I really like this book - perfect for beginners and almost beginners who want to develop and maintain their own fitness programs without the use of a personal trainer. There are many different programs to choose from, ranging from very easy up to fairly challenging. They all seem very realistic and require modest committment of time (30 to 60 minutes daily). Each program has a stretching, strength and cardio component. One program requires no special strength training equipment and there are a couple of programs suitable for a fully equipped gym. The rest fall in between - perfect for those of us with a very modest home gym. The programs focus is on fitness, not body building, and is really geared for the average person. There are clear illustrations of how to do the stretches and lifts and lots of good ideas on a variety of cardio fitness activities. I also like the ideas on hotel room workouts for us business travelers.

I have two criticisms of this book. First, I felt that many of the ab excercises were not realistic for a beginning level of fitness. I felt that some of them were too stressful on the lower back so I made substitutions. The second is that although Burke is a former cycling team coach, he really didn't give much information on cycling. I choose that as my form of exercise and I would have appreciated a specific progressive program for cycling. He does have a 10 week progressive walking program for beginners though.

For someone who is not physically fit at all, I thought I'd be intimidated by any literature that may even elude to working out. This book, with its helpful illustrations & detailed instructions, is a wonderful starting point for anyone trying to get into shape. It will take you step by step & explain why the steps are there in that order. Very helpful & valuable!

This book offers a common sense, practical approach to getting into shape. It focuses on the basics: stretching, lifting, and moving. It provides 8 levels for gradually increasing your fitness. You start on a "Program Before the Program" if you haven't been exercising or if you are recovering from an illness or surgery. You start on "Basic Program 1" if you are in good enough shape to do so. Once you start the Basic Program, you begin using weights to increase your strength. Moving can be walking, cycling, or swimming. A different set of stretching exercises is offered for each program. The book also provides a number of specialized workout programs, such as a "hotel room workout," exercises for back pain, and ones to fine tune specific muscle groups. The book also includes simple, common sense information and advice on food, choosing a gym, and other fitness-related topics. The book is well written, clearly organized, and has superb, easy-to-understand illustrations. It is ideal for almost anyone who wants a practical, common sense guide to getting into shape.

Burke points out the things all around us that we take for granted but which really are absolutely amazing in his discourse on the sublime. A galloping stead, the expanse of a starry night, or a range of towering, snow-capped mountains. Burke points out these awe-some sights which in themselves provoke us to ask of their origins.

This book can be repetitious as Burke attempts to make, especially on taste, his point absolutely clear (I've got one of the later editions - 1772.).

Additionally, some of the lines in the book are near-timeless and are good to have around to reference from.

Edmund Burke's 1757 treatise, "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful," is a clearly written, well-argued, and variously inflected work of philosophy. Coming out of and contending with the traditions of philosophies of passion, understanding, and aesthetics from Aristotle and Longinus to Descartes, Hobbes to Locke, and Shaftesbury to Hume, Burke would seem to be taking on a world of difficulty at the tender age of 28. However, Burke manages to maintain control and exercise great wit in his treatise by confining his "Enquiry" to the ways we interact with the physical world, and how in this interaction, we formulate our aesthetic ideas of sublimity and beauty.

Burke's "Enquiry" is divided into five parts, with an introduction. The introduction is perhaps his most witty segment, as he tries, as Shaftesbury, Addison, and Hume before him, to formulate a standard of Taste, a popular subject of conjecture in the 18th century. Physically, and not without some irony, he chooses to speak of Taste primarily as a feature of eating. In response to his predecessors, though, he does say that since our attitudes toward the world come from our senses, that the majority of people can see (sight being very important) and react; thus all people are capable of some degree of Taste. Education and experience, he must admit, though, do refine Taste. In Part One, Burke examines the individual and social causes which arouse our sense of the sublime and the beautiful, those being the primal feelings of terror/pain and love/pleasure, respectively. Throughout the "Enquiry," Burke insists that these are not opposites strictly speaking - that pain and pleasure are mediated by a neutral state of indifference, which is the natural state of man. (Compare that idea to Hobbes and Locke!)

