Richard Hughes wrote High Wind in Jamaica, one of the strangest and most compelling books that I've ever read. His next novel, The Fox in the Attic, is a well written and intelligent fictional account of life in Europe between the two world wars. A sophisticated, educated, and upper class Englishman visits his relatives in Germany and becomes aware of tensions between Bavaria and Munich and tensions between republicanism and monarchy. There is very little understanding between him and his relatives. The English feel revulsion towards the idea of war; the Germans, on the other hand, are determined to fight again, but to win this time. Hughes describes this very well. There are some notes that will remind the reader of High Wind in Jamaica: some charming descriptions of children and some concerns about what it means to be "I". The novel is odd, and the characters are difficult to understand, but High Wind in Jamaica was magical with characters that one will always remember. I'm not sure how I would have felt about this wook had I not read HW in Jamaica first. Recommended for people wanting a different viewpoint on Hitlers rise to power in Germany.

A big book, nearly 700 page long but a very detailed picture of the thoughts and life styles of the France which ushered in the Age of Enlightenment, leading up to the Revolution. Some information was too detailed for me, such as references to percentages of populations which did this or that. Some of the book contained only Roche's opinions based upon the facts he dug up. Overall, it was highly informative but not surprising. I suppose that I was not surprised with the finding that the rural areas of France were slower to change than the cities, that Paris set the intellectual pace for the rest of the nation, that blind faith in religion suffocated thought, that nobility made every effort to maintain its position over the lower classes.

Roche, however, did give a good picture of how the stage was set for the Enlightenment, going into almost every facet of day-to-day living in France in the late 18th Century. I got a good picture, though a brief one, of the reigns of Louis XIV, XV and XVI and for the first time in my education, I am able to get these reigning monarchs straight.

Roche has a quirky, teacher style of writing, though clearly expressed. Almost on every page, he will tell you that such-and-such happened for two, three, or four reasons. The numbering method of exposition is an insight into the way his mind is organized. It is also evidence that he did not merely set down his factual findings, but that he thought about what he found and tried to relate them to what was the historical result.

All in all, a very worthwhile project, reading this massive book.

This is a collection of eighteen essays, originally published in 1907, in which the author, living what he describes as a simple, gentle, and celibate life as a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, shares what he thinks and feels about life, discussing aging, books, art, education, ambition, spirtiualism, and other topics. These essays are fairly easy to read considering the period in which they were written, and offer interesting insight into a way of life that no longer exists in the modern world from the perspective of a man who describes life as a romance, full of interesting things and people.

This book has many good points but the ideas expressed do not use standard wording

This 2nd edition of a 1980 book is about 50% enlarged. Its readers today will probably be scientists two generations removed from those familiar with the first printing but this review stresses only the new stuff.

The book has two main parts: a first half containing ten chapters mostly about principles and theory, and a second half containing thirteen more about specific experimental systems. It seems curiously hard to decide whether the subject matter is narrow to the point of caricaturing academic specialization, or incredibly broad to the point of suggesting a smorgasbord for science dilettantes. Among the forty thousand academic science journals viable today, not one is devoted to the topic of "biological waves, oscillations, and phase singularities" featured in this book, so it must be too narrow even for such tastes. Yet the literature drawn upon spans an unmatchably wide gamut, ranging from practical medicine to abstract topology, from recent molecular genetics to history of science, from 1836 to 2000. And Science Citations Index shows that the first edition has been cited about a thousand times in widely diverse publications, continuing at about constant rate over the past twenty years. Maybe this is why Springer-Verlag chose to provoke a 2nd edition even after so long.

Updating is usually an opportunity to erase blunders, but this author instead preserves and draws attention to them: how did this mistake happen, and how did the item come to be seen from a different perspective, with different meaning? To avoid giving offense the author preserves mostly his own blunders for such object lessons while going out of his way to credit the innovations of others.

Almost the whole 1980 text is preserved, with new material intercalated on a shaded background, except for two entirely new fat chapters. One concerns the self-organization of excitable media into three-dimensional vortices with exotic topologies. This is almost wholly theoretical (supercomputer calculations and topology): the only ones discovered in the laboratory (so far) are simple vortex rings. The website mentioned in the preface contains much of the same material but more beautifully illustrated in subsequent Powerpoint lectures not mentioned in the book. The other new chapter concerns real cardiology and the role of phase singularities in sudden cardiac death. This seems a morass of details where I would have preferred to see the elegant tree that grew from seeds planted in the first edition. This tree was recognized midway between editions by a medical award normally given only to cardiologists. The new chapter gives the impression that it is already being cut down or at least pruned, and the author is more concerned about the details of that process than about defending its original structure. His 1987 book, was written a few years before the anticipated role of phase singularities and rotors in cardiology found confirmation in quantitative experiments, so the interested reader (if any) must still resort to the cited journal literature for that story.

