I felt this book was an excellent source of reading for the Basset show dog owners. I, myself am not into showing, I enjoy the breed as pets so I was a little disappointed in finding so much reading dedicated solely to showing. I enjoy reading about bassets and would of been more interested in stories, complications this breed can accure as well as how to prevent them or deal with them. I enjoyed the many photos included but once again, the majority were dogs being shown. In my own personal opinion, the book should of been more detailed either in title or on front cover explaining its contents more so. I am on to other reading and am hoping to find less of show dogs

"The Basset Hound" is an excellent book to add to any true fan of the breeds library collection. The pictures are excellent, showing the beauty and variety of the breed in bone structure and coat color. The historical content details the breeds use in hunting and dog showing, and a brief mention of the breed as a pet. I was very captivated by the pictures, and the information presented was very interesting. For owners of the breed there is even a chapter on traveling with your basset hound for todays busy lifestyles. This is a wonderful breed book.

we had to read this book for a cell physiology class and this book is simply horrible. Unfortunately, it is the only book of its kind so our professor had to use it. The reading materials in this book consist of advanced topics in physical chemistry, engineering, physics, and biochemistry. This book should only be used as a referenced guide for professors and not as a teaching tool.

This textbook received the CHOICE award from the Am Library Assoc as an outstanding academic book for the 1st edition in 1996 and 2nd ed in 1998.

I was enthused to discover this book when I did because it appeared to present complexity at precisely the level I was hoping for: as a philosophical and practical concept not necessarily dependent upon difficult mathematics or theory. I dove in, and it was fairly challenging reading. The tragedy of this book is that the topics and many of ideas offered-up appeal a great deal to my intellect, but the astonishingly poor editing is a significant distraction. There are cases of material repeated verbatim, painfully obvious typographic errors, and an insufficient degree of conciseness overall. It seems as if the book was under-funded, over-rushed or simply assigned the wrong editor. It is indeed a shame, since discussions such as why the growth of science may not have an inherent limit, but may be limited by resources are interesting. I also enjoyed the taxonomy of complexity. It has allowed me to consider, with greater subtlety, the complexity in the systems with which I work, and alternatives to manage it. I would give the ideas in this work 4 or 5 stars, but the lack of effective editing make this a difficult read.

Instead, I just want to give you information about a "misprint" in his book: Unfortunately, on page 164, note 6 a paper of mine is cited incorrectly.

The corrected source is:

Theodor Leiber "Chaos, Berechnungskomplexität und Physik: Neue Grenzen wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis?" Philosophia Naturalis, vol. 33 (1996), pp. 23-54

With best regards

Theodor Leiber

This book says that Rosie O'Donnell conned America because she pretended to be the Queen of nice, which is pretty stupid to say because number one if you read Rosie O'Donnell's book she says that some magazine called her the queen of nice and when she read it she was thinking "what in the world are they talking about", she herself never claimed to be the "queen of nice". Number two Rosie O'Donnell's JOB was being a talk show host, it was just a job, not her life, a person is going to act how they are expected to act at their job because that is what they get paid for, and it was Rosie O'Donell's job to have the "queen of nice" attitude, it was a G-rated early morning talk show! How a person acts at their job is not generally how they act in person.
This book is also saying she conned America by coming out as a lesbian. They say she pretended to lust after om Cruise on the show, now Rosie O'Donnell commented on this during an interview, she said that she thinks Tom Cruise is a beautiful man and that has nothing to do with her sexuality.
This book is a pure example of bigotry. A person should be praised for being brave enough to "come out" not condemned.
I recommend that people read FIND ME, by Rosie O'Donnell if they want the real "truth".

This book is hardly a work of journalism, but it's the first and only book to tell the real truth about Rosie O'Donnell. Think she's "the queen of nice"? Think she's all about helping people? Think she really cares about kids more than her own image? This book answers the questions truthfully, without Rosie's spin. This is a vile and utterly phony human being, and although this book is gossipy and poorly-written, it's entertaining and revelatory about this disgusting con woman.

This book is truly awful. It is VERY poorly written. He jumps back and forth in time in a way that makes no sense and contradicts himself over and over. Makes you wonder about some of his "facts".

Also it is clear that he wrote this book well before Diana died and then tacked on a small chapter at the end and gave it this misleading title just to cash in on the Diana phenomenon. Originally one of Charles' set, the first book N. Davies wrote about Diana was at the urging of "senior palace officials". What does this tell us?

He is waspishly critical of her yet aims his book at the public who love her. Disgusting.

It was one of the best books I have read in a long time. It made me cry(I do not cry that often). I loved this book. I reccomend that anybody who liked Diand of even if they didnt should read this touching book.