Parts Two, Three, and Four find Burke explaining his notion of the passions in relation to his basis of the physical world. Grandeur, potential threat, darkness, and ignorance for Burke excite our nerves and produce the sublime, a feeling of terror which is simultaneously delightful as long as it does not cause immediate pain. These he finds both in the physical world and in tragedies of literature and history. Smallness, softness, clarity, and weakness delimit the beautiful, which produces affection and sympathy. The contrasts and interventions that Burke makes throughout the "Enquiry" on these bases are variously inflected with issues of anxiety over gender roles, race, and power. Burke's politics give the work a joyful and troubling complexity to the literary minded.

Part Five, then, is a look at the effect that words, language, and poetry can have in influencing our affect in regards to the sublime and the beautiful. In it, he gathers together statements he sprinkles throughout the treatise on the nature of poetry - that its emphasis on representation of emotion, rather than imitation of objects, gives it a power that is perhaps unequalled even by nature. In Burke's "Enquiry," one can see a nascent fascination with landscape, mystery, and sensation that would find its flowering in the Gothic and Romantic movements of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His insistent break with earlier philosphers who combined aesthetics and morality is a serious challenge to moral philosophy with regard to art and Taste. His physical descriptions of emotional response prefigures Freud's psychological ponderings in "Three Essays on Sexuality" and "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," as well as linguistic theory. In all, a fascinating and complicated work for being as short as it is.

This review is dedicated to the memory of Vernon Lau. Unfortunately, Burke did not deal in the "Enquiry" with the pain or terror of immediate personal loss. One can only wonder if Burke's obsession with philosophical distance between people and fear wasn't motivated by a loss of his own.

Let us, for a moment, forget the historical and literary importance of Right of Man and Common Sense. What if this book had just been published today? Would it still be worth reading? The answer is an unequival yes.

Althought many parts of this deal with specific issues of Paine's time (especially Rights of Man), even after two centuries, the writings of Thomas Paine are able to stoke the fires of liberty in the soul of the reader with their passion, their fierce logic and their unexpected humor.

Rights of Man comprises two long volumes written by Paine in response to English criticism of the French revolution. Although much that he says is ironic in light of events that occured after he penned these volumes, you can see the hope that the Revolution produced. He breaks government down to basic principles, pointing out the needs that government fulfills and the method by which they should be constructed. It is thought-provoking, even in the modern day and will make you look on politics of our own time with a new light. Rights of Man does drag a bit when Paine begins repeating himself, but it remains interesting and though-provoking.

But Common Sense is the real treat. The pamplet that set a continent on fire is -- this was a surprise -- a thrill to read. I found myself actually laughing at Paine's sarcasm and satire -- his way of taking monarchy and absolutism and exposing them for the ridiculuous constructions that they are.

Any student of history should read these volumes for their portrayal of late 18th century geopolitics. But you will find them to be unexpectedly entertaining.

Anyone who wishes to understand American History, namely the Revolution, needs to read this book. These essays were crutial in the development of the revolutionary movement in America. Thomas Paine is a keynote figure in this time period and helped the American cause.

A big question for me when buying my first book on training for racing, was "Who provides the most reliable and important information?" I have seen Dr. Burke quoted in a variety of sources including Bicycling magazine, Velo magazine, and Chris Carmichael's web site. So I had the impression he is respected in the sport. Further, when reading his writings in other sources, he has gone into the underlying physiological processes that contribute to one's performance on a bike. As such, I decided to purchase his book based on his apparent credibility and the depth of information he provides. Strengths of his book include its excellent coverage of what goes into training for competitive cycling. From beginning "base training" to sprint training, periodization, and planning one's training for the entire year. He also speaks at length on nutrition, equipment/rider aerodynamics, body positioning on the bike, and adjunct training methods. Again, there is an emphasis on underlying physiological processes including some discussion of relevant research. I would say the book's weaknesses lie with it's failure to address racing tactics. Certainly, you learn about what is happening with the body at race pace, but this book will not tell you about positioning for a sprint or pacing one's self for a time trial.
In short, buy this book if you are serious about racing and want to enhance your knowledge of what goes into training for competition. Don't buy this book if you want to learn about tactics.

