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Book reviews for "Blakney,_Raymond_D." sorted by average review score:

Last Run (Choose Your Own Adventure, No 153)
Published in Paperback by Bantam Books (November, 1994)
Authors: Raymond A. Montgomery and Frank Boole
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A CYOA masterpiece!
One of R. A. Montgomery's most sophisticated and bleak works, Last Run takes the reader inside a murky and sinister conspiracy. The protagonist is more richly detailed than most "you" characters, the setting (the Italian Dolomites) is interesting, and the endings, while largely unhappy, are dramatically satisfying. A must-read for all CYOA lovers.

THOUGHT THAT IT WAS COOL, IT IS ONE OF MY FAVORITES.
I really enjoyed it, but for some reason, I could not find a ending where I demolished the Meridians. I wish that I did though. I thought that the plot was perfect. This was my most challenging Choose Your Own Adventure ever! It was well written and what I would say was the most wonderful and greatest book ever published. As a critic and fan of Choose Your Own Adventures, this was the literary masterpiece of young adult fiction everywhere. I acclaim it as a 10


Legacy of the Unterbrink family
Published in Unknown Binding by Brothers Printing ()
Author: Raymond K. Unterbrink
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Krull and Merris
I received a copy of the book in 1993 after my mother Doris (Krull) Merris passed away. The Authors put so much work into it that it is really unbelievable. Thank you so much for the time you spent on gathering the information. I remember filling out the form back in the early 70's and am I glad I did! I will pass the book on to my son Anthony so that he can remember all of his many relatives. Thank you!

The Family of The Remlinger Family
I like the story of the Remlinger Storys of Charles and Amanda Remlinger and there Family I have always love to hear storys about the Remlingers and Underbrinks.


Locus Solus
Published in Unknown Binding by University of California Press ()
Author: Raymond Roussel
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i read this a long time ago.
i read this book when i was about 13 and i have been wanting to read it again for 17 years. i remember it only vaguely, but i know it was good. please mister publisher, print it again.

A strange world of exhibits and the stories behind them
Roussel's novels are giant puzzles, in which he describes images and stories that have a unique carnival logic. Punning relationships generate textual rebuses (rebi?), in a way that makes the reader aware of the book as a mechanism, but Roussel gives too few clues to really understand it. In Locus Solus, Roussel gives a tour of the museum garden of an eccentric millionaire, who, like Roussel himself, collects with a frenetic and psychedelic rationalism. Please, Riverrun Press, reprint this book.


Lovell and Winter's Pediatric Orthopaedics
Published in Hardcover by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins Publishers (February, 1990)
Authors: Wood W. Lovell, Ramond T. Morrissy, Robert B. Winter, and Raymond T. Morrissy
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A MUST-HAVE for Peds Orthopods
A necessity for a resident interested in Peds Ortho. Full of information -- clearly written, easily read and absorbed.

A classic
This is the classic orthopaedic pediatric text, with updates to reflect the latest advances. It's very easy to read and would be extremely helpful for a junior or senior resident on an orthopaedic pediatric rotation.


Making Mechanical Marvels In Wood
Published in Paperback by Sterling Publications (June, 1991)
Author: Raymond Levy
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a wonderful gift for the woodworker
I ordered this book for my dad last Christmas, and he has used all of the patterns at least once. He is constantly telling me how well-planned the book is. I'm not a woodworker, but my dad is, and he rates this book top notch!

A book filled with plans for small hands-on wooden machines
This is a book filled with projects for machines that are fun to play with. Over the years I have built more than half of them. (And given them all away as Christmas presents.) The machines are unique and really fun to watch work. A relatively high level of woodworking skill is required.


Making of Golden Gate Park
Published in Paperback by Aperture (August, 1980)
Author: Raymond Clary
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An incisive and pertinent history and morality tale.
For a period of three decades Raymond Clary was San Francisco's most persistent defender of Golden Gate Park from those who sought to acquire the land for their exclusive use, to put up and expand buildings on the land, and to convert the land into money-making venues. Because his criticisms of park encroachers were caustic, witty and informed, it was to be expected that he incurred the wrath of those he rebuked. While Mr. Clary's sharp and eloquent voice has been stilled, despoilers of Golden Gate Park continue to clamor for buildings, museums, monuments, sports arenas, and facilities for special groups. The park needs defenders like Ray Clary to keep the land open, free and green for future generations. Though his books could benefit from condensation, they provide San Franciscans with instructions in the care of park environments it would be well for them to read and to heed.

History replete with the excitement of a bygone era.
The Making of Golden Gate Park is one work which must be a necessary reference; this says not only what a park was, or should be; but how it was set out in the beginning to be that special place in time. An interesting look at what created in sand had became a feature of the landscape of memories. Mr. Clary was a fantastic researcher with greater powers of understanding than even his public knew, envisioning how the park should look way into the future, many planners over the years borrowed his sentiments freely and grafted their public policy onto his outlines. One benefit being the Golden Gate Headlands National Park, an outgrowth of his promotion of open space for city-dwellers idea. Oddly enough, although he was praised by Herb Caen and much was done to preserve open-space, the main concept for conservation of this unique park as a very special and individual place aside from time has been consistantly resisted by every city and county functionary over the last 30-years!


