As a CPA and candidate for controller of Montgomery County, PA, it is refreshing to see the long-term planning, comparison, functional issue review, and the "watchdog" functions of a controller so well laid out. Montgomery County will be well served to use this planning approach.

Please tell me it's not this easy to run a city. If all the Giulianis, Rendells, and Daleys of the world would just implement this new direction for urban america, our cities would not be afflicted with the ills they currently suffer. Every big city resident should demand that local government run as recommended in this book. Students, policy professionals, elected officials, and urbanites everywhere should make this book a part of their libraries.

I am a passionate city fan and wish every mayor in the country would read this book and implement the policies the authors advocate. There are no quick fixes to the problems shared by large American cities (crime, poverty, decay). As successful cities prove over and over, local government must concentrate on the basics -- improving schools, reducing crime, lowering taxes -- to make the city a place where people want to be instead of a place people want to avoid. If Philadelphia would adopt the recommendations of this book, the city would truly be a great one.

An Alternative Medicine Definitive Guide To Headaches is a comprehensive guide to alternative medicinal treatments of chronic headaches -- a common malady that afflicts 90% of men and 95% of women. Collaborative written by Robert D. Milne, Blake More, and Burton Goldberg to help readers "say goodbye to headaches for the rest of your life," with multiple treatment options for 11 major types of headaches. The described treatments include herbalism and acupuncture, which are free of the side effects common to conventional treatments. An Alternative Medicine Definitive Guide To Headaches is essential reading for anyone who suffers from America's number one health complaint!

A must for all headache suffer's, with the help of this book I decreased my migraine pain by more than two-thirds! This book is packed with valuable information on how to kill the pain involved with headaches. All the treatments are drug free. If your a headache sufferer this is a MUST!

This book is a must for anyone who suffers from chronic headaches or migraines. It covers not only treatments, but also guides you through the causes and what parts of the body are responsible. Complete descriptions of every type of headache and many examples of ways to treat them fill the pages in an easy to read manner. This is the best book I have read on headaches, and being a migraine researcher and sufferer, I highly recommend it.

I recently purchased THE AUDUBON BACKYARD BIRDWATCHER, as well as WHERE THE BIRDS ARE published by the National Wildlife Federation and BIRDS OF NORTH AMERICA from the Smithsonian. All three books have something to recommend them, and if you are an avid bird watcher or want to become one you will want all three. The Audubon book will have the greatest appeal to the backyard bird watcher who has neither the time nor inclination to travel to the wonderful sites listed in the NWF publication. The Audubon book is not exhaustive or even nearly so. For a more complete listing of birds, turn to another Audubon publication or the Smithsonian publication I mentioned above. Audubon offers complete listings of birds by geographic regions in other publications. You'll find only birds adapted to areas inhabited by humans in the AUDUBON BACKYARD BIRDWATCHER -- familiar friends like Robins and Finches, Pine Siskins and Chickadees. Each bird entry contains a photograph of the bird under discussion, sometimes in flight, sometimes posing and sometimes feeding itself or it's young. This book is wonderful for kids and I am using it to teach my grandchildren about birds just as my grandparents taught me!! The book contains sections on bathing, bird calls (including call notes and mimicry), and baby raising, and all are illustrated with many wonderful photos including some amazing shots of babies hatching, babies being fed, and babies launching into independence. Sections on bird pests, bird deaths, and bird rescues explain foiling predators, warning birds about glass windows, and banding and tracking birds. The child exposed to this book will learn someting about birds and life. Probably one of the most informative sections for the new birder or even old birders like me includes suggestions about what to grow in your own backyard to attract the birds. It's not enough to put out seed in a birdfeeder if you want diversity, though the book covers what to use in bird feeders. If you want to see anything other than seed eaters however, you'll have to provide other types of foods including bugs and berries. Usually where you grow berries, you'll have bugs. The book contians sections on hedging, vegetation variety, leaf litter (for cover, food, and nest-building), dust for baths, and water requirements. While the Audubon book isn't a gardening book per se, you'll find more information about building a bird friendly garden in this book than in most gardening books. I recommend the Audubon book as a teaching and instuction tool for the new birders and old birders alike. Oh--my favorite baby picture? -- the short-eared owls. If you don't think owls can come to your back yard guess again. I've had them in my backyard and I live 10 minutes from the White House. I won't tell you want owls eat. You just go right on thinking it's mice.

