This book is best read as a reference and overview of the current state of scientific research on hypnosis. The bibliography is wonderful. However, it is written in the overly dense prose of academic/scientific journals (to prove that the subject matter and author are "serious"), so if you're looking for a pleasant reading, this book isn't for you. If you are a grad student or researcher in psychotherapy, neurology, anthropology or biopsychology, then you will find this book very useful. If you would simply like to learn how to hypnotize others or use hypnosis in therapy, this is not the book to buy.

This is a rare find in a book about hypnosis: thre is approachable information about nearly EVERY level or type of hypnotic function for both the lay reader AND the expert seeking details and models or theories of hypnotic process. Peter Brown matter-of-factly explodes the notion that hypnosis is some bizarre state and simultaneously give us interesting tidbits and detail about how nearly all brain function is related to what we loosely call "hypnosis."

Especially because of the flurries of news about false memory syndrome and hypnosis in the not-so-distant-past, this book is both a delightful tour through the human brain, and a useful reference. A MUST read for the generally curious about hypnosis, the hypnotherapeutic practitioner, and anyone in the helping or healing professions

This book is a great illustration of the 2000 US Open at Pebble Beach. Brown describes all of the many story lines that made this tournament so compelling. Stories of Tiger Woods' domination, Jack Nicklaus' final US Open; memorials to Payne Stewart and many other story lines are captured by Brown's words and telling photos.

This book is a fantastic compelation of photos and articles onthe US Open. Scott Brown has done a great job weaving the stories ofTiger Woods' domination into the many other stories from Pebble Beach.The photos from the Payne Stewart Memorial and 21 Drive Salute arechilling.

Brown does an excellent job of introducing the reader to the period of late antiquity in this work. He is able to cover the major political, social and philosophical transition of the Roman Empire of the Antonines to the emergence of the Christian Succesor States with clarity, and accuracy. Although this work does not take an indepth look into any of the many subjects that fall in this period, it is an excellent overview, and maintains a level of scholarship that is almost unparalled in a work of this nature. The book is documented to an excellent degree, so that even the most critical reader can see where it is that Brown is comming from. I would recomend this book to anyone from the avid scholar to the most casual reader.

Brown is able to establish the foundations for anyone interested in late antiquity with clarity and scholarly depth that is unparelled in the field. This book, although taking a broad picture of the period, and focusing on a shallow over view, rather than taking an indepth look into any perticular aspect of the period, is still scholarly enough to interest even the most particular historian, but will catch the interest of the beginer also. Browns conclusions are well thought out, and are based on an extensive, and acurate picture of the period. The documentation is incredible, hundreds of documents are quoted, and carefully indexed, in a book under 200 hundred pages, so the most nitpicky readers can see exactly where Brown is comming from. This should be the model for broad view scholarly work, this is truly an excellent work.

The true story of the Battle of Britain. This book is a good read. It's about the planning of the Battle of Britain on German side, and the planning of the British defense, on the British side. If the Battle of Britain had succeeded, it would have been the first successful cross-Channel invasion since William the Conqueror in 1066. Hitler's half-hearted attempt at an invasion was bungled from the start. He didn't count on Britain being prepared. He was expecting Britain to be like Poland and the Soviet Union with its planes on the ground like sitting ducks. Churchill had once said that French said that Britain would have her neck wrung like a chicken. Then he quipped "some chicken--some neck."

The definitive history of the Battle of Britain read this book! Operation Sea Lion is about the planned German invasion of Britain. It's also about the British countermeasures. Not many people know that the British removed the street signs from London's streets to confuse the Germans if they'd invaded. It also confused the British drivers. There are some editorial cartoons as well. One has a man on the telephone, he's probably a British Cabinet Minister or Sir Hugh "Stuffy" Dowding, and the caption's "Get me Messerschmitt 109." Operation Sea Lion was supposed to be like Operation Overlord--a cross- Channel invasion. The British were prepared and they defeated Goering's vaunted Luftwaffe.

Excellend and very well written Windows NT4 Server Reference. A must read for any Windows NT administrator.

I refer to this book often. It has helped me take my understanding of networking to the next level. Especially useful as a primer for IIS.

I just bought this book and will review it again later. I've read Brown on Augustine and am getting what I expect from this book: brilliant writing, brilliant thinking, brilliant scholarship. He turns you upside down and shakes all the change out of your pocket.

This is a great work that traces the development and movement of Christianity into Europe. A religion that started out in the middle east had, by the end of the work, come to be dominant more in northern Europe than in the middle east itself.

Brown is a very good writer and is able to very eloquently trace out the forces and personalities of the period as well as the theleologic discussions that often divided Byzantine and Latin interpretations of the religion.

While not an introductory work, any reader can benefit from reading this book. At best it will stimulate further interest in the period and reading other authors. At worst, the reader may require some maps and a copy of, "Who's Who in the Middle Ages"

I enjoyed this book very much. A must for anyone interested in Tchaikovsky's life, yet seen through the eyes of people who were close to him. Highly Recommended!

