The Promethesus Crisis, (written around 1975) deals with a nuclear power plant melting down....and goes into detail about how this happens and its aftermath. Written some years before the 3 Mile Island Accident, this book almost seems to be an omen, warning of the dangers of nuclear power and what can happen when that "1 in a million" chance of an accident happens. A very fightening and informative book, and extremely well written.

This book is one of the best of the whole West Point series. The authors have found a way to describe an analyse historical events in detail and in a very serious way, yet the book is never boring nor exceedingly academic. The readers feels like a junior officer in a staff HQ and witnesses key decisions being made. A brilliant and innovative book, maybe a little too centered on the role of the United States. The Atlas is a useful complement, and reading the two in parallel is invaluable. Probably one of the best tools to understand WWII ever designed.

Thomas' book is an insightful look at the path to spiritual growth and development. He clearly articulates the nature of conflict within congregations (although his model is applicable to any organization) and provides critical thinking about how to address such conflicts in a way that is meaningful and courageous. I found his discussion about people who function as victims and saviors by doing a dance of immaturity to be very provocative. His call for principle-based leadership, while not new, is very refreshing in a congregational context and challenges those of us who have congregations centered around charismatic leadership to abandon our cults of personality.

This book will be most helpful to congregations that have not fully understood or articulated their mission, vision and values. It will provide a very capable framework and guidelines to begin those discussions so that ministry can go forth as a "healing modality" in our broken society.

Frank's work with the Baffler and the Reader has always been enlightening and entertaining. As essays for the casual reader, his writing can do a lot of eye-opening. However, I don't think he can sustain his brand of cultural criticism for a book-length work. The problem, after Frank's thesis is repeated for the umpteenth time, is you finally say "So?" I personally always wind up picturing Frank in clothes he has spun himself, living off beans he is cultivating in a backyard seed plot, entertaining himself by sneering from his garret's window at the shallow "lifestyles" of every human being on the planet (except his own). I've always disliked the hypocritical, distant stance people like Frank (whose views I happen to mostly share)adopt when they tackle these issues. The great problem is how to relate these kinds of ideas without pretensions of immunity to the dominant cultural malaise, without relentlessly stereotyping the middle class, and without the hopelessly easy targeting of lame ducks, ducks that Frank seems to consider strong and insidious. Tom Frank, what are the alternatives? Where are the solutions?

in fact, Frank's point is that advertising did NOT necessarily co-opt counterculture. if he labors over anything, it's his assertion that the Creative Revolution in business practically preceded the existence of a widespread counter-culture movement. as far as his scorn, it was rather obviously directed only at the baby-boomers and historians with bad memories...the ones who insist that 60s youth culture was completely non-commercial, the ones who need to believe in The Man (especially the man in the gray suit).

i thought that the book was extremely engaging. frank is very insightful, and his writing is entertaining. i laughed a lot, and said, "Right, exactly!" so many times. i did not get any sense that frank had any real trouble with the conquest of cool or even consumer culture. he develops his thesis so precisely that there was no room for censure. as far as offering a solution--the book doesn't present any Problem to be solved. it's an examination of the relationship between commercial and counter culture. Most importantly, it's a rethinking of that relationship through the lens of the late 50s and 60s.

An excellent examination of consumer culture and the way that corporate America has tried to deal with, understand, and co-opt youth culture (or did youth culture co-opt advertising?) Frank gets to the bottom of it all in an always entertaining look at advertising from the Madison Avenue years through the sixties. His examinations of various ad campaigns - such as Volvo who insisted in their ads that their cars were ugly and at least not as filled with defects as the cars they used to make - are insightful and well researched. In fact, this book is a necessary primer for anyone doing research on youth culture. It helped to change the way that I think about these issues and has become a text that I refer to often.