Before I purchased this book, I struggled to find something that I could refer to quickly when I spotted a bird at my feeder. Not only did this book provide me with basic features such as nesting habits, song descriptions, and typical diets of each bird, it also gave vital information on how to attract these fascinating little guys into your yard through the use of water, food, shelter, & shrubs and flowers. The photos are fantastic as well. I find myself referring to this book constantly, and keep it right by my binoculars.

Bird profiles, behavior guide, nesting, eggs, curious behavior, songs, displays. Ways to attract birds to your backyard no matter what kind of area you live in... landscaping, supplemental feeding, water. The photos are fantastic and are very valuable to the backyard birder. Great book.

What an incredible family! This book is not a biography, nor is it a book about running a business. It is a look at the life of an extraordinary man, John Tigrett, and his business and personal dealings with people from Glenn Miller to Winston Churchill, from Jimmy Hoffa to Fred Smith It is a success story filled with everything you would want in a novel. It is filled with stories of passionate lovers, great tragedies, and incredible successes. He was raised in a small town in Tennessee yet John played a part in changing the world in so many ways.

If we could view the world without John's influence over the past 50 years, how different would it be? From the leaders of World War II to the business world of the 1990's, from the toys we played with as a child to the skyline of Memphis, TN, John played a role in each of these.

However, this book is not about John only. It is about his family, his friends, and the many people he met along the way.
He speaks with such pride about his mother who struggled to raise her son after his father left. He talks about his uncle and aunt who helped his mother. The same uncle that changed the way the South traveled through the development of the Gulf, Mobile and Ohio railroad. He speaks about his children; two of whom died tragically and much too young. He writes with great pride about his son Issac and the hospital he build in India with the proceeds from the sale of the Hard Rock Cafe's. And his passion for his two wives and his youngest son Kerr let's you know that he was truly a blessed man....What a wonderfil life!

How did a toy maker from a town in West Tennessee become an international financier and the colleague of some of the world's most wealthy and powerful men? Read this fascinating book and find out! The stories of John Burton Tigrett's many friends are the stories of modern history: Churchill, Eisenhower, MacArthur, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Armand Hammer, Sir James Goldsmith, J. Paul Getty, Bunker Hunt, Brezhnev, Ross Perot, Ronald Reagan, Federal Express, the Hard Rock Cafe, and many more! This collection of vignettes and tales could also be sub-titled "A Life Well Spent." The reader sees not only well crafted word pictures of the many interesting people that Mr. Tigrett has known over the years, but also a picture of the author himself, as someone that YOU would wish to count among your friends. He appears as the type of man that you could call from a jail in some banana republic, knowing that he would move heaven and earth to get you out speedily! The! author of this most interesting book is the father of Isaac Tigrett, who founded the Hard Rock Cafes and House of Blues Restaurants. This reviewer knew the author when he (the reviewer) was a child, and was a friend of the author's late son, Hewitt. If you are interested in seeing the very human side of some of the movers and shakers of the post- World War II twentieth century, read this book!

a great book for every serious scientist in the field of sports medicine.In next edition i would be pleasure to see more
photos and details in dynamic stabilization exercises in real situations and criteria for advancing in the rehabilitation
program ,especially for elite, Olympic level athletes in gymnastic.
The spine in sports open new horizons in philosophy and research on spinal disorders with safe return in sports.

an excellent guide for treating spinal disorders in the field of almost all sport situations. In next edition i would prefer to see more photos and details from rehabilitation in real
situations,on dynamic stabilization exercises and criteria for advancing in the program for elite athletes especially in gymnastic.This book open new horizons in the philosophy of rehabilitation spinal injuries in sports.

I charged this book out of the Beaverton, Oregon, library and may buy it for a friend who loves hummingbirds. It's beautiful. It contains many interesting facts and was an easy read. Some of the information could be used by school teachers to do a nice lecture for their students with a subsequent homework assignment to learn more about birds.

There have been many books written on hummingbirds; so why another? Robert Burton's World Of The Hummingbird provides a focus on the science of the hummingbird more than its coffee-table predecessors, considering the bird's survival tactics, daily patterns, and habitats. From feeding to migration patterns, this is packed with both color photos and fascinating facts easily accessible to lay readers.