This is a marvelous book about Tchaikovsky compiled of diary entries from his contemporaries with commentaries and analysis by Alexander Poznansky. It is the best kind of biography that makes him seem very real, coming to life off the page. It begins in his school years and continues with a variety of rare diaries and letters of people who came in contact with him and kept journals or notes. It covers the entire social range from princes to valets, so we get quite a variety of observations from the intellectual esoteric to the very "earthy." We see not only Tchaikovsky the great composer, but also the student, the philosopher, the scholar, the workman, the card player, the bon vivant, the unsuitable suitor. It also includes explanations and diaries of his ill-fated marriage and many details of his rich personal life. The conflicts and turning points of Tchaikovsky's career and life are well illustrated. Each chapter is chronologically organized with often the inclusion of several diarists, most of whom are included in the copious illustrations. Poznansky begins each chapter with a biographical essay describing the importance of the contributor and the events of Tchaikovsky's life. The comprehensive scholarship is impeccable and the style superb. Poznansky is one of the only serious scholars, who can put together a well researched biography with style, flair and clarity that will satisfy the most stringent musicologist, while also entertaining and moving any Tchaikovsky admirer.

Let me put it this way, and I quote another translator of this book, "You have not read 'Confessions' until you have read the Sheed translation."

(Sorry for my poor english...)

If you liked the marvelous Moravagine, Dan Yack could be considerated in a way as is soft counterpart. When a group of depraved artits decide to follow an idle billionnaire to spend a winter near the south pole, anything can happen. And, of course, as we are in the Blaise Cendrars world, it happens in a brutal, hallucinating but touching way. Dan Yack plays with life like a gambler who would play russian roulette with a gun loaded with five bullets.

Mr. Irons is an advocate. A graduate of Harvard Law school. He does a magnificent job of presenting the history of Jim Crow from a legal perspective. It is a splendid refresher course in High School Civics: The Dred Scott decision that negroes were property; Plessy vs. Ferguson establishing the doctrine of "Separate but Equal," and the myriad cases argued by Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP leading up to the desegregation decision in "Brown vs. Board of Education."

Segregation advocates recognized even fifty years ago that their arguments for separate schools were weak in light of the 14th Amendment. The surprise is the degree to which the Warren Court took psychological testimony, the self esteem argument, into account. Separate schools, they concluded, could not be equal simply because of the stigma that separation imposed on black children. Full and equal citizens must enjoy the right to participate fully and equally in the society.

The book traces the progress of desegregation from 1954 onward, including busing and other measures to force integration. Mr. Irons laments the limited success of these measures in achieving their objective, equal educational and financial achievement by blacks in an integrated society.

Why, then, do differences persist? Mr. Irons argues that ongoing differences result from continued de facto separation of the races in schools, the inferior economic status of blacks, and the high incidence of single mothers among the black population. These situations perpetuate a cycle of lower expectations, lower self-esteem and lower achievement among blacks. Take them away, he suggests, and blacks would perform at the same level as everyone else in society.

Mr. Irons takes the obligatory swipe at "The Bell Curve," leading with the phrase "Virtually all reputable scholars reject claims, most recently leveled by Richard Herrenstein and Charles Murray.....who conducted no research of their own." It is true that they saw their task as compilation.. They acknowledged that the relationships among social status, income, intelligence and race are vastly complex. Their goal was to bring together and analyze all the significant statistical data from diverse studies in many countries over many decades. Though one would not know it from the reception it got, the book is not even primarily about race. Mr. Irons did not footnote his claim about "all reputable scholars." The only one he cites, Richard Nisbett, has not written a book on the subject, only a 16-page tract entitled "Race Genetics and IQ," ..It cites a handful of studies with limited numbers of subjects dating mostly from the 1930s to the 1970s. Mr. Irons chooses to ignore a number of published authors he must regard as disreputable, among them William Shockley, Arthur Jensen, and Philippe Rushton. Whatever their shortcomings, they have published books to offer their thoughts for public scrutiny. Mr. Irons should not have ducked the chance to refute them.

Mr. Irons is totally focused on U.S. society. The book would be richer, though his thesis would be more difficult to support, if he were to consider the situation of blacks elsewhere in the world. He would find that whatever their situation with regard to education and income, the degree of equality between blacks and whites in the U.S far exceeds that in any other part of the world, including Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and Latin America. Jim Crow is a weak explanation for the status of blacks in France or Haiti.

Thinkers throughout the history of our country, including great minds such as deTocqueville Twain and Mencken have devoted a great deal of thought to the natures of the races and relationships between them. While there is no agreement, all would say it is tremendously complex. School integration and busing were simple ideas that had their opportunity to resolve the situation. They didn't. We can thank Mr. Irons for a wonderful history lesson. Sadly, his thinking is trapped in his own history.

