement Cilliers himself makes on p. 133 (in reference to a recent book by Rouse) applies equally well to this text: "For me, reading this book was about as pleasant as it would be to eat it."

I read this book primarily through an interest in the philosophy of language. Of particular relevance in this respect is the emphasis on a characterisation of complexity as being opposed to traditional notions of representation. Cilliers draws parallels between the philosophy of Saussure and Derrida and scientific developments in distributed representation, particularly with respect to connectionist approaches as implemented in neural networks. Cilliers argues that a classical representational theory of language that posits syntax as an instantiation of semantics does not sufficiently allow for the complexity evident in language, but rather that meaning is constituted by the dynamic relationships between both the components of language and the environment in which it is embedded. Cilliers explicitly rejects rule-based symbol systems as being adequete for modelling language, referring to recent scientific research using neural networks to simulate language learning indicating that "though rules may be useful to describe linguistic phenomena, explicit rules need not be employed when language is acquired or when it is used" (p. 32). In Chapter 4 (pp. 48-57), Cilliers considers the Chinese Room Gedankenexperiment from the perspective of his thesis. He suggests that the debate has unquestionably assumed that the formal model of language represented by the argument is correct, that is, that a rule-book such as the one supposed is even possible. Cilliers suggests that this assumes certain features of language: that a formal grammar for a natural language can be constructed and represented in a lookup table; that there is a clean split between syntax and semantics; and that language represents rather than constitutes meaning (p. 53).

The overall picture of language that Cilliers develops has important parallels with the views of Wittgenstein, though, somewhat surprisingly, Wittgenstein is never explicitly mentioned (except with regard to his family concepts). Firstly, meaning is construed as occuring through dynamic processes (use) rather than static representations (the conception that Wittgenstein's private language argument criticises). Secondly, the idea that there is some fact of the matter (whether inside or outside human agents) that determines meaning is explicitly rejected. Finally, a straightforward split between syntax and semantics is denied (a distinction that the sceptical interpretation of Wittgenstein, offered by Kripke, takes advantage of).

In summary, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in making connections between dynamic systems theory and philosophy of mind or language -- Cilliers proves an effective communicator in both of the fields he wishes to connect.

This book is truly astonishing. Paul Witcover has taken our everyday world, distilled it down to its very essence, and disguised it as the Hierarchate. The book is one immense parable. It covers the cruelty, sexism and unmitigated power of the Christian Church, interweaving Christian mythology with well-known fairy tales and pagan folklore. The symbology in this book is overwhelming - on every page there is something that makes me stop and grab my copy of "The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets" by Barbara G. Walker (which I highly recommend you read before, during or after "Waking Beauty" if you want to fully appreciate its vast multiple layers; also, a Latin dictionary is useful for uncovering the hidden symbology in the names of the saints). Towards the end it becomes difficult to tell if Witcover intends the three Viridis Lacrimatas to represent the Christian Trinity in female garb, or the Triple Goddess (Maiden, Mother and Crone) - however, given his level of awareness about religious-social issues I'm inclined to interpret it as the Goddess. This book is far deeper than it appears on the surface to the idle reader...it is not mere fantasy, it is a living, breathing, scathing commentary on the structure of the world we are forced to live in; and this author is a man I would love to meet and talk to over a long, delicious lunch! Blessed Be.

Despite a silly dust jacket summary which has almost nothing to do with the plot of the book itself, "Waking Beauty" is an extraordinary first effort. Bizarre, fantastic, and sometimes grotesque (in the truest sense of the word)this book has a lot in common with gothic writers such as William Beckford, Lord Byron and Clark Ashton Smith. Witcover's rococco writing style is perfectly suited to his sumptuous exploration of the vectors of power, love and sacrifice, qualities which in his world are literally written upon the bodies of his characters. His characterizations are strong and sharp, and, unusual for his genre, the female protagonists take up most of the center stage. The action comes lickety-split, leaving the reader breathless by the novel's end--and hopeful there will be a sequel. "Waking Beauty" is not a facile book. Underneath the glittering prose and byzantine plot, "Waking Beauty" is deeply concerned with the interplay of power and domination, greed and ambition, and perhaps most importantly, love in all its many guises. Witcover is more than up to the challenge of translating these abstract ideologies into an entertaining, imaginative ripping good read. "Waking Beauty" transcends the "fantasy" genre, and sets Witcover in a class with such "literary-fantasy" writers as A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter and C.S. Lewis. Though the action of this novel may be set in the fantastic, the underpinnings of Witcover's world is all too familiar. By far, one the best novels of the year.

If you must choose only one book to read this whole year, please make it WAKING BEAUTY by Paul Witcover. This is a feast of erotic literary fantasy, a horn of macabre plenty, a burst of truth, exquisite sadness and winged joy, a chord of acute intensity that pulls at you and stays with you always. I am still in awe of it.... And I cannot believe that this is a first novel! Paul Witcover is a true original.