There's no shortage of originality in Peter Brooks' recent foray into the confessional act. Indeed, "Troubling Confessions" is a kind of sui generis text on the place of confession in Western Culture, and as such it bears absolutely no resemblance to other and earlier critical treatments of confessional literature. What's remarkable, looking back on the rich tradition of literary and cultural scholarship that came out of Yale during the 70s and 80s, is that nobody even *thought* to broach exactly these questions. That a work so plainly underivative should appear now, after the long and arid years during which the Yale school had grown into a pale and emaciated shadow of its former self -- well, it gives one pause. And one could justifiably argue that this is the effect of Brooks' oeuvre as a whole, which, if read cover to cover, induces the kind of silence from which even the keenest intellect can scarcely be roused.

For those with a general background in literature and in law, this book is straightforward and easy to follow. The book explores the complicated act of confessing in a myriad of contexts, greatly enriching the reader's understanding of this most troubling speech act. When so much "scholarship" in the nascent field of law and literature is banal, a profound work such as this one gives the entire field much needed legitimacy.

Those with an interest in law and literature have awaited this book, and for them there should be no disappointment. From a variety of perspectives, Brooks reflects on the extraordinary value that Western culture places on the act of confession, and the equally extraordinary problems that Western culture has assessing individual confessions. We want confessions, yet we are equally suspicious of them. Brooks' method for examining this cultural ambiguity is to juxtapose literary and legal traditions of confession (the religious tradition also receives significant attention). By juxtaposing these traditions, Brooks argues that we can better see the demands that are made of confession in Western culture, as well as the demands that confession, in turn, makes of us as members of social communities and as individuals. His interdisciplinary moves are skillful, his historical and legal glossings are accessible, and his readings of literary texts (and films) are smart. The chapters can be read individually, allowing the reader to jump around at will. Chapter 1 looks at how the Supreme Court has tried to address the problem of confession, primarily through Miranda. Chapter 2 looks at the relationship between the confessor to the confessant in various contexts -- law, literature, religion, psychoanalysis. Chapter 3 looks at the problem of the voluntary vs. the coerced confession with a close reading of Culombe v. Connecticut. Chapter 4 discusses how the religious tradition of confession affects modern understanding of identity and selfhood. Chapter 5 addresses the law's difficulty addressing psychoanalytic concepts of truth, identity, guilt, and victimhood. Finally, Chapter 6 sums things up by looking at what motivates or compels an confession at all. Among other literary works, Rousseau's Confessions, The Brothers Karamazov, Alfred Hitchcock's film I Confess, The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Camus' The Fall make extended appearances. These texts are hardly obscure, and neither are the general outline or the finer points of Brooks' argument. Very helpful to anyone interested in confession, narrative and rhetoric, or the general relationship between law and literature.

The description of the book has more meat than the book itself. This disappointing book is a 15 short chapter breeze through a multitude of subjects, and does not linger long on any single subject. There are some nice diagrams and ten thousand foot views crammed into 374 total pages (the page count vs. chapter count alone should indicate how superficial this book is). An example is the 21 pages devoted to weighty subjects encompassing project management tasks, configuration management, verification and validation, quality assurance, decisions and risks. Any one of the topics would have merited at least 20 page in a serious book on systems engineering. Useful to sales and marketing types who are selling systems engineering services, and executive management who might like a quick overview of systems engineering. This book is useless for technical professionals.

This book is a great introduction to the system engineering process. It might be lightweight for a practicing system engineer, but for an IT professional whose background is service delivery, production support and data center operations this book opened a whole new world.

An example of how this book opened my eyes is the way configuration management is explained, and how it fits within the system engineering process. IT professionals with my background are subject matter experts in change control; however, few of us (certainly myself) realize that change control is a subset of a much larger picture. Every part of system engineering it covered in sufficient detail to understand the basics. This understanding created, in my case, a desire to further research some areas in greater detail. Overall, seeing the process from a high-level view provided some unique insights about what is missing in IT management that can be filled by borrowing from our system engineering brothers and sisters.