Burke, a well known name among cyclists, gives very detailed and sometimes complicated advice about how to train, how to create a training schedule for various goals, how and why to make a training diary, etc. Readers should be aware that his advice is aimed at the very serious cyclist, and his training schedules range from those for serious collegiate cyclists (~15hrs/week) to professionals (~25+ hrs/week). His advice is sound, but it may be more than most people really need. His peak mileage (feb) is 2000miles--that's 500 miles per week!

Very detailed, I found "serious cycling" easy and enjoyable to read. Ideal for the self - coached athlete, it helps personalize your cycling program depending on your present abilities. While reading you find that there is much more to training and becoming a better rider then you first thought, but it puts the "why" into training in addition to the "how" giving a better understanding and appreciation with what changes your body must undergo to be a better cyclist.

Periodization, training modes, keeping diaries and more... The nutrition section I found to be a little "old school" but, nevertheless, interesting and backed by studies. This information is aimed at the "serious cyclist" and may be too much for someone not willing to put forth the 15+ hours a week.

There is much in O'Brien's book that is interesting, original and insightful. But it suffers from two fatal flaws, one stylistic/structural, one substantive: (1) It is a mess. It is part personal biography, part intellectual biography, part annotated anthology, all mixed together in a confusing and unsatisfactory hodge-podge that may have been deliberate, given Burke's (and therefore O'Brien's) aversion to systems and abstraction. It is as if the author set out with a firm intention to portray Burke a certain way, collected up all the relevant facts, but just couldn't pull it all together in the end. It reads like a work-in-progress, several drafts short of completion and in dire need of a good editor; (2) It seriously overstates its case, and is therefore simply not reliable as an account of Burke's thought. O'Brien's Burke is a pluralist liberal, one of the "good guys" not to be classed among the "reactionaries", as Isaiah Berlin has done. But as Berlin points out--with far too much courtly politeness--in his exchange with O'Brien (reproduced in the appendix), the author has simply turned a blind eye to those aspects of his subject that make him appear illiberal. Most liberals at the time supported the French Revolution, at least in its early phase, and with good reason: it destroyed a confused mass of privilege, injustice and corruption that served the interests of a largely hereditary elite, which Burke vigorously defended. Most liberals since have supported it too. Few (if any) liberals today would hesitate to condemn someone who defended tradition, hereditary privilege and deference to authority as Burke did. To say that Burke was a liberal just doesn't wash. Granted he had SOME liberal tendencies, but he had many other tendencies that liberals have always found repugnant. It is a crude and one-sided portrait. O'Brien subscribes to the old-fashioned Cold War liberalism of Jacob Talmon, who interpreted the struggle between liberal democracy and "totalitarianism" in the 20th Century as a replay of the struggle between liberalism constitutionalism and the Terror. O'Brien's agenda in this book is to accept this dubious and anachronistic framework and to place Burke firmly on the "correct" side in it, with a demonic Rousseau on the other. THE GREAT MELODY was probably out-of-date before O'Brien wrote a word of it, just as much of Burke was when it appeared in the eighteenth century.

"The Great Melody" by Conor Cruise O'Brien is not your traditional biography; there is little here concerning Burke's personal and family life. Instead, the work concentrates on Burke's political career and thought and, specifically, how they relate to his Irish heritage. The result is a fascinating look into the mind and personality of a man who suffered from a conflict of emotions over his Irish heritage that included his father's conversion to Protestantism while his mother and wife remained Catholic. Burke himself was torn in different directions his entire life; loyalty to Britain and also his Irish ancestors and friends suffering under the Penal Laws, loyalty to the British constitution, but also a deep feeling for the need of justice for the oppressed people at home and abroad.

