Brill, Brill and Feigenbaum's "Investing with Your Values" has been greeted with three cheers from the Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) community. It deserves perhaps two of the three. It aspires to be both a pragmatic handbook for SRI and the bible of the movement. As a handbook it is excellent. As a bible it is weak.

The book is divided into four large sections, of which the second and third are the most valuable. In Section II, the authors do an excellent job of describing the entire range of SRI activities: avoidance screening, affirmative screening, shareholder activism, and community investing. They lay out the strategies of each, explain the thinking behind them, and discuss issues readers should consider concerning them. For most people, SRI means little more than avoidance screening: refusing to own stocks in tobacco, alcohol, gambling, weapons or nuclear energy companies. The other approaches - all, if anything, more politically productive - have never, to my knowledge, been as fully and usefully presented as they are here.

The authors also do an excellent job of debunking the myth that investing along ethical lines lowers returns. Nobody who invested in the Pax World Fund, the Domini Social Index, or the Citizen Funds over the past several years will be found wringing their hands over missing gains. Socially screened funds have matched or outrun their unscreened competitors consistently. It's nice to see this myth laid to rest with a systematic barrage of pertinent research.

Section Three covers different kinds of investments: mutual funds, closed-end funds, stock, bonds, annuities, etc. The section also includes a catalog of socially screened mutual funds, complete with expense and performance data. This section, along with the many appendices, makes the book an excellent reference for the Responsible Investor.

In Sections II and III, the authors are writing within their expertise. Throughout the book, however, the authors slide from finances and investing into pure discussions of politics, ethics, and spirituality, and the results are always disappointing. When they're discussing SRI, they qualify as lucid, informed experts; when they discuss philosophy, theology, and politics, they're amateurs at best. Section IV spirals deep into New Age pretension and silliness. Even their preferred term for the SRI movement, "Natural Investing," is trendy, ill-conceived cant. (The English and Canadians call it "Ethical Investing," which is less coy and more accurate.) The authors pay lip service to the ancient roots of SRI, but they try to create new roots for it in New Age "spirituality." This tendency reaches its nadir when they rename the "voluntary simplicity" movement "voluntary abundance." Henry David Thoreau and John Woolman would cringe at the smarmy hypocrisy of the term.

Despite the weakness of their philosophizing, however, the book deserves applause for the amount of information on Ethical Investing it presents and the clarity with which it's presented. Despite its flaws, Responsible Investors should buy, read, and keep the book on hand. Or lend it around. Or put a copy in your church library and tell people it's there.

In a future revision, the authors should drop Section IV in its entirety and beef up Section III, on personal finance. They could write an excellent general introduction to personal finance - a "how-to" for nervous, well-meaning beginners - set in the context of SRI. These authors could improve an already fine book if they would take up this challenge.

Investing with Your Values does an admirable job of covering all the various aspects of socially responsible investing, but unfortunately it's not that fun to read. Enthusiasm is great, but the book has a gee-whizish tone, which I found grating (call me a sourpuss). I preferred The Mindful Money Guide, which covered most of the same material more succinctly and gracefully while also making me laugh. Still, if you're looking for comprehensive coverage of socially responsible investing, Investing with Your Values is a good reference.

This book documents how to earn competitive returns with investments that 'do good'. That helped me quickly educate my investment advisor to my preferences for values-based investing.

I bought this book to get some info on Oracle 9i to see how it was structured. It was good for explaining the terminology and showed some screenshots. But this book will not get you started using Oracle9i, it only
helps you to understand some of the syntax.

If you have a strong knowledge of SQL, then find another book, this book covers alot of java and xml explaination when dealing with 9i.

In short, if you are curious about using Oracle 9i, this book delivers
but if you want to learn the software, get another book.

The book is well written and easy to read, but it fell way short of my expectations because of its brevity. You really have to consider who this book is intended for before purchasing it. I expected it to be a summary of the most important operating aspects and gotchas with Oracle. Instead, the beef inside the bun amounted to about 100 pages that started off with a description of SELECT statements. This was way too basic for what I needed. For someone who just wants an overview of Oracle, then thisbook would probably suffice. But if you want an overview because you want to learn how to use Oracle, then chances are you're going to want much more than what this book offers. I purchased this book because it was not the behemeth volume so many authors like to produce. I give this author credit for creating something digestible. For me, however, this was just an appetizer that I had to send back to the kitchen for something heartier.

Without wasting a lot of space on screen shots, this book provides step by step instructions for downloading and installing Oracle on both Linux and Windows and then using it. It explains new Oracle features such as the timestamp datatype and generally gets the novice up and running quickly. Everything else that you need is in the online/CD-ROM docs. If you're going to administer a production database yourself you'd probably want the Oracle Press dba book. If you're going to continue using Oracle you probably also want the bone-crushing Oracle Press "complete reference" book. But start with this one.

The content of the book is great. There is no doubt about that.

However, the Adobe eBook format is far too restrictive. This is the first .PDF file that I've found only works in Adobe eBook Reader. eBook Reader is designed to prevent copying of eBooks: The eBook is downloaded...by eBook Reader itself, saved on the boot partition with a cryptic name, and secured so that it cannot be opened from any other location. And with this eBook, you are limited to printing 300 pages per year. Too many restrictions!

