I found this book rather disappointing. Let talk about the size of this book. It is slightly larger than a larger post card. It has lots of illustrations, so it has less space for recipes. The recipes, and information are helpful, insightful, and useful, but there are not very many recipes. The folks at Cooking Illustrated are always top notch when it comes to content, but the packaging of their material lacks in this book. I was hoping for a book to be filled with salads, salad dressing recipes, and more. This book did not deliver to those expectations.

With great illustrations, Adler gives us the bare facts of Columbus' life, however, he leaves out the passion of the man that children can really appreciate. Furthermore, Adler "forgets" that 1 reason Columbus sailed was to find new lands but another reason was to win converts to Christ. This & other historical information is lacking in his book. I was left with more questions than answers based on this book & will be looking elsewhere for these important answers. I wish the end of the book had a "parents note" with a synopsis of Columbus' life in more detail.

The back cover of "Love in the Ancient World" states that the author will tell the reader, "What is love? And how did people deal with it from humanity's earliest days? How was it represented, communicated . . . ? The answer to such questions would be interesting.
Unfortunately, the author confuses sex and love and tells us stories of Nero's slaughter of his wife, mistress, etc. There is pottery that shows Greeks engaged in gay activities. Do these things say anything about love? No. There is a difference between love and sex which the author fails to distinguish. He actually confuses the two throughout the book. The photographs are wonderful and I learned something by looking at them. The text, however, leaves way too much to be desired.
(PS I am not some crazy conservative.)
Do not spend your hard earned dollars on this book.

The book's strength is its beautiful, abundant illustrations; its weakness is the text. Reading through the book is not nearly as enjoyable as simply looking at the pictures: Some of the illustrations are not discussed in the text, and the text often refers to works of art not pictured in the book.

Another weakness of the text is its frequently dumbed-down tone and the shallow treatment given many of the subjects in its survey. The text and picture captions are also riddled with typographical and grammatical errors.

Despite the flaws in the text, however, the photographs of classical art are lovely, and the book is certainly worth browsing through.

This is a large format (coffee-table) book with lots of excellent pictures and a readable but erudite text. "Olisboi" is the ancient Greek word for dildo (p 84), and to my eye it looks suspiciously like "lesbian", suggesting an altogether different origin for the latter word, perhaps a pun.

Among the excellent pix in this book is a mosaic from a Roman villa in Corinth. It portrays the face of Dionysus, but the pattern around his central portrait is best described as psychedelic (p 58). So, there really is nothing new under the Sun - this is the first century equivalent of a black light poster of op-art. Followers of Dionysus liked to warm up with unmingled wine and allegedly some mildly stimulating herbs. This cult goes back, apparently, to the heyday of Catal Huyuk, as there are representations of Dionysus-like and related characters. Catal Huyuk and its short-lived successor ceased to be 7500 years ago.

Magdelanian art comes from the last Ice Age. It's the same culture discussed as the source of the Atlantis legend by Mary Settegast in her excellent "Plato Prehistorian: 10,000 to 5000 B.C. Myth, Religion, Archaeology" which has a chapter about Catal Huyuk and is out in a Jan 2000 edition.

Among the Magdelanian art shown in Love in the Ancient World are phalli carved from mammoth ivory up to 19,000 years ago, and a vulva carved on a cavern wall up to 32,000 years ago. I figure that people by and large were not living in caves and carving naughty bits on the wall, but rather that the same kinds of people who pursue artistic fields today were off by themselves. Most of the cave art found in books concerns animals and supposed hunting magic rituals, so it's probably a public service that Miles and Norwich have included these surpressed works.

See also "Eros In Pompeii" by Michael Grant with photography by Antonia Mulas and "A Book of Love from the Ancient Mediterranean: The Sweetness of Honey and the Sting of Bees" by Michelle Lovric and Nikiforos Doxiadis Mardas.

Mr. Ailsby never fails to copy data from other authors and add a fancy title that is catching and will sell. So long as the title has "SS" on it (he figures), it will sell. Don't waste your time or money on this piece of tripe!