O'Bien's book takes an in-depth look at Burke's career in parliament and as a member of the Whig party through an extensive analysis of his letters, speeches, political relationships, and writings, specifically, as they relate to his struggle on behalf of the American colonists, the struggle of the Irish Catholics, the people of India suffering at the hands of the rapacious East India Co., and the French Revolution.

The work can be a little dry at times and tends to quote in an overly lengthy manner, but the immense erudition and scholarship and the insightful picture of Burke that emerges more than compensate for this. I do wish, however, that O'Brien had spent more time on "Reflections On The Revolution in France," but he feels that since it is so readily available to the reader there is no need. Finally we see an Edmund Burke as he really was and not the "old reactionary" that is so often depicted. We come to understand that Burke always believed that "the people are the true legislator," that Burke did not want to see Americans in Parliament who were slave holders, that he was a life-long opponent of increased powers for the Crown and the corruption such power entailed, that he was one of the few who consistently fought against injustice toward the American colonials, that he found all authoritaianism abhorrent, and that he opposed commercial monopolies and the abuse of power in all its forms. But, because he opposed the overturning of society and its reengineering on the basis of "metaphysical abstractions," he was often portrayed as a reactionary by later pundits. Lewis Namier and his followers are particularly taken to task by O'Brien for this tendency. In the end we see a Burke who always supported basic human rights, but remained constantly aware that real life circumstances must make social and political change possible if such change is not to lead to chaos and violence. Burke's fear of radicalism based upon abstract theory was real and the destructiveness of the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Nazi bio-racial religion more than sufficiently proves his point. A reading of O'Brien's fine book can only lead the intelligent reader to a renewed respect for a great man, a decent and liberal minded man, and a man of immense vision.

Everyone knows Edmund Burke's most famous quote: "for evil to triumph, it is only necessary for good men to do nothing". As a former lecturer in political science, I was mainly familiar with Burke as the founder of Anglo-conservatism (infinitely more nuanced and modern than his equivalent in Franco-conservatism, the Count Joseph de Maistre). I had also read an early work, namely "An Enquiry into the nature of the Beautiful and the Sublime", which I thought a brilliant little jewel. But there's much more about Burke than that.

O'Brien, the great man of Irish diplomacy, shows in this extraordinary book that Burke, whom recently history has shown as a fawning servant to the political leaders of his time (Rockingham and Pitt), was at the heart of the great fight between George III's royal absolutism and the emerging English democracy. Burke was on the right side of virtually all the fights he picked. He advocated equality before the law for the Irish subjects of the king, first tolerance and then freedom for the American colonies, the end of the colonialist abuses of the East India company, and a quarantine on the infectious ideas of the French Revolution. The later one is still a contentious affair. Zhou En Lai famously opined that it was still too early (in the 1970s) to judge the French Revolution. Burke would have had none of that. As early as 1790, in the "benign" initial phase of the revolution, he foresaw the Terror, the execution of the Royal Family, the Consulate and the Empire, and the French banner covering all of the Europe, in the name of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity".

O'Brien shows the extraordinary situation of an Irish Protestant (always accused of crypto-Catholicism) having great informal influence on the politics of Great Britain, while holding menial offices or representing various "rotten boroughs" in Parliament (this is no aspersion on Burke's memory- that's how politics was done at the time, and anything that gave Burke a pulpit couldn't have been all bad). The "Great Melody" of the title provides the underlying themes around which O'Brien organizes the public part of Burke's life. Far from tiresome, this is a useful device that provides unity and coherence to Burke's thoughts and actions. O'Brien's attacks on mid-century historiography are perfectly adequate, given that much of what was written as that period was designed to regress Burke into irrelevancy, as a sycophant and a lackey. He never was that. He was a good and a great man, and O'Brien does him justice in his book. Perhaps the only fault that I could find in it is a tendency to assume the reader's prior knowledge of the arcanes of Irish history. But these are quibbles. If you can stomach a history of ideas, full of events and studded with memorable characters, this is the book for you.

