there may be a hundred books that teach acoustic analysis of speech, however this book will make the reader smile all along as he/she reads. The explanations are clear, and easily digested by the reader. It gives a feeling that kent and read are beside you and explainging things out and thats what a student expects from a book.

As a Conjurer I have studied the classic works of many of the great old conjurers. Of all of them Blackstone is one of the most well known. This book provides clear and simple explanations of some of the greatest tricks and illusions known to Magic. Great for the beginning or advanced conjuror.

An interesting and comprehensive survey of Ray's work throughout the 70's, 80's, and into the 90's. The interview with the artist is funny and informative and the reproductions of his work here are beautiful.

Clear, but brief details on a vast array of the people, machines, and problems associated with the invention of the computer. It's a very picture intense book that makes learning the computer age interesting and somewhat exciting. This extensive collection of pictures ranges from the real news articles to the inventors actually working the machines. This book acts as a perfect quick-reference to the computer age.

Introduces readers to the field of end-user computing support, including needs assessment, telecommunications, human factors, personnel selection and management, ergonomics, and information resources management. Includes cases and software. Technology content is a bit dated, but concepts and cases are strong.

This collection from phaidon, give as a good study of three projects with detailed plans and good pictures. This book recovers also a three masterpieces, fallingwater, villa mairea and eames houses. Three good projects, cheap price, just get it.

This book is ostensibly about crime. Specifically the amelioration of crime by a policy of zero tolerance of minor and petty crimes which became famous for the dramatic fall in crime in New York City.

This book has a slightly different focus. Rather than concentrating on what Zero Tolerance is and does, it seeks to place the crime figures and approaches to crime reduction in a broader context of community. The concept of community developed both in these pages and within a wider research agenda supposedly concerned with the development of a civil society in which the state plays a smaller and smaller role has a particular slant to it.

Zero Tolerance is the latest in a line of books from the Institute of Economic Affairs Health and Welfare Unit, now a free standing institute of it's own, CIVITAS, which postulate a decline in morals and behavious which result from a growing tendency in our society to becoming more individualsitic. The model of decency and good behaviour upon which this view is based is a rather idyllic view of the English working class family as portrayed by Norman Dennis in some of the earlier books of this series. Here it's scope is widened to incorporate views on how to tackle crime which involve the wider civil society. Policing in this view is both external and internal and the police forces themselves are seen as a legitimate part of the community, reinforcing the internal rules and moralities forged in the furnace of home and family. Headed preferably, of course, by working father, stay at home mother etc.

You will not find in this book any arguments about drugs save for the superior tone about how the use of drugs has grown in our society and is therefore bad. This cannot go unchallenged. In a passage devoted to the emphasis on education and development of working men's clubs and institutes the book praises them for their contribution to improving the moral fibre of those who participated. These clubs were segregated against women drinking in the public bar and fought hard to retain that position against equality laws and became more well known for the strong and cheap beers that they sold than for moral improvement. Their innate conservatism was a major contributor to why their customers deserted them and caused the closure of many in the North East of England. While the consumption of this legal drug is condoned, other recreational drugs are the cause of much petty crime. The book ignores the setting of the laws and blithley makes assertions about theft while ignoring the basic point that laws against drugs make them more attractive to the purchasers, more profitable to the suppliers and lead many who consume them to do things out of character in order to get their drugs. I could go on but this would be a book of it's own.

Zero Tolerance is a one sided book. It excludes any consideration of the diminishing role of the church in society as one of a number of relevant institutions, and it excludes any treatment of what changing structures in our society mean for those individuals who have previously been imprisoned by those structures, in particular, for women. The supposed golden age of the working class family is a modern myth, a sociological urban legend, which did not exist for many.

Ultimately, this is yet another attack on growing individualism in our society which begrudges any positive changes and which harkens back to an age which never really existed. The causes of crime run deeper than one parent families and tower blocks. The harsh reality today is that women are valued more by society than they were which is the real reason why female wage rates are increasing while male wages rates decline overall.

Perhaps we should be looking forward and not backward to see how a healthy individualist society might develop.

I am a big fan of Ray Charles Robinson. This felt like a character assination. It is no secret that he was not exactly the best husband. I am sure Charles was a tightwad, and ran a very tight ship. But, the book goes on and on and on about this in every chapter, ad nauseum.

The good parts about the book are the the exaustive research and the insight about the single minded drive Ray had to be the best at everythig he does. I agree with the above review that there was very little insight from Ray about what makes him tick. It seems obvious that Ray did not spend much time with the author. Perhaps read this and 'Brother Ray' to get his side of the Story.