This book is a decent introduction into the study of the SS. It doesn't have much (if any) new information and it doesn't go very deep into the subject but if you are only starting to study WWII or the SS this is a good primer (probably best suited to high school students). It also mainly concentrates on the fighting units of the SS while devoting very little space to the Waffen SS's atrocities and participation in the Holocaust. I also would have liked to have more infomation about the foreign SS units. The book has several good photographs in it.

Again, not for serious students of military history but a good start for study of the SS if you are interested in learning about WWII military units. Just don't expect too much.

This is a good book and the first I've read by Christopher Ailsby. It covers almost everything concerning the war on the eastern front 1941 - 1945. I`m thinking of aquiring Roll Of Infamy by the same author.

Christer

Scattered throughout the western United States, I have a handful of cousins: one in Oregon, two in Wyoming, and two in Arizona (along with an aunt and uncle in the latter state). Including myself as a resident of California, this is a distribution of Foristers, and from it could be made an area cladogram, which would look like a four-branched tree, with one state perched at the top of each branch. I happen to know that the Foristers have been in Wyoming the longest, for only slightly less time in Arizona, and only recently in California and Oregon. Therefore, I would arrange the area cladogram with Wyoming in an ancestral position, then Arizona, and finally Oregon and California bunched together as sister groups. Countless area cladograms could be made by inquiring into the family histories of other people-if at all possible, we might also construct some cladograms for the family dog and the starling that frequents the windowsill, just to be broad-minded.

Then (and this is the raison d'être of the book in question), a collection of these area cladograms could be compared, and a kind of compromise cladogram would be derived which represented the common features of all the family histories. To do this right, some math and computer programs could be used, as described by the authors of Cladistic Biogeography; for now, however, let us focus on the consequences of our cladograming, and not be distracted by the glamor of the process. So what can we say about our compromise tree? For a moment suppose the best of all worlds: a clear pattern arises, with various people, dogs, and starlings showing ancestral groups in Wyoming and Arizona, and sister groups in various other western states. With a little common sense, we might say that our Homo sapiens reflect a history of westward movement and that the dogs and house sparrows moved from Wyoming to the other states with the humans (we probably had to throw out a couple of native American cladograms that would have confused the obvious "signal"). But wait! Parenti and Humphries tell us that dispersal is not an explanation for biogeographical patterns. Since any species can disperse according to its own unknowable caprice, we had better assume that the distributions of all organisms are crafted by the same processes. In our case, humans and dogs and starlings might have been widespread across the west in large populations that were split by the uplift of the Rockies and further rifted by the opening of the Grand Canyon.

The case is not closed, however. According to Cladistic Biogeography, geology can only "illuminate" the patterns derived from area cladograms, but can never test them. Without confirmation from other sciences, we can only gain confidence in out pattern by throwing in more and more cladograms from diverse groups-the more agreement we find, the more assuredly we may speak of the history of the "biotas" of Wyoming, Arizona, and the other western states. Within this seemingly scientific iteration lies the fatal flaw of cladistic biogeography as presented by Parenti and Humphries. I described an oversimplification of the process of arriving at a compromise cladogram. In the analyses done in Cladistic Biogeography, all possible combinations of areas are considered for each organism, a process which can produce hundreds of trees. However, if one of the organisms in question, through a peculiarity of its history, presents only one possible cladogram, that organism will dictate the entire analysis. The possible trees for each organism are then searched for patterns that do not disagree with that one peculiar cladogram. How do we know that one organism it not a fluke, some kind of historical freak unrelated to all other members of the "biota"? We do not know any such thing. In fact, Parenti and Humphries forbid us from knowing any specific natural history, for, they say, such biological questions as age of arrival or dispersal ability are precisely what area cladograms are designed to test!

In the author's defense, it is possible that their method could generate one area cladogram that could then be confirmed by patterns from many other organisms. For example, they work their magic on a collection of distributions from the Atlantic and Mediterranean, and conclude that the Mediterranean biota is more closely related to far northern biotas than to mid-latitude Atlantic or Caribbean groups of organisms. However, I remain unconvinced that another method of pattern generation (perhaps even a random method) might not have produced an area cladogram that could have been similarly confirmed by dozens of different examples from the same waters. Simply put, the biodiversity is immense, and even the devil can quote scripture for his own ends.