I found this book valuable because I did not have to wade through a dry manual and sort out the details in order to get a big picture of system engineering. The brief, succinct chapters and excellent illustrations provided me with a coherent approach to my own job. In fact, I personally believe that applying system engineering principles to IT service delivery and operations management will significantly improve the IT profession. As such I highly recommend this book to my peers and anyone else who needs to see the big picture of the system engineering and how its principles can be related to their job.

Stevens' Systems Engineering looks at the place ofrequirements in a world which consists of complex systems in a highlycompetitive marketplace. This may be the commercial world or equally the military-industrial world in which systems must literally do battle with their rivals.

Stevens and his co-authors (two of them from the UK's Defence Evaluation and Research Agency) know that in this environment, many systems fail, very often because they were inadequately thought out, and often also because their development projects were poorly managed. Chapter 1 begins "The world is currently gripped by changes more intense and rapid than those triggered by the ndustrial revolution..." : we are at once swept into the rich, complex, and dangerous life of real system development.

For Stevens, the problem in systems engineering is complexity, and its mastery is, as the subtitle implies, the key to success. The design of complex systems demands hierarchy - of organisations, of projects, of contracts, of documents. Hierarchy implies interfaces: if you split a system into three, you probably create three interfaces between the component subsystems. Interfaces in turn imply specialisation: someone develops the hardware; someone else, the software. Similarly, someone (the customer) writes the requirements specification, while someone else (the developer) tries to meet those requirements. This, like the prime contractor - subcontractor relationship, consists of a customer and a supplier: the marketplace reaches right into the core of system engineering.

The book therefore covers a startling breadth of subjects, but always with the same practical vision and with the same conceptual tools. The first few chapters broadly follow the European Space Agency's now-classical PSS-05 software engineering standard life-cycle phases: user requirements, system requirements, architectural design, integration (of subsystems) and verification, management.

(Requirements are involved in every one of these phases.) Once the reader is grounded in the basics, the next chapter discusses how to tailor the simple life-cycle just presented. A tell-tale section entitled 'smaller systems' gives the game away: the systems in the authors' minds are a great deal larger than the PC 'systems' beloved of advertising copywriters.

The second part of the book (chapter 8 onwards) starts by looking at more realistic life-cycles, based on the management of risk: when is it sensible to go ahead with something? The answer is, when success can be assured even if the bad risks materialize. That can only be guaranteed if the risks have been quantified. Concepts of requirement priority and benefit, risk, and cost loom much larger in the marketplace than technical issues.

The remaining chapters examine management in multi-level projects (hierarchy again), software and systems, prototyping (to control risk), information modeling, projects and the enterprise, a chapter on how to improve and a summary.

Each chapter consists of a double-page title/table of contents, overlaid on some crisp pencil artwork on the theme of engineering progress (from Leonardo's hang-glider to an agile jet). The text is broken up by plenty of simple flow diagrams illustrating life-cycles, trade-offs, business processes and information models, as well as short summaries of what the most important system documents should contain. Key points are highlighted or bulleted within the text. The chapters end with a page or two of realistically tricky exercises: the answers cannot be coded in C.

The helpful appendices include a list of websites: Systems Engineering comes with its own website which contains pointers to several related sites, and itself includes 'proposed' answers to the exercises which end each chapter. Students will find the glossary helpful and comprehensive. There is an extensive list of very varied references, and a detailed index. This book is a carefully worked out description of the process of developing any large, complex, and risky system. The book can also be read as a polemic: an impassioned plea for the discipline to graduate from its narrow roots, whether in academia or in quality control. The concluding paragraphs make it clear that system engineering is a human process, a 'game' in which there are losers as well as winners, something that can be played well, and that absolutely must be played better to limit the risks and losses that are still all too common....