Another chapter reports on revolutionary developments entirely unforeseen in the first edition: this is the story of molecular genetics of the circadian biological clock. The author provides a readable summary of discoveries up to the end of 1999, but quite a lot of facts have accumulated since that time. The author's point of view is that present-day facts, while unanticipated in detail, do bear out the almost-forgotten theory elaborated in a 1963 book (Goodwin) as to basic principles, and the contrarian expectation stressed in the first edition, that the details may prove to be surprisingly diverse taxonomically.

One of the best resources this eight hundred page book provides is its dual index, with almost two thousand topics and as many cited references, half of them since the first edition. Because the material is both mathematical and experimental, and each item is encountered several times but from different directions in the text, the index is indispensable to persons with finite lifetime who accordingly prefer not to read every word in sequence. Find the topic, jot down its several pages, read one and note a reference from which that argument draws its data, then see the other index for all pages on which that source document is alluded to. The references, by the way, seem exceptionally complete and up-to-date (up to the last day of the 20th century, when it appears the ms was sent to press).

The preface points to a website for Errata. While this may be helpful to specialists, for the rest of us a better discovery lurks nearby: a link to a series of richly illustrated lectures given since the book went to press. These cover much of the same material in about three hundred substantially distinct slides but with entirely different organization in Powerpoint color (in contrast to about as many B&W line drawings in the book). The web site URL changed: it now seems to be eebweb.biosci.Arizona.edu/~art for Errata, and for the Powerpoints, eeb8.biosci.Arizona.edu/art/2000_lectures.

The author was professor of biological sciences at Purdue University until a few years after the first edition, and has since been professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. These seem peculiar credentials for authorship of a monograph mostly about topology, physical chemistry, and cardiac electrophysiology in an Applied Mathematics series. The key to understanding this phenomenon may be the first word, standing out in yellow against the green book cover: Interdisciplinary. Whatever may be hyped to the contrary, the academic world resents and resists activities that transgress its historically-defined disciplinary boundaries. You will find them all transgressed in this book.

Benchmarking has been used for years by manufacturing and service companies to identify and learn the best ways to execute various practices. The Guide to Benchmarking in Healthcare explains how the benchmarking process can be used by healthcare organizations to improve their processes and services.

The first section provides detailed look at the four phases and twelve steps of a benchmarking project. It serves as a quick reference guide with checklists highlighting the actions taken during each step. In the second section, four case studies illustrate benchmarking projects from different perspectives within healthcare organizations. They include views from the implementation team, the project sponsor, the executive committee, and other members of the organization not directly involved in the project. Additional chapters examine the use of Internet in benchmarking and the benchmarking of healthcare costs.

Ex-Texas Ranger (Johnny Canavan) versus the gunthrowers. Well-written fiction that's very easy to read. I grinned a few times with the subplot of the story: Canavan dealing with the demands of the female, Ardis Lundy. The paperback is worth your time, good way to spend a few relaxing hours.

I bought this book based on the title without having a chance to examine it. Had I had the chance, I would have picked something else to read first. The book is extremely detailed in it's review of the wall and of earlier writings on the subject, but the author has assumed a certain level of knowledge on the part of the reader. For those people well versed in the basics of the wall and it's study, I would highly recommend the book. The author's theories about the wall being as much an offensive weapon as defensive are certainly worth a look, as are his criticisms of earlier studies. He brings up a number of inconsistencies in some often accepted ideas. But for all the strengths, you need to understand some things that are not well explained in this book. Readers without a strong base of the local geography will often be lost (no pun intended) by his descriptions of geographical features and local sights. The pictures are almost useless for forming a general idea of what the wall looks like. In short, too detailed for a first book on the subject, but a valuable purchase for those who want a more in-depth look.

This is one of very few books that covers cord progressions and typical rythms found in music. However, the book is almost completely free of explanations. It is just a collection of short scores that demonstrate a principle in each chapter. The principle that is being demonstrated is not explained. It is possible but difficult to work out the point of each chapter for yourself. The book is not really appropriate for self-study.

Social Psychology can be chilling: gaining insights into how we behave socially can be disturbing. It's good to get an introduction to this field. I didn't find this book to be particularly well written, however it is the only Social Psychology book I have read.