In "Cladistic Biogeography," Christopher J. Humphries and Lynne R. Parenti offer a detailed but easily digestible analysis of the significance that geographic distributions of species have with respect to the history of those species and the geography that they inhabit. Despite the seeming harmlessness of the subject, the book touches upon very controversial notions. Anyone even skimming it may feel overcome by an avalanche of evidence that modern geological theories need some revising in order to account for a plethora of biogeographical facts.

The main thesis of cladistic biogeography is perhaps best described with an example. Imagine that several different species (involving plants, fish, insects, and animals) are restricted to two particular areas in South America that are separated by the Andes mountains. According to cladistic biogeography (or at least according to Parenti's and Humphries' view of it), the most reasonable conclusion is that these trans-Andes species are older than the Andes--and that the formation of the Andes separated them. This seems a more rational explanation for the pattern than the idea that each species evolved on one side of the Andes chain--and then each species managed to cross the Andes via various hypothetical, species-dependent methods of dispersal.

In general, the fundamental theory of cladistic biogeography can be stated as follows: If many different species are restricted to the same geologically separated areas (divided, for example, by oceans or mountains) then a single, general cause (e.g., a geological event) is a more preferable explanation for this pattern than a series of unfalsifiable theories of dispersal across the geological divide, with each dispersal theory designed for each organism. Despite the seeming obviousness of this argument, many geologists, ecologists, and other scientists are extremely critical of such biogeographical analyses because it often conflicts with current geological theories.

Perhaps, this explains the somewhat reaching criticism of Amazon-customer critic, Matthew L. Forister, who not only panned the book, "Cladistic Biogeography" but the entire science itself. (Forister also wrote a negative review of "Panbiogeography : Tracking the History of Life--Oxford Biogeography Series No 11" by Grehan, Heads, and Craw.) In his review of the Parenti and Humphries book, Forister dismisses cladistic biogeography because of its insufficiency when applied to the geographic distribution of his cousins throughout the United States. According to Forister, this would lead cladistic biogeographers to conclude that the extended Forister family "were split by the uplift of the Rockies and further rifted by the opening of the Grand Canyon." Obviously, Parenti and Humphries do not extend their arguments to families of humans who have access to modern transportation. And so Forister's criticism overlooks the elemental fact that the plants, worms, frogs, snakes, trees, fresh-water fish and other organisms that are the real subject of "Cladistic Biogeography" have a difficult time booking flights across mountains and are notoriously bad drivers.

As Parenti and Humphries point out, this is not the first time that biogeographical evidence conflicted with contemporary geological theory. In the early part of the 20th century, much of the evidence that Alfred Wegener used to support the theory of continental drift was biogeographical. Trans-Atlantic biogeographical patterns (as well as certain geological factors) suggested to Wegener that South America was at one time attached to Africa, while North America was connected to Europe. Geologists and others maintained that continents were always fixed and explained these patterns via various dispersal hypotheses for all of the species found on both sides of the Atlantic. These dispersal hypotheses involved cross-ocean land bridges, long-distance island hopping schemes, hitching rides on flotsam, etc. Wegener's hypothesis has now become the conventional view. So, in this instance at least, the seminal principle of cladistic biogeography was validated while all the seemingly fantastic methods of dispersal across the Atlantic have been rejected.

Interestingly, a more significant biogeographical pattern can be found across the Pacific. Cladistic biogeography suggests that some sort of general geological explanation for the distributions, like a past Asian/American and Australian/South-American juxtaposition, is required. Today this view is largely ignored by people who are not biogeographers--and, once again, popular explanations of the trans-Pacific patterns encompass a group of independent dispersal hypotheses that include cross-ocean land bridges, long-distance island hopping schemes, the hitching of rides on flotsam, etc.

"Cladistic Biogeography" is a great step forward in trying to make sense of all the biogeographic data available to us today. It is an effort toward the development of rational, general principles for analyzing the geographic distribution of species, which hopefully will help geologists, ecologists, and biologists avoid the same mistakes that their counterparts made in the not-too-distant past regarding the very same subject.

--Dennis McCarthy

I find this book not that helpful especially for medical student as it's way of presenation is not appropriate and not easy..also it's language is difficult... I find this book boring ..it doesn't draw your attention and concentration

good book with nice illustrations, but lacks in simplicity.

