This is a fascinating book that has a lot of detail in it, and my only criticism of this book is that it gets somewhat detailed due to so many people being discussed, but it is very well written, and I enjoyed it very much; I wish to thank Combined Books for re-printing the book in 1996. History books like this enrich my life, and this book comes close to a five star review: it is higher than 4 stars, but I could not state that in the rating.

It was a wondeful book. Very infomitive.

The number of writers included in this book is 43 and the number of articles even more than that. Many of these writers have not written about Gurdjieff elsewhere.

The best in this book is that it presents many views of the people who had worked with Gurdjieff himself or those who were around him and carried his work on. Many of the articles are based on direct experience of the Work and only a few are speculative and theoretical. The tone of the book is positive; if you are looking for a critical approach to Gurdjieff and his ideas you will have to look elsewhere.

People are different and so are their reflections. Some of the articles are brilliantly written both in content and expression; some are badly translated from French, vague and with very little content.

About 70% of the book is on the Gurdjieff psychology and philosophy, 15% on the Movements and the music and 15% on cosmology.

A very interesting biography of an emperor who is not that well known. Interesting facts and information on him and his rise to power, his relations, and his last years.

In this book, one can learn that: The internet started as a Defense Department project in the 80's p. 120 The proper way to search for pager manufacturing in internet web search engines is just to mention "pager", and not worry at all about other key words or symbols. p. 124 That, according to an intelligence project, pager repair could be a great business. p.139 I was lead to believe by a book review that this book would give me a great deal of information about passive intelligence gathering. It does not live up to its promise, and lacks credibility for so many factual (1,1969 2, +pager +manufacture + industry +trends ) and analytical (3 I threw my cell phone away, and got another for free)errors. What a shame.

I work as a professional performing due diligence for VC firms and client companies in Seattle and Silicon Valley. I have been using many of the techniques for several years that enable me to rapidly assess business opportunities and develop turnaround strategies. I am also a member of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals.

What this book did was enable me to enhance my business process and better articulate this extremely difficult line of work. For example, the business process outlined on page 58 is crucial in that it identifies several "Stop" or check points with clients. Key in this type of consulting, especially where steps you take as a consultant may directly add risk to your client, it is important to know where to draw the line and involve them for a decision. The authors clarify where the key decision points are when it comes to going from passive to semi-active, to active intelligence gathering. Critical, as time is money to you. But! to the client, information - or exposure thereof also means risk that could become your liability.

Consultants in this field are in the knowledge business, and one of the most difficult things to do is get the client to place a value on knowledge or intelligence. The authors, through wit and excellent real-world examples, spell out some of the keys to getting paid!! (pp 67). Naturally, this would go over the head of the casual reader who has never practiced and is looking for a "cook book" approach to due diligence of new business opportunities (i.e. see above commentary from Bogota).

This book is a "how to" book in that the authors have taken the time to clarify and rank several research tools and locations that one might not normally be aware of. This comparison alone is worth the money, as anyone who has used the web for performing research would agree.

The real brilliance in this book is subtle. By connecting the examples, you learn how to ask questions and iden! tify with what is important in doing intelligence research.! Again, for anyone who has gone in circles with clients who "don't know what they don't know", or worse yet, don't know how to value knowledge - this is critical to delivering fast, and minimizing your exposure.

Frankly, the Bogota guy didn't get it and has probably never performed true business intelligence. I agree that the coverage of the Internet web search engines, which used the example of finding information on pagers, is old news. The chapter's purpose was to show how more advanced tools outside of the Internet, such as Nexis, are preferred substitutes. That point was clearly made. However, this example was only used among 10 pages of chapter 5 (which was taken up with images of why the web doesn't work). The other 257 pp of this book are the meat.

My hats off to the authors for delivering a humorous text based on real-world wisdom that cuts through a very gray area that is as difficult to perform, as it is to explain.

As an investment banking anaylst, one of my primary jobs is build financial models of the companies we evaluate. One of the most underrated and (in my view) more important element of my work comes when we perform due diligence and understand the soundness of the assumptions we build into our models. Most analysts (in my experience) are too infatuated with their sophisticated spreadsheets and believe the sheer complexity of their models can compensate for a lack of understanding of the fundamental business they are set to evaluate.

The book does an outstanding job of articulating, at every step, the importance of challenging one's assumptions and systematically gathering, synthesizing, and =analyzing= information that helps to dig through the colored lenses of wishful thinking or purely numerical analysis. The occasional injection of humor is quite welcome - in a world of stuffy self-important books on business, here's a piece of work that was written by people who love what they do, and are adept at making you better at what you do as well.

I didn't like the book - but the girls in my class are crazy about them! They are the perfect series for second grade readers. The content is age appropriate and cute.

This is available domestically for (much less)! It's exactly the same as "RX For The Blues". Unless you have information that the sound quality is better, stay away. Another reviewer has some insight into the origins of this material under that release.