Sight and Insight! As a painter this book is invaluable to me, as an appreciator of art and a viewer it is an opportunity to view some of the most magnificent and masterfully executed paintings all bound together in a spectacular reproduction of artwork in itself. The execution in his draftsmanship, the use of form and the genius of the use of color by Mr. Silverman is incredible to behold. The narrative is clear and thoughfully written. I have purchased not just one book but two, one for use in my studio as a reference book. The other is a special edition signed by the Master. All who pick up the book have a delightful treat in store for them, for each time one gazes at his art, there are new discoveries to be made. As an artist I am in awe and hold a great deal of admiration and respect for his art, to have this treasure to enjoy and learn from in the form of a book is indeed a feast.

"I purchased Sight & Insight ;the art of Burton Silverman several months ago, but just came across his listing with Amazon. I think it's a beautiful book with some of the best paintings I've seen that uses representational realism. The people depicted are both very real and very arresting in a thoughtful, reflective way. It's like reading a good book and looking up to conjure the image of the character in ones mind only this artist does that for you. He doesn't exclude the viewer though, because there's a lot of ambiguity in his characters that leaves room for ones own speculations as to the meanings of the paintings. The writing, by both Prof. McGrath and Philip Saietta are excellent if sometimes difficult sledding, particularly with the Professor. But it's really a very readable and informative collection of essays. Silverman also writes about his career with compelling honesty. It's a real treat to go through this book and well worth the price, many times over."

Rarely do I come across an art book with both stunning visual imagery and insight into the state of representational art. The artist provides a clear, beautifully written essay for all of us confused about "modern" art, his paintings statisfy the thirst for imagery that moves and enhances our humanity. BEAUTIFUL book!

I've only gotten through volume l and part of volume ll (so far). I agree that I find it incredible that Musil is not as well known as Proust...he's his equal as a writer and in my opinion a much finer thinker. The brilliance of the book is in the extended introspections rather than the events...the multi-page musings on the human condition illustrate the timeless aspects of what we conceitedly think of as our "post-modern" psychic quandry. In common with Proust we are inside the protagonist's head, but in the third rather than first person, which gives the experience a different feel...we're a little outside at the same time. It's a ghostlier sort of connection, but I think equally as immediate. We walk the streets of Vienna as vividly as Chambray, but, perhaps Ullrich's less romantic nature, I find him a better correspondent. His perceptions are intellectual rather than the sensual, and yet, experiencing that intellect is a sensual experience for the reader (at least for this one!)

A note: I do not think the recent translation compares to the original English one...it may read more breezily, but my brief comparison suggests that it loses a LOT of subtlety in trying to achieve a more colloquial, effortless, less dated narrative voice. For instance, a passage in the original English translation reading "knowledge was beginning to become unfashionable" is translated in the new as "science became outdated". Two totally different meanings, and the first is clearly closer, given the context..(in which Musil is waxing sarcastic about a silly but dangerous bourgeois "believing" fad - spookily portentious of the Hitler era). An incredibly absorbing psychological novel...if your reading time is precious...nothing will reward more deeply or stay with you longer.

Of all the great European novelists of the first third of the century -- Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Knut Hamsun, Herman Hesse -- Robert Musil is far and away the least read; and yet he's as shapely as Gibbon, as mordant as Voltaire, as witty as Oscar Wilde and as indecent as Arthur Schnitzler, a fellow Viennese writer who gets more attention. "The Man Without Qualities" is an extraordinary amalgam of the formidable, the delicious and the unfinished; and no doubt each of these attributes is in some measure dissuasive.

If we take it that the characteristics of 20th-century life are fatuity, doubt and confusion; the "barbaric fragmentation" of the self, where "impersonal matters . . . go into the making of personal happenings in a way that for the present eludes description"; a crisis of individual identity and collective purpose -- then it is Musil's astonishing achievement to make a comedy of all this.