I am a consultant with the largest supply chain practice in the world, and I await the release of new texts on supply chain content with great interest. Based on the reputation of Gene Tyndall and a colleauge's personal recommendation, I purchased "Supercharging" with this same great enthusiasm. After finishing the book, however, my opinion is that its a grand testament to the hypebole, unsubstantiated claims and lack of professional rigor that so often gives consultants a bad name. The book seriously drops the ball in several areas.

First, I have read enough books, including this one, that promise enhanced supply chain management will directly improve share price; despite "Supercharging" positioning this as the central tenant of their argument, I am still waiting for valid proof. Anecdotes and self-serving case studies, which this book has in extreme abundance, will not suffice.

If you conduct a literature seach of academic databases you can find dozens of rigorous, statistically valid studies that attempt to isolate and identify the primary correlative variable(s) to a firm's share price. To my knowledge, the following variables have been examined: EVA generation, marketing capabilities, traditional accounting measures, change in EPS, product/process quality performance and even supply chain management. Conclusions from all these studies which I have read are typically mixed, but none of them claim to have found the "magic bullet;" Tyndall et. al. not only claim to have found the magic bullet, but they ask us to swallow this significant statement based solely on the collective experience of the authors. As they say, we believe God, all others must bring data.

For example, I would like the authors to provide the source data for a figure early in the book which shows a straight-line, linear relationship between a firm's "instrinsic" stock price and its working capital investment rate. So my conclusion is that by simply increasing working capital turnover, any firm can boost their market capitalization by several billion dollars. I would ask the authors to look at Sara Lee Corp. (NYSE: SLE), which dramatically improved its working efficiency in the recent past when it shed its manufacturing assets and became a "shell" corporation. There was a short-lived share price jump, which was simply a favorable reaction from The Street, which has long-since disappeared.

The lengthy point which I am trying to make is that for every self-serving case example the authors have dredged up, I can serve up one which is equally contradictory. I feel they are treading on complex ground with heavy boots and stepping on all kinds of land mines.

Second, this book is a great witch's brew of the latest supply chain programs and trends: integrated planning, customer-centric logistics, collaboration, etc. I am very uncomfortable with knowledgeable supply chain consultants presenting laundry lists of what the authors call "proven and common sense" ideas to readers with no discriminatory or categorical framework to support the ideas. For example, its very easy to claim that eProcurement is a great approach for gaining operational excellence. What this book does not do, and what is much harder to do, is to help a company decide what will give them a defensible, strategic advantage in thier supply chain. Maybe its not eProcurement, but a strategicu sourcing project to stabilize and capture sources of supply. Maybe its a supplier rationalization and management project to cut transaction and ordering costs. The point is, the approach used by the authors is analogous to giving an excited teenager his first new hunting rifle with no instructions: you know he's probably going to kill something, we're just not sure if its a deer or the neighbor's dog.

Last, this is just too much of a feel-good book for me. I felt like I was slowly being suffocated by all the consulting-ease, jargon and glittering generalities that pervade the book. Remember, I am a supply chain consultant that truly believes most all companies have significant untapped operational and financial improvement opportunities in their supply chains. I just feel that its the consultant's duty to temper his/her beliefs with (valid!) empirical data, rigorous approaches and a value-adding framework to discuss all of these new ideas.

I would never recommend this book to anyone. If you are supply chain beginner I would recommend purchasing one of the college texts which contain structured content on supply chain fundamentals. Don't allow this book to put stars in your eyes or make you skip all the good supply chain details that already exist in more basic texts.

If you are a supply chain professional, I recommend you also skip this book and search for texts that focus on your particular area of specialization. Don't believe the hype, and if you do, don't blame me just because I am a consultant.

Supercharging Supply-Chains is aimed at providing senior executives with an overview of the issues, and an approach to achieving operational excellence through the supply chain.

Highlights of the chapters include:

* Linking operational performance to shareholder value- greater free cashflow & market capitalization , operations as the bridge connecting strategy & shareholder value, key principles for operational excellence (e.g. differentiated supply-chain strategy, organize along processes, collaborate with customers & suppliers, invest in IT, people & expertise, manage by product/channel, outsource elements, think globally, build regionally, operate locally, and execute through focus, measurement & empowerment).