I thought this would be the perfect get-started book and CD, but I was wrong. I had difficulty installing the edition of Linux which was provided with the book, because the instructions were very unclear. When I tried to get support from Caldera, they told me they would not support my version and that I would have to get help from a use/newsgroup. I didn't have the time or patience to deal with that, so I switched to Red Hat.

Caldera has provided a great source for someone to get involved with LINUX. OpenLinux is primarily a network alternative to Windows NT, and is more stable. This book is short and sweet, but to the point.

This story had great research done; in the area of historical accuracy, it seemed flawless. But when it came to the plot, it was awful! Continues the adventures of Kai, a young girl growing up in 15th century Africa.

This continuation of the story of Kai contains a strong sense of the subtle dilemmas faced by the young and the somewhat older. Welch's masterful delivery displays great depth and delicacy, and great compassion as well. This book has been infused with a balance of morality and humanity all readers might benefit from. Succinct, reader friendly, good.

I had a hard time getting into this book. I just felt like the plot was not moving forward and the writer, frankly, was boring me. About page 200 I gave up. The story sounded promising but the author did not put it together.

In contrast to the last reviewer, I thought this was a great book. Realistic three dimensional characters, great plot twists and fast paced action.

This book spends 300 pages dancing around the topic of change management and talking about the authors' proprietary change management system of tools/checklists. The authors go to great length, over and over again, to list all the tools they have available, yet nowhere in the book or on the CD-ROM will you find ANY example of these tools! For that, you need to go to their website and spend thousands more.

What a complete waste of time and money sifting through all the fluff in this book trying to find some concrete, practical tips on a subject that sorely needs to be covered well. You won't find anything redeeming about Project Change Management in this book.

All of the tools for Fundamentals of Change Management are in the book it is an excellent reference book for consultants.

A few years ago H. O. Mounce wrote a similar book entitled _The Two Pragmatisms_ in which he argued--much like Rescher does here--that pragmatism took a wrong turn when James got ahold of it and that the only means for rescuing pragmatism from Rorty's antirealist deathgrip is to return to a Peircean form of pragmatism that embraces metaphysical realism and shuns Rortian relativism.

That one has already to be a metaphysical realist in order to derive this reading from Peirce I will not argue here. However, I do wonder how the self-respecting metaphysical realist deals with Peirce's own claims to be both a "Scotian realist" and an "objective idealist." Are these claims somehow reconciled in arguing that what Peirce means by both of these terms is late twentieth century metaphysical realism? I think not.

Further, Rescher draws the reading out of James that he does and thus the contrast with Peirce that he desires through some crafty quotation. For example, when quoting James's famous statement from _Pragmatism_, "The true is only the expedient in our way of thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in our way of behaving" (Rescher, 16) Rescher fails to follow James's thought into the next sentence, which adds the proviso, "expedient in the long run and on the whole of the course" (James, 106.) Thus, Rescher is able to claim that Peirce's commitment to "the ongoing long run allegiance of a community committed to the methods that successfully implement the goals of science" (Rescher, 12)is neglected by James. This is but one example of Rescher's many attempts to draw broad distinctions between Peirce the Good and James the Bad throughout the book.

Although my familiarity with Dewey is not as great as with James, what acquaintance I do have with Dewey leads me to believe that Rescher's account of Dewey's thought is equally skewed in the interest of making pragmatism palatable to the metaphysical realist.

Now, I would not deny that there are distinctions among Peirce, James, and Dewey, but Rescher's work paints with such broad strokes that the distinctions become unbridgeable chasms rather than interesting philosophical debates. Rather than refuting Rortian readings of James and Dewey and drawing a line of thought out of pragmatism different than that given us before, Rescher offers us another reading of early American pragmatism that reiterates an old mantra, "Peirce, good; James and Dewey, bad." Unfortunately, instead of being an interesting study in American pragmatism, this book is yet another perpetuation of just the kind of reading Rorty (as Rescher's apparent nemesis in this book) gives of American pragmatism. The only real difference here is that Rescher likes what Rorty dislikes and vice versa. In the end, it is difficult to see much difference in thesis between this and Mounce's book and to see much new in this reading of pragmatism.

Despite his uncannily high volume of scholarly output, Nicholas Rescher is incapable of writing a bad or uninteresting book. And there is much of great interest in _Realistic Pragmatism_.