The book begins with a baroque meteorological description; its first action is a car accident; the hero is first seen looking out of a window, stopwatch in hand, conducting a statistical survey of passing traffic. Can there be any doubt that it is a prophetic book about our world? Musil is us. The world of "global Austria" in 1913 and "the Parallel Action" -- the plan, in the novel, to claim 1918 for the jubilee celebrating the 70th year of the reign of the Emperor Francis Joseph before the Germans get it for Kaiser Wilhelm's 30th, made nonsense of by the intervention of World War I -- is our world of the United Nations International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction and other fatuous schemes. While Musil's contemporaries Proust and Joyce chose interiority and the private world of memory, Musil is uncannily prescient about modern life, where sportsmen and criminals are indifferently idolized, where quantity sits in judgment on quality, so that an author, as Musil puts it, "must have an awful lot of like-minded readers before he can pass for an impressive thinker," where we sit and stew among "bobsled championships, tennis cups and luxury hotels along great highways, with golf course scenery and music on tap in every room." So "The Man Without Qualities" is satire; as one character says, "The man of genius is duty bound to attack." However, it is not harsh satire, nor is it sour. There is something loving about it. Musil's tone is unlike anyone else's. Partly it is the Austrian melancholy that underlies the book, the melancholy of a defunct empire, of a closed conditional: what was to happen did not. WHAT if, the novel implies, instead of expressing itself in the carnage of World War I, human folly had chosen another form? Partly it is the equable irony that plays over every character, institution and group in the book that makes reading Musil such an exquisitely flattering experience. No characters in the book escape mockery -- especially for taking themselves so seriously. All of them are skewed and partial, but none are caricatures; perhaps the book's almost complete lack of physical description plays a part here -- and yet, in spite of that, you feel you could pick them out in a lineup. They are Musil's puppets.

In his early career he wrote stories, plays and novels that had a certain popularity. But none of those prepare a reader for the expanse of "The Man Without Qualities". It took up the last two decades of his life, before he died in self-imposed exile in Switzerland in 1942, at the age of 61. It is a quite overwhelming novel, quite indeed...

No doubt the book is a little draggy and you can glean a lot of what Musil wants to say in his earlier more tightly written work. But, read this work (I've read this work twice) with the unpublished posthumous papers and you will get a feel of the vast scale of this masterpiece. If Musil had lived to complete this masterwork the way it would have inveitably turned out, it would have been the greatest novel of the century. It would have been the consummation of European thought of several centuries placed in context of both the first and second world wars...now that's something to think about.

Creating a Soul by Girard Haven is about the practical work of the Fourth Way. "Practical" in this context means something more than physical or mental exercises that the reader can attempt in the privacy of his or her own study. In these pages, Mr. Haven speaks about the difficult, day-to-day work to awaken from the sleep in which we are all immersed. "Practical", then, means both beginning to see things as they are and attempting to act from what one sees. "Practical" also means distinguishing between the efforts that one is capable of making by oneself and the line beyond which one cannot pass without outside assistance.

The Fourth Way is a teaching of spiritual development brought to the West in the early part of this century by George Gurdjieff and Peter Ouspensky. It can be said that the Fourth Way, more than any other system of knowledge known to us in modern times, stresses the importance of work on being. It is not enough to know the words, one must strive to be the words.

This book is an invaluable addition to the existing canon of Fourth Way literature. Whilst remaining true to the origins of the Gurdjieff-Ouspensky System and the basic principles of self-remembering and the non-expression of negative emotions, Mr.Haven talks about how to work with these ideas on a practical, everyday basis - and the Fourth Way is designed to take place in life, not monastic retreats. He talks about how to deal with ever-pressing daily issues and how to transform them into something higher, presumably, as the title would suggest, the creation of a soul. For many this book will represent a bridge between Ouspensky's brilliant, but somewhat intellectual presentation of the Fourth Way, and an understanding of how practical spiritual work on oneself can actually take place.

I picked up this book from a table somewhere and found it a truely interesting read! Written in a simple essay style, Mr. Haven outlines his own personal philosophy and that of his fourth way school in essays written over 20 years. I recommend this book to those interested on Fourth Way ideas or internal work on their souls!

This book is a really nice reference book for the backyard birdfeeder. It's not just a bird identifier book, it has chapters on bird survival and behavior. I'm glad to have it my small bird library and refer to it often.

...to receive this fine book! Trying to identify the birds visiting my backyard feeder with old field guide books was not working. They simply had too much information geared for experts. This book is nicely laid out and clear, offering tips for attracting, feeding, watering and identifying the birds visiting your backyard, as well as instructions for building bird houses, feeders, and so on. I put several of the ideas to use immediately! If you are an amateur backyard birder, this is the book for you!!

I am a beginner backyard bird watcher and I really enjoyed this book. It has some great pictures to help you identify birds, or even just to look at. The book doesn't stop there, however, it gives you nice detailed information of bird behavior, sounds, nests and habitat. I recommend this book to beginner or intermediate bird watchers.