Maoist Economics & the Revolutionary Road to Communism: The Shanghai Textbook
Published in Paperback by Banner Pr (April, 1994)
Author: Raymond Lotta
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Handbook for Despots, Entertainment for Proles
Occasionally some propositions made in earnest can be so far off the wall that we find them quite entertaining rather than bizarre. The Shanghai Textbook is one such work. The author does a decent job explicating some ideas of Marxian economics. Having never read the economic writings of Lenin, Stalin, or Mao, his only sources for 20th century economics (except some bureaucrat in one article mentioned in passing), I cannot comment on the author's treatment of them. However, one has to wonder what sort of terrifying conditions lead the author to write that all natural barriers to production can be overcome by human will based upon one relative exception in the middle of nowhere. Indeed, written at the height of the cultural revolution in no less than Shanghai, this piece of Maoist propaganda is, simply put, comical. Except when he sticks strictly to Marx, the author committs virtually every fallacy in a first year economics course imaginable on every page. Needless to say the style is highly politicized and reads like a Pravda article during the Stalin days. The treatment of the Sino-Soviet split and the maelstrom into Capitalism by Khruschev is somewhat informative, if nothing else but to hear the hardline Stalinists defending the disaster that was mid-20th century Bolshevism. Nevertheless, the utter lack of economic sophistication makes this book hillarious and I highly recommend it to anybody out for some good laughs.

why communism works!!!
This is a textbook from the Cultural Revolution and gets into how a socialist (socialist as in 1949-1976, dictatorship of the proletariat) economy can work, can lead away from opression and can pave the road for communsim, in a scientific way. Accompanied by Lotta's brilliant intro and afterword, this makes for an excellant piece for understanding why communism was not a failure but is a great success. Difficult reading but well worth it. (The socialist economy is a planned economy is an economy that works)


Marcia Adams' Heirloom Recipes: Yesterday's Favorites Tomorrow's Treasures
Published in Hardcover by Clarkson N. Potter (November, 1994)
Authors: Marcia Adams and Raymond Bial
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Marcia Adams' Heirloom Recipes
This is a wonderful book. It brings delightful regional recipes to the reader. I already have dozens of these recipes on my list to try. Ms. Adams gives us information to pique our interest in the recipe without boring us.

Truly a Heirloom
Wonderfully put together and easy to use, this book should be on everyone's shelves who are intrested in cooking and keeping our heritage alive.


Messages from the Celestial Sanctum
Published in Paperback by Amorc Funds (March, 1980)
Author: Raymond Bernard
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Should be a classic
Yes, this is an excellent book, especially if you are familiar with the Monographs of the Rosicrucian Order. I found the book in a used book store in Spokane. I would have thought this book would be more well-known than it is, but it is an excellent read for those interested in techniques to exploring contact with the Ascended Masters. And in the process one learns a great deal about mysticism and psychic matters. Raymond Bernard was truly an authority on the subject at hand.

Hopefully AMORC will reprint this excellent book.

Meditate and Get Spiritual and Material Guidance
Not only a 'how to' book but an informative, almost story of a past Rosicrucian Order, AMORC officer's meditation sessions in the visualized place called the Celestial Sanctum. Excellent for anyone who is looking for a greater meaning of life or searching for the mystical path. It covers reincarnation, how to contact spiritual Masters for guidance, etc.


Model Selection and Inference: A Practical Information-Theoretic Approach
Published in Hardcover by Springer Verlag (November, 1998)
Authors: Kenneth P. Burnham and David Raymond Anderson
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authoritative and thorough treatment
Burnham and Anderson have put together a scholarly account of the developments in model selection techniques from the information theoretic viewpoint. This is an important practical subject. As computer algorithms become more and more available for fitting models and data mining and exploratory analysis become more popular and used more by novices, problems with overfitting models will again raise their ugly heads. This has been an issue for statisticians for decades. But the problems and the art of model selection has not been commonly covered in elementary courses on statistics and regression. George Box puts proper emphasis on the iterative nature of model selection and the importance of applying the principle of parismony in many of his books. Classic texts on regression like Draper and Smith point out the pitfalls of goodness of ift measures like R-square and explain Mallows Cp and adjusted R-square. There are now also a few good books devoted to model selection including the book by McQuarrie and Tsai (that I recently reviewed for Amazon) and the Chapman and Hall monograph by A. J. Miller.

Burnham and Anderson address all these issues and provide the best coverage to date on bootstrap and cross-validation approaches. They also are careful in their historical account and in putting together some coherence to the scattered literature. They are thorough in their references to the literature. Their theme is the information theoretic measures based on the Kullback-Liebler distance measure. The breakthrough in this theory came from Akaike in the 1970s and improvements and refinement came later. The authors provide the theory, but more importantly, they provide many real examples to illustrate the problems and show how the methods work.

They also refer to the recent work in Bayesian methods. Chapter 1 is a great introduction that everyone should read. Being a fan of the bootstrap I was interested in their coverage of it in chapters 4, 5 and 6 (much of which is the authors' own work).

Because the authors work in biological fields they cover survival models as well as the standard time series and regression models where most of the emphasis has been placed on model selection in the past.

It is a great reference source and an important book for learning about model selection as part of the inferential process. The pictures of the famous contributors inserted throughout the book is also nice to see. We have Akaike, Boltzmann, Shibata, Kullback, and Liebler brought to life in photographs or sketches.

A breakthrough book on statistical modeling building
Statistical data analysis usually goes through cycles of exploring and looking for patterns in data, often through model construction, analyzing residuals and modifying model fits, until all unusual features being explained. Though this practice has been going on for more than 100 years, it has not been closely examined to see whether the fact that your analysis based on the best fitted model using the same data set should be biased, or plainly you cheated by over-analyzing your data. This book by the two productive authors say yes, and you should rethink about what you have been doing. A highly applaudable and timely efforts on the part of the authors, considering that the trend of over-analyzing your data is increasing rapidly with recent explosion of data and intensive computer analysis in the data mining industry. It's not as hopeless or bad as you think, and there are ways to avoid pitfalls and there may exist ways of making some valid inference out of this model selection process. So enjoy reading this book and think!


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