* Operations issues- business overview (develop, plan, buy, make, move, sell, market, and finance), only 4 organization structures, key metrics (EMV, share price, return on net assets, net profits after tax), 3 requirements for competitiveness (structure, measures & rapidity), 12 key imperatives (flexibility, plan & measure, structure logistics, leanness, information optimization, unequal customer treatment, operate globally, virtuality & collaborative management, e-commerce, leverage people, operationalize new product introductions, mass-customize & postpone), and dashboard performance measures.

* Demand and supply planning- 8 key tenets (high-level accountability, combine demand & supply planning, eliminate impact of product forecast, create a common language & focus on commonality, treat customers unequally, plan for spares & returns, replace inventory with information & analysis, and focus on deployment transparency).

* Sales- 4 key steps (segment markets & product groups, identify key value points by customer, identify consolidation opportunities around the customer, and identify & create common processes & systems around the customer).

* Sourcing & suppliers- 10 principles (extend chain towards suppliers, organize right people effectively, develop commodity teams, practice global sourcing & supplier management, focus on total costs, simplify, let suppliers manage (vendor-managed inventories, consortium buying, or outsourcing), leverage IT and e-commerce, enhance sourcing automation, partner smart), and 6 basic IT areas (tactical planning & support, core transaction processing, EDI/web, imaging/forms automation/bar-coding, automated purchase orders, and integration with suppliers' IT).

* Advanced logistics- reducing capital expenditures by improving use of fixed assets (rationalize distribution networks, outsource select processes, explore shared facilities, optimize use of equipment, and understand tax implications of chain) and reduce working capital by minimizing inventories (consolidate warehouses, use in-transit warehousing, replace inventories with information, reduce distribution cycle time, and implement demand/supply planning & management).

* Product introductions- 6 tenets- link PIP to supply/demand planning, concurrent/codevelopment, design with commonality, better business case, and world-class teams.

* Supply chain project management- ensure value, manage risk, use method, and use iterative approach.

* Summary findings from a basic supply chain survey study.

Strengths include: the timeliness and interest of the subject; the concise content-rich style; good use of appropriate & attractive sidebars, figures, and tables; mostly high-quality content; and good consistent chapter structure including summary and "questions for the managers".

On the negative side are: the occasional typos, errors & omissions; inconsistency & lack of definition of acronyms; poor supporting materials & references; some throwaway (non-value-add) content; re-labeling of older established technologies as current & innovative (e.g. EDI); and a "linear-generic" rather than "thorough" treatment of the subject (i.e. little option of tools for each stage). 'Supercharging' sometimes felt like a (good) sales document or lightly-referenced literature review, without enough guidance for you to directly use the material without (Ernst & Young) consulting support.

Overall, supercharging supply chains is a good starting discussion point on contemporary supply-chain practice. Use with a deeper operations text like Slack or Wild (with wide, referenced, rigorous toolsets), as well as supply-chain vendor specifics (standards/professional organisations, tools, and methodologies) to actually achieve business change. Clients beware- extracts from Supercharging charts and tables could be used by unscrupulous consultants to sell supply-chain engagements!

And for the author to come onto this site to defend his malodorous slapped together quickie bio is contemptible. Heard, the author, "takes offense" and makes claims of having spoken extensively with mssrs. Woo and Chow, and yet these "talks" are not included in the book. All we get are the same story beats featured in mainstream magazines such as People and Time. Anyone who buys this odious ripoff will, in fact, receive nothing but quotes featured in articles posted on www.chowyunfat.com, or www.johnwoo.com, or bullet in the web or any number of other sites available by typing the words 'John Woo' into any search engine. Available for free, mind you. Christopher Heard, unfortunately, is a hack who did not put in the necessary legwork, and who now feels the need to attack his critics and defend his own deficiencies as a writer and "reporter." For all the "authoritative posturing," where is the interview with Kenneth Tsang, who has starred in almost every post ABT Woo work (including Chow's American debut The Replacement Killers)? the detailed examination of Woo's work (how the two-gun stance was swiped specifically from The Shootist and Taxi Driver)? details about his gun-happy works before 1986's A Better Tomorrow? Why didn't Ti Lung become Woo's leading man? why Chow? and who is Ti Lung anyway? and what about the many other projects Woo was supposed to do once he got to America? Band of Assassins? Full Circle? Tears of the Sun? Metal Machine? the sequel to Hard Boiled? Who wrote these? How did they come to Woo's attention? Christoper Heard doesn't know any of this because he didn't know what questions to ask Woo (or Chow). He focused solely on the well known movies, as opposed to the person behind the typewriter and camera. Where was the discussion about how Woo (and later Chow's) work suffered once they reached America? Why is this happening? These answers are not in this "book." This slapped together quickie's contents can be found, free of charge, on the aforementioned sites, where ironically, amateur webmasters offer more answers than this so-called biography. Don't bother with Heard's hackwork. He didn't bother trying to write a real book; he slapped other peoples' quotes together and called it his own work. Don't bother buying it. A better book has yet to be written on John Woo.