In addition,[some sites limit] the number of downloads of the eBooks that you purchase.

So, if you frequently need to re-install the OS on the boot partition, like I do, then you lose your eBook! This is not good for the customer or the publisher or the writer.

I'd like to backup the file that I've purchased rights to, but I can't! I expected the eBook format to be portable, like standard PDF.

...The majority of independent eBook authors on the Web using the .PDF format do not restrict the copying of .PDF files. Some of these files have no restrictions at all. Certainly, there are some people who violate the copyright, but many of these eBook authors are making bags of money in spite of that. Unfortunately, it seems that the traditional publishing houses are reluctant to take the risk of allowing the customer to keep backups of the eBooks they have the rights to use, and as a result infuriate customers like me, who never again will purchase an eBook for either Adobe eBook Reader or Microsoft Reader.

I've been developing web applications for more than 5 years, and though not perfect and not necessarily written for the beginner, I feel this is the best book of its kind available. Thanks to the authors for putting something useful out there finally.

This is a great little book. If you are like me who is not a programmer, but ends up doing lots the Web front end development tasks because the real developers " don't do scripting" as its beneath them. Then this book is for you. It gives real life examples that can be used to get you started on that dynamically cascading menu or that regular expression to validate your date entry field. Small and compact gives you well targeted golden nuggets of information about HTML, DHTML, JavaScript, XML and XLST not 100's of pages of theory and "hello world" examples.

The book covers many legal situations. More than most people should have to deal with in a lifetime.

The book gives a high level discussion of the pertinent issues. In a situation where you need legal advice, this book can help you know what types of questions to ask. It can also help you understand why the attorney is doing what he is doing.

However, this book will NOT provide legal advice. It will not qualify you to plead your own case in front of a judge. In that respect, it can be a little misleading. Otherwise it is pretty good.

an absolute must have. A great gift for the college grad or a new mom. This book discusses all those things you wish you had done after its too late. Take charge, i recommend this book

This book is a great legal resource. Almost every situation is covered in it. I bought it and am still enjoying the help it gives me.

How very important the subject matter; how very disappointing the outcome of this project. The first portion of the title is misleading. It is not a primer. There is absolutely no discussion of adoption, alternative means of starting a family, legal issues for gay men and lesbians, etc. There is a fair amount of information for lesbian couples, but even that is a warmed over rehash of self-help group discussions. This is not a book for a gay person longing to be a parent. One can only hope that someone else will move rapidly to fill the void this book only skirts.

i bought this book when it first came out last year. i've now purchased a total of six for friends. there is nothing like it on the market. great guidance not just on glbt parenting, but on parenting in general!

EVERY glbt parent needs this book... and honestly quite a few straight parents could use it, too.

this book covers it all, and in an easy to read format. from legal issues to what to call the co-parent, to how to come out to the grandparents.

this book covers topics clearly in a way that other books out there simply don't. very well written. i see why [they] picked this as a top ten book of 2001!

this is now my parenting bible.

The concept of the Underground Railroad is difficult for most children to grasp, and they first think it is similar to the subway. I used this book with elementary students in a small rural school in North Carolina where there are very few minority students; they loved it. For the first time they were able to understand the horrors of slavery and what the slaves and "conductors" alike risked for freedom in the North. The author does an excellent job of making this dark and complex chapter in our history understandable the students. The wanted to read it again and again.

Allen Jay and the Underground Railroad is the retelling of a man's recollections of his first experience helping an escaped slave. The book brings the underground railroad down to the level primary students can comprehend. This book makes for wonderful discussions regarding overcoming one's fears, going against the norm and doing what you believe to be morally correct. The story is very idealistic. The dark side of the time period is not dealt with in any depth. This makes the book excellent for young readers who are just getting their feet wet on the issue of slavery.

As a quick guide on how these nations have become independent since the break-up of the Soviet Union, Olcott's book can't be beat. One really gets a feel for the threshold on which these nations stand, whether they become great in their own right or if they sink into poverty and crawl back to Mother Russia for help. Basically focusing on Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrghizstan, with metion of Tajikistan and Turkmenistan Olcott's book paints a picture of struggle, hope and a future in question. I thought it was great.

I read this book about 5 years ago it was good with a lot of twists and turns.

This is the best collection of essays on the Mahabharata currently available in print. Any student of the Mahabharata should be aware of it, and I am certain that those who are have photocopies of the essays that interest them, because as with most books on the subject published by Brill the price is totally out of line, in fact it is a slap in the face to the reader, and an invitation to photocopy. Even University Libraries I know of are hesitating buying from Brill because of this, which is indeed a great shame. The reason I do not give this book the five stars it deserves, is because of the $ 160.00 price tag !!!

Extraodinary Young People is about... just that. It mentions the classical greats such as Helen Keller, to todays greats such as Tiger Woods. It mentions what makes each one unique, and discloses the hidden struggles each individual has to deal with throughout their lives to reach where they did.