The book will be of interest to several quite different communities: in particular development managers, clients having large systems developed, and students of system and software engineering will all find much that is of interest here. The book may also be a useful supplement (or perhaps an antidote) to the academic perspective on RE. Everyone should have access to a copy.

As someone completely new to Ayurveda and/or the Ayurvedic approach, I found this book informative, interesting and worth the money. It was explained in a simple, linear fashion that I understood and can now incorporate. As for Ayurveda itself, I particularly appreciate the preventative approach behind the medicine, and the emphasis not only on the correct foods to eat, but the setting and manner in which we eat them.

If you want to learn more, and know nothing now, I recommend the book. However, if you're Deepak and seeking to enhance your extensive Ayurvedic base of knowledge, keep looking, because this one is for beginners.

Peace in the valley.

While I'm not an outright skeptic, I've had my doubts about books like this for years. No more. After finishing reading this book I immediately put into many of its practices and see (as well as feel) immediate results. I wish there was more on those of us with a mix of constitutions, but I can overlook that in favor of excellent writing, clear instructions, terrific insight, and practical tips. I'd recommend this to anyone new to the field or still with questions about its merit.

I have owned - and read - this book for many years. For anyone who has had an interest in delving in to the world of theatre which is on the very edge of discovery, read this book. Take a group of ethnically diverse actors, a carpet, a pair of boots, a very rough idea and a collection of small African villages, some of whom have never encountered anyone from outside their own small community, and you have the perfect mix for rediscovering the true meaning of theatre. At one and the same time massively amusing and wonderfully inspiring, enter into the world and the mind of the 20th century's most creative forces - Peter Brook.

Peter Brook has staged many successful (and unsuccessful)productions of Shakespeare. Find out what he thinks aboutcontemporizing Shakespeare. Brook writes very simply, as most of his works are transcribed speeches. This book is easy to follow and wonderfully illuminating. Has large print, so that's sort of hard to swallow. This book is packed with information, but it is a SMALL book.

I got this one dirt cheap. Another book on Wright to ad to your collection. Better than some, but I imagine there is better ones out there.

Peter Brooks' book, "The Melodramatic Imagination," would be helpful even due only to its serious examination of the structural and philosophical underpinnings of traditional French melodramatic theatre. However, what makes this study necessary reading is its convincing argument that melodrama exists as a driving force, not a distracting or somehow 'lower' element, in the creation of the modern novel. The melodramatic structure, shaped by high moral conflict and determined by its motion towards a final revelation of virtue as innocence, and is held together by a system of characters, images and actions become part of a signifying code that opens onto a moral world more cohesively meaningful than the literal world that can be represented by a more straightforward, perhaps more materialist realism. Authors of the nineteenth century novel needed this structure to retain urgency and significance in works from which motivations based on the sacred or the mythic had been discarded, and to make 'interesting' stories seeking to represent the lives of human beings in time rather than the explanatory deeds of timeless, imortal figures. A willingness to historicize a bit more, to relate an explanation of changing modes of representation to changing modes of production, would have made this work even stronger.

This is a must have if you are building a Lutzow/Deutschland Class model and need good picture references. Fairly good text and statistics. The only drawback are the line drawings which are far too small in scale (you need a magnifying glass) to be of any use and the camouflage drawings which are done in black and white and are also of limited use. Otherwise, tons of very useful black and white photos...

If you're live in or are academically interested in the Greatest Town On Earth, this is a good book. It's a collection of studies and essays that well illustrate how we became the City we are today. Thoughtful, somewhat balanced, but unafraid of being controversial, it's a solid read.

Subtle is the enforcer for the Wolfbay wings. Every one see him as a goon because he loves to knock people of the puck skating full speed, this helps the team score a lot of goals. But when the coach changes the lines around Subtle sees that he has to play clean. But now the team is losing. Read the book and see what happens.

This book and the other Wolfbay Wings books a great for young hockey players and fans to read. I enjoyed them.