BOOK SUMMARY - this paragon is a compilation of court cases, impact and results, of: segregation, integration, desegregation, federal vs. state powers, black vs. white imbalance, and urban vs. rural education with respect to race. This is a powerful book, which will encourage you to challenge your own educational background and to reminisce about your own upbringing, whether your race is black or white, and to which generation you feel connected - something for everyone at all ages. After reading the book, I think it explains a lot of racism from our parents, grandparents, and forefathers before them, because of the dearth of reference points that we have today with an integrated society. In hindsight, it (racism) doesn't excuse our ancestor's behavior, but it does elucidate the issue.

You will gain an erudite perspective with regards to the impact of Jim Crow schools. "Jim Crow's Children" illuminates a progressive evolution that embarks upon the journey through slavery, to sharecroppers, to 'nigras', to Negro's, to Blacks, and to present day African-American socioeconomic plights. Court cases are interspersed throughout this lucid and professionally-researched anthropology throughout the past 150 years. This collection of historic, judicial impact superbly demonstrates the current situation that faces our education system and affirms the book's statistics through Peter Irons's interview with high school students.

PERSONAL REVIEW - Awesome, Thought-provoking, Engaged, Intellectual, Piercing and Educational are words that describe this compilation. I agree with the reader below, who remarks that many of the statistics divulged are extremely confusing in prose, compared to charts. This setback is cumbersome and I believe the only foible of the author.

Education is only one example where the disparity of whites and blacks diverge. Both races are to censure (and laud), our accomplishments, as well as our governmental policies and jurisprudence. I was surprised to learn of the glaring statistic of black, female head-of-household in urban cities and the author's comments of role models for OUR nation's black children (I am Caucasian). Too often, I find the personalities of Rev. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Louis Farrachan chide white America on the divergence of race relations and blame our society for its woes. Why isn't their rhetoric more solution-based to create alternative methods to mollify the affect of languishing family values (ie: dead beat dads, poverty, safe sex, education, drugs, cultural integration, etc.) for BOTH races?

I highly recommend reading this book, regardless of race, disposition, or creed. In addition, I encourage you to discuss and debate the issues as we strive for racial harmony. For without intellectual dialogue we will continue to have "two cities: one white, one black." Perhaps, Peter Irons will be an expert witness with the University of Michigan admissions policy.

This book is clearly the result of a great deal of thought and effortand I recommend it to anyone interested in the subject. It really causes one to question the commonly held assumption (at least perhaps among whites) that all of the issues involving forced segregation and the negative consequences that flowed therefrom more or less evaporated in 1954 or shortly thereafter. Quite to the contrary, the book shows how, in may ways (though obviously not in all), there are almost more similarities between the state of American education and race relations between, say, 1953 and today than there are dissimilarities. In that sense, the Brown case may have accomplished a whole lot less than is commonly imagined. For this reason alone, the book is valuable.

I did have two qualms with the book however. The more trivial one is that I thought that the numerous statistics were confusingly presented, perhaps because the author tried to summarize them in prose rather than in charts. There were repeated times that I had to re-read those portions of the book and I feel that that was mostly because the author did not do a good job of clearly summarizing the statistical information for his readers. I feel that the use of charts would have been more helpful (and perhaps more dramatic as well in terms of proving the author's points).

My other complaint goes to the issue of the remedy to the problem. It seems to me (and I think that the author concedes as much) that a good portion of the reason for the problems that exist today relate to changes in demographics, culture and societal forces which are beyond the power of the courts or the legislature to change--just as some judges and commentators have stated. To be sure, these changes include white flight to the suburbs, but nevertheless people live where they live and little can be done about that. Thus, in that sense, to the extent that most children attend schools in which their own race predominates (as in the pre-Brown days), I'm not sure that I would call that a "failure" or a "broken promise" of the Brown decision. The author seems to take this point as a given, but then proceeds to say that we should not give up; that we should keep trying to fulfill the promises of the Brown case notwithstanding that; that we should search for the harder solution.

One possibility for that solution is of course a modified "separate but equal" solution in which separation still exists (though for societal reasons and not due to legally sanctioned segregation) but this time with true equality in terms of funding, teachers, facilities, etc. In other words, make the black schools just as good as the white schools.

Irons seems to disapprove of this solution on a number of grounds, and I tend to agree with him. As Thurgood Marshall stated, the idea and the ideal is true integration between the races and NOT separate but equal, even if there were true "equality" in the senses I have stated.

But, if we rule out this possibility, doesn't this leave only one other possibility, that being busing? Irons never comes right out and advocates a return to the days of busing (perhaps because it remains a political hot button issue), but it seems to me that there is no other alternative which he leaves open to us. With that in mind, I would have preferred him to come out more directly and specifically with his own solution to the problem which he lays out so well. I believe that the only solution he leaves us with is busing, but he seems reluctant to come out and say that in so many words. If that his solution however, I think that the book would have benefitted from a discussion as to how busing might work today and how it might overcome the problems it faced in the 1970's. On the other hand, if he has in mind some other solution, I would have liked him to say what that is.