This book is a blend of history and fantasy which rarely could be read. Unfortunately it is written in a language spoken by only few million people, so it can not enjoy the fame of books like Lord of the Rings, otherwise this saga is comparable to the best novels written. Its language is poetry in itself.
Highly recommend it to anybody who can get hold of it.

... Robert makes an excellent case that fellow Libertarians such as Murray Rothbard, George Smith and Samuel Edward Konkin III unintentionally create a new religious dogma based on an entirely metaphysical concept of "rights." He makes short work of their wacky ideas, which is a refreshing change from Mr. Wilson's other works, in which he (with great delight and panache) purveys his own wacky ideas.

Library Journal's review of this guide: "Combining encyclopedic coverage of destinations with loads of practical information and atlas-type maps, the series illuminates the wonders of nature but emphasizes the peculiarity of a place's people and their folklore."

My wife bought this for me to read in hospital. It was an inspired choice. The quality of writing is uniformly excellent, though the writing styles are very diverse.

Almost all of the articles avoid the standard trap of science writing: the idea that the science itself is not interesting, so just write about the personalities. These are serious writers, seriously applying their considerable skills towards making hard, important science understandable.

I was sufficiently impressed by these writers that right now I am researching the Masters in Science Writing courses that are mentioned in the introduction.

Exceptional play fitted with perfectly great performers. I saw it first hand here in Des Moines, IA. It was sad, funny, inspiring, dangling, ramantic and beautiful.

Being new to a call center job this book helped understand what I was getting in to and the dictionary in the back is a huge help!

Ten years ago, I wrote South Africa's War against Capitalism. Inspiration for the title came from the kind of arguments I heard during my several trips to South Africa, comments made by blacks and their supporters in the struggle against apartheid. The essence of their argument was that apartheid was a by-product of laissez-faire capitalism. For these people, including many academics and politicians, some variant of socialism would provide the cure. My research and counterarguments would have been far more productive and persuasive if I had had the benefit of the insightful analysis set forth in Anton D. Lowenberg and William H. Kaempfer's new book, The Origins and Demise of South African Apartheid: A Public Choice Analysis.

Lowenberg and Kaempfer provide powerful evidence for the Public Choice argument that South Africa's apartheid "was essentially a massive bureaucracy whose raison d'etre was the production of market regulations designed to effect wealth redistribution away from blacks and white mining and industrial capital owners in favor of white workers and agricultural capital owners. These regulations reflected the preferences of the median voter in an electorate dominated by white labor and rural constituencies." (p. 39)

Many people attribute the demise of South Africa's apartheid to international sanctions. Lowenberg and Kaempfer arrive at a different conclusion: "The white South African Government abdicated power because of a recognition that apartheid policies were becoming too costly to maintain. The main costs associated with apartheid were self-imposed as a consequence of years of misguided development strategies on the part of the National Party government and its predecessors. Although external events such as the oil price shocks of the 1970s and international reaction to apartheid after the Soweto riots of 1976 contributed to the slow growth of the South African economy, even more significant was the fact that the economy had undergone changes which had turned the apartheid system, once an asset for important groups of the white population, into a liability." (p. 218)

Lowenberg and Kaempfer devote several chapters to the sanctions issue. They show that despite claims that the goal of sanctions is to make targeted countries change objectionable domestic policies, sanctions more likely serve the interests of pressure groups within the sanctioning countries....

Therefore, the Lowenberg and Kaempfer hypothesis suggests, for example, that the United States might impose sanctions on the importation of South African wine, textiles, and coal and not to create domestic resistance, because abundant substitutes exist for those goods. Moreover, domestic producers might cynically support embargoes on wine, textiles, and coal imports as a means of gaining monopoly power. The United States embargoed South African agricultural products, but European nations, which were heavy consumers of produce from South Africa in the winter, chose not to embargo that category of goods.

There are innumerable, many incoherent collections of Chekhov's short fiction: such is the bane of an author being in the public domain. What makes this collection superior is that Edmund Wilson, the greatest critic of the 20th Century, assembled it, and there is at last a logic applied to its assemblage beyond the crude dictates of chronology.

Wilson realized that Chekhov seems spotty if not incomprehensible when his short caricatures and romances are interleaved with brooding tales of peasant lives. Think of a Twain compilation where "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg" and "Punch Brothers Punch" are sandwiched together.

So Wilson's collection takes the best of Chekhov's "social" tales of his last decade, stories that focus on groups of Russians, whether it be the bourgeois, the peasants, the workers, or the decaying aristocracy. In these stories, Chekhov is on Tolstoyean grounds, and holds his own remarkably.

However, this strategy means sacrifice: the beautiful, sparkling "Lady with the Dog" would not sit well in this grim company, so it is excluded.

design of pipelines of steam, design of boiler

Pelinka is one of the most poetic political writers I have ever read. He clearly takes on the leadership of Poland, both defending it and tearing it apart at the same time. Although the book's title, would lead you to believe that it is just about Jaruzelski, Pelinka provides an in-depth analysis of international leadership and the role of "democracy" in Eastern Europe and in the internationl arena. He brings in bits from every area of study and introduces new views on international politics that I have rarely seen. One of the most memorable anectdotes is what Hitler told the Lord Halifax of Great Britain to do about civil uprising in India, "Shoot Ghandi." Although I stumbled upon it for a research paper, I now have the book in my library and consider it a necesary component--much more valuable than Huntington or Kant.