This book is written for the "layman" in regards to the physiology behind the sport of cycling. As someone not familiar with VO2 max or heart rate training or even different methods of training, this book is perfect.

As someone with an Exercise Physiology background, however, this book was nothing more than a reveiw of everything I have learned. I was looking for something more physiologically based.

I read Serios Cycling from Ed Burke and realized that there is more to cycling than mere racing. Being a "new" cyclist at the age of 43 I had great difficulty to match the "older" cyclists that have been cycling competatively for the last 25 years. This book helped me to see what is all the preparation work behind the scenes. Mere fitness is not enough. You tend to hit the wall during training rides and feel confused because you are still not there. The understanding of how muscles work and what they need to continue performing at extreme levels of endurance made me to adapt my diet and pre-race preparation to ensure maximum energy, nutrition and oxygen are available to the working muscles to perform at their best. It was a complete mind change but today, less than three months since I bought this book fellow cyclist are questioning if I use steriods. They could not believe the improvement! The book is well laid out to explain the basic as well as the advanced detail of the body and mind and how to overcome those stages where you seem not to progress at all. If you are serious about cycling, get this book. You'll see what I mean!

I will be reading this book several times. It's packed with information on how to maximize your training session, off-season training advice, nutitional info, how to cope with jet lag, ad infinitum. I recommend this book to all who take this sport seriously.

This book is a posthumous collection of Hodgson's essays on world history, Islamic history in particular. Much of the book was unpublished at the time of Hodgson's sudden death. Consequently, the book reads as if Hodgson was thinking out loud. The prose is very dense and he often pounds home points over several pages that could have been made in a paragraph or two. Nonetheless, many of the ideas presented by Hodgson were advanced for the time, and a necessary correction to William McNeill, his fellow University of Chicago prof. Hodgson's main thrust is to set right the place of Islam--or what he calls the "Islamicate"--in world history. This argument should be well-heeded in view of the overly Eurocentric tone that much work on world history has taken. Specialists on Islam will appreciate the book the most, and anyone interested in world history can benefit from it--but it is a very tough read that could easily be pared down to a precis.

Hodgson was the pre-eminent Western historian of Islamic societies, as set forth in "The Venture of Islam." In "Rethinking," Hodgson's widow has seen to the publication of a series of broader essays on the philosophy of history as applied to the world at large. Part 1 tries to get outside Euro-centrism as best as an Occidental can. Part 2 considers Islam in a global context, and Part 3 discusses commonalities and differences that make for meaningful comparison, decompositions, and aggregations in regional and global history.

The most interesting chapter is entitled "Modernity and the Islamic Heritage." Here Hodgson inquires whether it is possible for a society to be Modern yet not Western, given that the presuppositions of Modernity reach deep into the Medieval Occident. For example, "with an effort of the imagination, one can guess what the institutions of Modernity might look have been like if it had developed, for instance, in Islamic society... The nation-state, with its constitutionalism, its particularist characters of rights and responsibilities, stems from the corporate conceptions of Medieval Western society. From the very different legal conceptions of Medieval Islamic society, with their abstract egalitarian universalism, there might well have developed, instead of the nation-state, some international corps of super-ulama, regulating an industrial society on the basis of some super-sharia code." This tension between Western-ness and Modernity is palpable in the West, but elsewhere it is a defining issue running through politics, economics, and warfare. It is especially evident in the violent Islamist organizations, where Modernity is used to combat Westernization.

The successful resolution of those tensions, in the Islamic world as elsewhere on Earth, will be the only way that civilization of any kind can continue at all.

I was a little startled by an earlier review of this work that suggested that Burke's parody of Bolingbroke could possibly be taken seriously as a work of political insight. And although there have been scholars who have suggested (without supporting evidence) that Burke meant the work to be taken seriously, it is difficult for anyone familiar with Burke's later writings to regard "Vindication" as anything other than a rather dismal parady. The later writings all display qualities sadly lacking in this work, especially the subtlety of thought and nuanced insights featured in "The Reflections on the French Revolution." Anyone who could take this work seriously merely displays a kind of political obtuseness that goes against the very sophistacated, practice-rooted political thinking exemplified by Burke. It is rather laughable that a radical thinker like Godwin should have mined Burke's parody for insights. It demonstrates all to well the essential shallowness of radical political thought.