Good work, Thomas Frank. This book is a revealing transcoding of the corporate mythology of the 90's, a rabidly hyped symbolic order cooked up by admen, marketers, and management gurus at the behest of the top 1%. It goes by the name market populism. If you've read Fredric Jameson, you will recognize the practical, real-world analyses of the 're-narratavized' cultural fragment. Capital takes cultural artifacts which may have opposed it previously, (e.g. revolution, class war, freedom, democracy), and re-appropriates it for use in its' own narrative, to justify its own ends (the inflation of securities and paper wealth). Thus historical data, or ideological conflict or even Marxist utopianism is re-narrativized by big money in the mass media. Plenty of explanation of how Capital effaces the differences between all those dialectical poles,like a home-grown Baudrillard with easy-to-follow examples. Where the book lacked was in it's not drumming home what exactly the costs were, especially in terms of the destructive effects of international finance capital, the dis-lodging of a billion people into shanty towns by Global Capital, and the environmental destruction rent by Trans-national Capital. You might take a look at one of David Korten's book for this, or George Soros' On Globalization. But most important about the book is the fact that it questions what has been so vigorously sold as 'inevitable' to the rest of us, it maintains the possibility of negating what seems so Universal on CNN or Fox News. It is a supreme act of historical transparency, pointing to a way we might go from a way we've already been.

While I disagree with Thomas Frank a lot, I am forced to admit that there is more than a grain of truth in his criticism. At times polemic, other times ranting, sometimes he just says something that blows away a lot of the "conventional wisdom" that we are fed and many times accept.

The largest strength of this book is not that it offers any sort of alternative (It really doesn't), it is that he is criticizing things that need to be criticized. Over the last 20 years or so, critical writing and commentary has lapsed, and offered little voice of reform or change. It is nice to see that someone offers dissent to many cultural values that have become solidified and crusty (even if it is at 90+dB).

In an age of blind faith in "The Market" there is a voice of skepticism in Thomas Frank's _One Market Under God_. If you are a God fearing, Capitalist-loving, Market Driven, person, this book may be especially valuable to read -- if for no other reason, to hear from someone who disagrees with you and has no fear in stating it clearly!

I disagree with a lot of his thesis, but I cannot give this book anything less than 5 stars!

In this extraordinary and brilliant book, the American journalist Thomas Frank exposes the shams and scams of the market and its barkers. Frank dissects the media, the political parties, the 'think tanks' like Demos, and the public relations and management theory 'industries', with their clowns like Tom Peters. He shows how the market, under the sign of democracy and choice, robs us of our basic freedoms, in the economic arena.
He shows us how the US economy 'works': 86% of Wall Street's gains go to the richest 10% of the US population. In 1999, Chief Executive Officers got on average 475 times what their blue-collar workers got; the ratio was 11/1 in Japan and 24/1 in Britain. 40% of Internet firm executives had criminal records; they were experienced fraudsters and swindlers. The other 60% haven't got caught yet! Yet US workers had less social mobility than European workers.
... Capitalism does not provide: stocks and shares do not secure jobs, incomes, pensions, education, or health care. Only the old-fashioned, despised, desperately-in-need-of-structural-reform welfare state could do that. Of course, the Stock Market that has so finally failed all its supporters did not need structural reform! We need politics, not politicians or politicos or ideologues. We cannot rely on the market; we need to stop the market before it stops us.
After the coal-based industrial revolution, we had the oil-fired economy; now we are supposed to be in the third revolution, the third way of 'the knowledge-based' economy. First, this implies that earlier industrial revolutions were powered by ignorance and the ignorant (workers), not clever like 'us' moderns. Second, it is pure idealism.
Blair's favourite guru, Charles Leadbeater, recently wrote a book entitled, Living on thin air. His vision of the future allows no production, no industry, no nation, no economy, no materiality - and this idealist rubbish passes as 'new' wisdom! Workers having to live on thin air - no thanks!

Too vague and general for someone using the book to use as a reference. Does not go into a lot of key points you actually use on patrol. Also, tends to make remarks that do not reflect the reality of todays police work. The author seems out of touch with policing today.

I had to read this book for a promotional examination and found it to be a good refresher of the very basic points that we all learned at the beginning of our police careers. When I am approached by someone who is not yet in police work and wants to read a good, simply written and understandable book on law enforcement, I always recommend this one. It may seem to be too basic for those of us in this field for the years I have served, but many areas are still very relevant.

I had so much fun reading this book that I got a hernia! Peter Thomas and Frank present their wizadry in such a way that one could never mistake them for proprietors. They suckle the "teets" of the 80's cow until only powdered milk would resolve their finance. Undeniably, the highlight of this book is when Peter Thomas takes his shot at the musty moguls known as the "Lompom Twins"! Boy, did I laugh!