There are some minor difficulties which have to do more with the editorial process than with the content. First of all, the book seems to have more than its share of spelling and grammatical errors. (Some more or less typical examples: "Hypotheses" is given a singular verb on p. 6. On p. 251 we encounter the following sentence: "And so, while a pragmatism of limited objective (be it cognitive or psychological or social) makes perfect sense in its own domain, but that nowise entitles it to claims of predominance -- let alone sufficiency or exclusivity -- across the board." And the name of Susan Haack is consistently misspelled "Haak" -- rather surprisingly, since Rescher regards her as an ally in his battle for a "pragmatism of the right.")

Moreoever, Rescher, usually a fine writer, is at his most awkwardly Latinate throughout much of this volume and occasionally lapses into prose that would be at home on the overhead projector in a business management seminar. (For example, we are told on p. 11 that owing to biological evolution, Charles Sanders Peirce's pragmatic view of truth is "comprehensively coordinated to effective implementation." For my taste, at least, there is altogether too much of this sort of thing.)

These minor stylistic annoyances aside -- and that is all they are -- Rescher has written a very thought-provoking book here. His basic goal is to rescue pragmatism from some modern and post-modern philosophers who have adopted that rubric (mostly Richard Rorty). In order to further this goal, Rescher wishes to distinguish firmly between a hard-minded "pragmatism of the right" (which he favors) from a woolly "pragmatism of the left" (which he wishes would go away).

And so he sets out to defend pragmatism against a host of real and hypothetical foes. He argues by turns that his brand of methodological pragmatism has something useful to say about scientific inquiry, the philosophy of language, and the pursuit of value (and not merely "crass materialism," which seems to be a bogey of Rescher's); that pragmatism is not in any way an enemy of metaphysical realism or a friend of subjectivism or relativism; and -- especially -- that pragmatism took a wrong turn under the management of William James and should make pilgrimage back to its Peircean roots.

He actually begins with this last, and his thesis here underlies most of the book. In a footnote on p. 9, for example, he notes that "one point that separates [Peirce] from William James" is that Peirce identifies the meaning of a conception with what follows from its _truth_, not with what follows from _believing_ it is true. This is apparently supposed to be the watershed that irrevocably divides the pragmatism Rescher favors from the wrongheaded perversions of Rorty et alia.

Unfortunately Rescher seems to me to be on very weak ground here. Constantly reminding us that pragmatism bases itself on success in practical action, he seems to lose sight of the fact that even in Peirce's hands, practical success tends to be identified with things with which it is simply not identical.

For example, Peirce's essay "How To Make Our Ideas Clear" (cited by Rescher in the aforementioned passage) does indeed tell us that the meaning of an idea consists of what would follow from it if it were true. ("Our idea of anything," Peirce writes, "_is_ our idea of its sensible effects.") But this is actually a liability.

In what seems to be his eagerness to scotch metaphysical speculation, Peirce has set out to deal with ideas and beliefs in the same manner, and yet has also told us that to clarify a _belief_ (as opposed to an idea) we are to consider the consequences, not of the belief's object, but of our taking the belief to be true. James may well have given this latter portion of Peirce's "pragmaticism" too much weight, but _that_ he found this doctrine in Peirce is hardly in question. If anything, he adopted it with greater consistency than Peirce himself did.

At any rate, Peirce's own formulation, even as regards ideas, rests on a confusion (and one which heavily influenced logical positivism's misbegotten "verifiability theory of meaning"). For the _consequences_ of a particular state of affairs are surely not identical with the state of affairs itself; the meaning of an idea is to be found, not in something which follows from the idea's object, but in the object itself. As Brand Blanshard phrased it with characteristic wit, Peirce's claim here is in effect that "to think clearly about something, the best way is to think about something else" [_Reason and Analysis_, p. 196].

Despite Rescher's tremendous acuity, I do not see that his defense of Peirce manages to clear up this fundamental confusion -- nor, therefore, ultimately to justify his claims for "methodological" pragmatism (which, in this volume at least, seem to consist mainly of telling us in general terms what pragmatism could or should do rather than actually telling us how to go about it).

Nevertheless, Rescher's volume is generally a goldmine of helpful insights and provocative suggestions. I have long thought that Rescher is at his very best in getting clear on foundational issues, making basic distinctions, and setting up helpful classification schemes. There is quite a bit of that in this book, and it is characteristically clear and well constructed even if it does not quite meet Rescher's usually high standards of expository prose. In this sense the book is a clear success on its own terms: whatever we think about its metaphysical foundations, its contributions to practical reason are undeniable.

Readers who are interested in Rorty's relation to pragmatism (and especially to Peirce) might also enjoy Susan Haack's _Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate_, in which (along with much else) Haack presents an imaginary dialogue between Rorty and Peirce consisting of contrasting excerpts from the writings of the two men.