The redoubtable Edmund Burke is widely known as the man who layed down the philosophical foundations of modern conservatism. Thus, it may come as a great surprise to discover that he penned what may very well be one of the earliest clear expositions of philosophical anarchism in the Western tradition. While scholars may always dispute over the issue of whether or not the "Vindication" was meant as a serious work or a satire, the book's status as a landmark is incontestable.

In this terse tract, Burke sets out to apply the same rationalistic standards to the realm of politics that 18th century Deists like Lord Bolingbroke applied to the doctrines of revealed religion. As Deists upheld the distinction between natural( i.e. rational) and artificial (irrational or faith-based) religion, Burke seeks to defend natural (anarchistic or voluntaristic) society against that which is dominated by the brute engine of government.

Although modern conservatives may also give their full support to the idea that the unrestrained employment of reason undermines the basis of both religion and government, it is infidel anarchists who will derrive the greatest value from his insights. For those wise enough to allow the light of reason to be their guide, the "Vindication" serves as a powerful indictment of government and the innumerable crimes that it has perpetrated on mankind wherever it has existed.

If indeed the work is a satire, it would seem that it has done far more damage to Burke's cause than he would ever have imagined. Not only did the tract serve as a great inspiration to William Godwin, the man who, in less than four decades from the time of this book's publication, authored one of the definitivie works of philosophical anarchism, but it will certainly serve the ends of anarchists for many years to come, as they continue to wage war against the religion of politics with many of the same weapons that Burke has so eloquently furnished for us.

This is an excellent book that will help companies focus there business on strong relationship with the community they live in. The one weakness I see is an over emphasis on philanthropy. I am not so sure that throwing money at the community will really buy a good relationship. This book should be read by anyone who is involved in the management of a manufacturing facility.

Because of his ability to capture the complexity of human life in drama without filtering it through his ego, Shakespeare has often been called a mirror in which critics cast their own prejudices and preoccupations. Something similar could be said of Edmund Burke, whose timely thoughts on politics and government often illuminated timeless truths through which commentators could reflect on their own concerns.

Burke is best known for his opposition to the French Revolution of 1789, which he described in Reflections on the Revolution in France, and for his opposition to aspects of British imperialism in America and India. Even those who disagreed with his politics considered him a man of profound imagination; in fact, his early interests leaned to the literary, as in his treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. His works suggested a literary sensibility that surpassed his contemporaries'. Largely due to the work of Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet, and Irving Babbitt, Burke has been considered a major influence on modern conservatism.

Burke's writing, though aphoristic, quotable, and of high literary merit, can be difficult. Daniel Ritchie's intent with this anthology was to introduce the general reader to Burke's major themes by a variety of commentators. Consequently, the book has been divided into five sections: the literary imagination (Coleridge, Arnold); revolution (George Watson, Russell Kirk), constitutional and party government (Harvey Mansfield, Alexander Bickel); the radical mind (Raymond Williams, Conor Cruise O'Brien), and the conservative mind (Irving Babbitt, Robert Nisbet). In each case the critic tends to project his own interests onto the texts, which I consider less a shortcoming of the critic than an indication of Burke's transparent genius. Babbitt, for example, saw in Burke the quintessence of the humane man of letters who could balance opposites in an unsystematic world view.

Some of the essays here will probably try the patience of the general reader. I would have put Steven Blakemore's essay in the "radical mind" section of the anthology, given that I consider his deconstructive approach to be much more in line with radical literary fashion than with traditional explication de texte. But I general I found this to be a useful volume. As I have in the past, I would direct the reader toward the essays by Kirk, Nisbet, and Babbitt for their encapsulation of Burke's themes into plain, yet graceful, English.