Ray Charles is a legend, a genious of music and recording and a fine artist with extraordinary talent. But this book focused more on the times and people surrounding Ray Charles, than the actual man. I got lost in all the music jargin and mumbo jumbo-I wanted to know about this musician, his life, how he felt, what he did, how people felt about his music. But since I am not in the music business, nor do I understand most of the jargin, this book was lost on me. I skipped quite a few parts in the middle chapters because they just bored me and confused me. Not to say this was a bad book, but if you're like me when it comes to the language of music business, skip this one and buy the man's albums. His voice tells it all, you can just feel the emotions in his songs.

If you only reading this book because you want to know exactly how friendly Ray Charles is, you might end up disliking him. This book is a tell it like it is. After reading it, I developed mixed emotions towards Brother Ray, that I didn't have before reading it. However, this book is truly a musician's favorite.

The book contains six stories:

The title story is the creepy account of an asylum inmate forced to take drastic action in order to avoid electro-shock treatment.

"Selected Incidents," a tribute to Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby stories, is a pitch-perfect parody of a Hollywood picture producer.

"A Letter To A.A. (Almost Anybody)" is an alcoholic's confession that sets up like a Raymond Carver story and then delivers an ironic payoff that is straight out of Fredric Brown.

"Jake's Journal" is the first person account of an American serviceman who runs afoul of his superiors in the Phillipines and is exiled to a lonely airstrip in Tibet where he slowly goes mad.

"Just Like On Television" is a parody of one of Jack Webb's suspect interviews on the old "Dragnet" TV show. The entire story is told in a Q&A format between an interviewing detective and a discursive suspect.

"The Alectryomancer" is the story of a Caribbean conman who uses trained roosters to predict the future.

The back-cover copy calls Willeford's stories "almost Chekhovian." This is nonsense. His work can hold its own with the short fiction of Fredric Brown, Jack Finney, Richard Matheson, or Charles Beaumont, but there is nothing particularly deep or memorable about it. The stories are clever pieces of American pulp fiction circa 1960, but they are very much of their time and haven't aged particularly well.

Originally published in the early '60s, The Machine in Ward 11 is a collection of six short stories by Charles Ray Willeford. Though the six stories all stand independent from each other, a theme of madness and disillusionment runs through them. A brilliant film director goes insane when his artistic vision is curtailed by the demands of reality. A cocky air force pilot commits a senseless murder and finds himself assigned to the mountains of Tibet as an indirect consequence. A recovering alcoholic discovers that giving up drinking is possibly the worst thing he's ever done. These stories are filled with a wry sense of the macabre. Of these stories, three were previously published and three were written (I assume) specifically for this book. The three original stories -- A Letter to A.A., "Just Like On Television," and Jake's Journal are the strongest in the collection. I was especially enthralled by Jake's Journal (which deals with the unfortunate pilot in Tibet) which is a story that defies any easy interpretation. While at first, it seems that the story will be a rather standard tale of a man going insane in isolation, Willeford instead piles on more and more bizarre anecdotes and incidents before building up to a brilliant, tour-de-force ending.

Willeford, best known for writing Miaimi Blues, is often dismissed as an occasionally interesting but otherwise unremarkable writer of pulp fiction. This dismissal manages to unfairly underrate both Willeford's talent and pulp fiction itself. While the melodrama was often sordid and over-the-top, pulp fiction -- especially in the years immediately following World War II -- often served to give voice to a darkened and, at times quite critical view of the American Dream then one might find in more "respectable" books. Often that is why, while most of the previous decades' best sellers have since faded into obscurity, the works of Mickey Spillane, Chester Himes, Jim Thompson, Richard Stark, and others have continued to be reissued and read. At the heart of the best pulp fiction was a universal fear of the future and an ongoing debate between human desires and human society. These are concepts that remain universal to readers spanning both time and location. These are also the concepts that Willeford deals with in The Machine In Ward Eleven.

The seller needs to list the edition he/she is selling This is a very out dated edition that was sold to me. The seller did not sent any return information like the other agencies did.

An excellent general overview, covering drug use and regulation, pharmacological basics, in-depth analyses of the legal drugs, tranquilizers and stimulants, narcotics, hallucinogens, and marijuana, and comments on "a rational look at drug use." Well-documented with an abundance of relevant quotes and statistics; a rich set of references follow each chapter.