This book, though very informative, is taken from so many other already available sources that it reads more like some student's book report. The most inaccurate passage being that Jeff in "The Killer" wears white gloves like Jeff in "Le Samourai". I own "The Killer" and do not remember seeing him wearing gloves. Also, Christopher Heard claims that some scenes from "The Killer" match "Le Samourai" shot for shot. That is completely untrue. Obviously Mr. Heard has not done his homework and thoroughly researched his subject matter. All in all, it is an interesting read if you are unfamiliar from where some of the material is plagerized.

Think of this book as a really extensive magazine article. If you're looking for some behind-the-scenes information on the second half of John Woo's career, look no further. However, if you're a film student looking for a complete in-depth critique of John Woo as an artist and director from both a technical and biographical perspective, this book will leave you a little hungry.

This collection is a travesty indeed. Great poems no doubt, but abysmally read. Furthermore they should have put all the introductions together separate and apart from the poems. It's nice to hear intros the first time around. But who wants to hear the intros everytime you listen to the poems? Sometimes I want to hear just a stream of poetry without any interuptions and this format makes that impossible. It's incredible that such a great concept could be so terribly executed.

I could not get this back to the store for a refund quickly enough. While the poem selection is great and the poem introductions are narrated well, the choice to use "modern poets" as the readers made this compilation utterly unlistenable. The only one that I found acceptable was Anthony Hect--the others were notably bad. In particular, I found Jorie Graham's "readings" to be abysmal. She reads each poem as if it were simply a string of unconnected words, giving equal stress to each, with halting pauses between them, never breaking out of a drowsy monotone. Other readers were not much better.

There are three major flaws in the readings:

1) The readers are no better than the average untrained person, and often much worse. (You've just got to hear them for yourself to appreciate how bad they are.)

2) Successive poems by the same poet are read by different "readers." It's jarring to hear 3 or 4 poems from Poet X, each in a wildly different voice.

3) No regard is given to matching the sex of the poet and reader. In general, it is really annoying to hear your favorite poet read by the wrong sex. In particular, making this mistake on "gender specific" poems (like having a woman read Poe's "Annabel Lee") is unforgivable.

Why is this all so upsetting? Because it is practically impossible to find poetry collections on CD, making this a serious waste of limited resources. If you are looking for a good collection on CD, buy "81 Famous Poems CD" by Audio Partners (ISBN 0-945353-82-0). It's a good collection on two CDs and is read by professionals: Alexander Scourby, Bramwell Fletcher, and Nancy Wickwire. In the meantime, we can only hope that the producers of this collection will eventually come to their senses and re-record the poems with the services of trained professionals.

If you are prepping for the GRE in literature or are trying to gain a basic understanding of literary periods and poets, this audio-collection is a must. It features a brief introduction about each poet's life. It also includes a brief introduction about the theme of each poem. The fact that you have to listen to these introductions before listening to the poem inculcate the poem and aids retention. If literature has turned into a cumbersome and overwhelming task, this collection will not only provide you with a sense of direction but will also make literature far more pleasurable.

I used this text in my Western Civ course. While it is solid in historical content, it averages at least one typo per page. Obviously it was never even spellchecked. I tried to ignore the first hundred or so but they just keep on coming. Inexcusable.