These incouragable fellows have done it again! An exceptional representaion of this impish decade is presented in a masterful manner by Peter Thomas and Frank. My temples almost imploded due to laughter when I read Peter Thomas' justification of the "Lompom Twins". I also almost seared myself after reading the "Ode to Russ" and all its colossal wisdom. No human could expand on this phenomenon as well as Peter Thomas and Frank. Kudos my green friends! Keep up the great work.

This book is tremendously funny. I love Peter Thomas and Frank's candid approach towards the uninspiring decade that we know as the eighties. This book helped me get through a couple of tough years upstate at Elmira State Penitentiary. Since, I've been released, I've gained a new perspective on life and have Peter Thomas and Frank to thank. You good men have made a better man out of me through levity and humor. At first, the days were long and dreary but when my C.O. lent me that book, the days became brighter. I needed to keep it!

THANKS AGAIN! You will always be in my thoughts!

I've had the 'pleasure' of experiencing numerous calculus texts over the years - starting in high school in 1987 and until now (mutlivariable calculus) and, as a math major, I'm sure I'll get to see a few more. I witnessed the growth in the use of graphing calculators and Computer Algebra Systems (CAS - MathCAD, Mathematica, Maple). Thomas' Calculus makes good use of CAS applications and even includes a CD with some 'good stuff'. But it left out all the historical text from the book, expecting the student to find it on the web. Personally, I enjoy reading about the development of mathematics in-line with the presented material and knocked off a star accordingly. The second star I took off was because the reference materials in the front and back of the book are not as helpful as they had been in other texts I've used.

I've used this text to teach myself calculus, basically reading the text cover-to-cover and doing about half the exercises. I've found it fairly easy going - the text is well written and contains enough worked examples that you can do most exercises without too much trouble. I would advise against spending money on the Student's Solution Manuals (Sharf/Weir) though - these do not contain enough detail to be of much help with the exercises that you get stuck with.

This book is the best calculus book I ever had in my possession. It is very detailed and it also gives you lots of examples. There are also a lot of problems that you can work on for practice followed by the odd answers at the back of the book. This book can take you from calculus I & II to Multivariable Calculus. I think that this book should be recommended to anyone taking calculus in college.

Most technothrillers seem like throwback to the cold war in their portrayal of stalwart American servicemen (without a hint of any dissent) and their problem-free hardware up against the fractured - almost medeival - horde of the Warsaw pact military. "The Gold Crew" in which the crew of an American ballistic missile submarine comes apart and brings the world to the brink of nuclear war, is a different anachronism - when we thought we were losing the cold war and our pretensions of freedom were being undermined by a dissent that argued against the costs of our hostility to the Russians.

The title "The Gold Crew" refers to the navy's system of having rotating crews on-board missile subs - the subs can endure prolonged duty better than the men who run it; to ensure that a submarine remains ready for sea (and for launching its missiles) for the longest period, missile subs return for patrol only to switch crews - blue crew for gold and vica versa. The gold crew gets the lucky (or unlucky) assignment of participating in an extended wargame involving a few missiles with unarmed warheads. The need for constant readiness requires that some of the missiles remained tipped with armed warheads, but the gold crew is the best and nobody imagines that the crew is particularly vulnerable to stress. In this case, it comes down to bad paint - fumes that put the men off their axes and sufficiently diminish their ability to tell reality from wargame inspired fantasy.

I read "The Gold crew" about the same time that "Red Storm Rising" appeared - and "Gold" seemed prefigured to destroy the myth of seamless, push-button techno-warfare that Tom Clancy's books created, almost as soon as they were really created. Unfortunately, it takes more than bad technology to make good charachters, and none in "Gold" really stand out. Author Scortia realized that the whole charachters of other books were too unbeleivable, but failed to realize that even dissassembled chartachters don't a compelling novel make. Once bad paint fumes cause the crew to become undone, and the captain has begun to convince them that war has actually begun , the crew doesn't try to put itslef together. There's something frightening in the way that Scortia's crew moves with the listless way of men who have actually seen WWIII, but he doesn't capitalize on it enough.

Still a worthy effort - and better than the by-the-numbers TV movie based on it (With Robert Conrad, David Soul and Sam Waterston)