This is a spectacularly interesting journal. Cook was an odd sort, that's for sure. But a genius? I'd certainly say so after reading his often-daily account of his activities. Really neat book.

This well prepared abridged edition of Captain James Cook's journals is a specialized book of interest to people studying the exploration of the Pacific and/or the British Navy of that time period. Other people might find sections of it dry reading. The book is recommended for oceanography students as the 17th century voyages of exploration formed the basis for later oceanographic cruises.

Cook's voyages carried scientific personnel of that time period, many of whom died from the harsh conditions along with members of the crews. In addition to bad weather, there were diseases and hostile natives (including cannibals). Extensive charting was carried out and, on the second voyage, the Board of Longitude supplied Cook with Larcum Kendall's copy of John Harrison's H4 watch for determining longitude. Observations were made of prevailing winds, currents, temperature, and other things of scientific interest.

Natives throughout the Pacific would go to great lengths to obtain iron, expecially axes, even prostituting their wives and daughters (willing or not). Natives would attempt to steal items, if they could, leading to numerous confrontations including one in which a boat crew of the Adventure (the consort ship of the second voyage) were killed and eaten by the Maori natives of New Zealand.

Cook's journal ended several weeks before his death. The editor fills in details from journals of other people who were on the voyage, and speculates on the reason he was killed by the natives in Hawaii.

The book includes maps of Cook's routes on his voyages. It also has an index listing the names of the various individuals mentioned, with an indication of their positions on the voyages or their other positions if they were not active participants.

This re-issue of the Beaglehole edition of the Cook journals attests to the enduring importance of Cook as the exemplar navigator and Beaglehole as his nautical Boswell.

The writing is elegant and subtle and the fascination of the recital enduring.

Best there is no other!

This collection of studies is, unfortunately, not light reading (especially for those lacking a solid grounding in statistical methods). Nor, like many of the pro-gun tracts, do the studies included set out clear and definitive conclusions.

What it does is present a number of studies and articles by those scholars who the NRA would label as "gun grabbers" offering evidence that challenges many of the more widely disseminated pro-gun arguments and pseudo-scientific works of authors like John Lott.

For example, while John Donohue's article presents a rather compelling case that Lott's conclusion (summed up as "More Guns, Less Crime") is deeply flawed he notes:

"If one had previously been inclined to believe the Lott and Mustard results, one might now conclude that the statistical evidence that crime will rise when a shall-issue law is passed is at least as compelling as the prior evidence that was amassed to show it would fall. However, there are still enough anomoliesin the data that warrent caution."

That's quite different from Lott's certitude in "More Guns, Less Crime" and, given the evidence, it is Lott's certitude that should be called into question, even before the conclusions about which he is so certain.

One other example merits particular note. That study, by Steven Raphael and Jens Ludwig, challanges the effectiveness of one program that is the "darling" of both the NRA *and* the Brady Campaign -- Richmond's Project Exile. The study concludes that the drop is actually something more akin to "regression to the mean" -- where the implementation followed a particurly steep risee in homicides and the subsequent drop is more attributable to the return to the "normal" rates than the increased focus itself. What the study doesn't mention is that, in 1997 (the base year used in hyping the program's success), homicide rates in Richmond had risen so steeply (contrary to other Virginia metropolitan areas) that Richmond's homicide rate exceeded Washington, DC's.

It many ways, it's a shame that the book isn't written for a wider audience, because the gun debate is one where the loudest and most self-certain voices carry more weight among the public than the most reasoned ones.

Frank and Cook's book, The Winner Take All Society, forces us to reconsider our position on the inherent good of the free market in light of newly emerging forms of destructive, albeit free, competition and growing income inequality. Written in the vein of a thinly veiled rebuke of the moral and social decline of the American economy and society, the book appears to focus too much on specific individuals, and merely states a few implications for society as a whole. In my mind, what the authors posit as the verities for individuals and corporations under a winner take all banner just as readily applies to the nation and ultimately, the world. Taking their arguments one step further, advances in high technology, such as the internet and telecommunications, have increased productivity, transformed labor markets all over the world, and created uniform standards for goods and services that can now be consumed anywhere in the world. In effect, technology has made the world a similar, smaller place. Thus, what is true economically in America now is most likely true elsewhere, though cultural differences still remain.

While winner take all markets can, with the aid of technology, make the goods and services of the few available to everyone in the world, they also have many negative consequences. Winner take all markets magnify the consequences of first mover advantages, making it difficult, if not impossible, for those late to the competition, be they corporations or countries, to establish themselves. Winner take all markets continue to increase the disparity between wealthy, industrialized countries of the North and the impoverished, besieged economies of the South. Winner take all markets continuously lure our most talented individuals into socially unproductive and often individually and socially destructive tasks. Many of the world's economies already invest too little for the future, be they nations struggling to develop (such as those on the African continent), or fully industrialized nations (such as the United States), and the growth of winner take all markets has encouraged wasteful patterns of investment and consumption. Finally, winner take all markets have the proven ability to undermine what is in the best interests of our culture and society, and given the terrifying ability of winner-take-all markets to rigidly engender and enforce conformity, standardization, and one-upmanship, this growing phenomenon can only be counter-productive and disruptive to the efforts of indigenous peoples to maintain and preserve their fragile and threatened cultures.

Quite literally, in winner-take-all competitions, the rules really are there are no rules. As such, these competitions lead people to do very crazy things. When large payoffs are at stake and there is a very real certainty of the loser(s) getting absolutely nothing for their effort, contestants have powerful incentives to spend money to enhance their chances of winning, and have little or no moral compunction to exercise restraint and sensibility in their behavior. This is especially the case where unfettered, free competition is the rule and covenants and/or regulations to ensure orderly, equitable markets are not the norm.

Thus, there seems to be an inverse, negative relationship between investment in these all or nothing competitions and their (social) value to the larger group. As the pace of investment, size of the investment and the risk associated with the investment in the winner take all competition increases, the social and economic value of the competition steadily decreases. While these investments look justifiable from the individual's or nation's standpoint, especially if there is a considerable chance that the individual stands to win, and win big, the concomitant dueling that these investments fuel almost always appears excessive from the standpoint of the society. As such, these all-or nothing competitions have led to a plethora of economic versions of military arms races between individuals, corporations and nations.

Although one could surmise much of the content from experience and simple common sense, I generally found the book to be a straightforward and thought-provoking read. Yet, many of the examples demonstrating the extent to which such competitions have infiltrated all aspects of our economic life, as well as the often ridiculous, comical and increasingly desperate attempts by individuals to thrive in these all-or-nothing environments, profoundly scared and disturbed me. The authors could have done away with the last chapter, a rehashing of the same old remedies to the problem, and written a much better ending which could have summarized the main points of the book and discussed their implications, going forward, for all participants in the new global economy.

In conclusion, these all-or-nothing competitions have steadily become 'the only game in town'. Yet, I seriously doubt that these dangerous economic games are really worth playing.

This book would make a fantastic 30 page essay. It covers very important ideas and backs them up with analysis and examples. But then it starts to repeat itself, and bring out too many examples without new ideas.

The basic premise of this book is that the U.S. has too many markets where the "star" or top performer gets a large percentage of the proceeds. Examples are the sports market, the movie star market and the publishing market; The reasons given are;

-Technology. National distribution channels such as network television make it easier for an individual to penetrate the market. For example, at one time villages and towns had their own musicians. Now a singer can make a CD and sell it nationally.

-Falling transportation and tariff costs. Goods have gotten lighter. It is easier to send computer discs all over the world than books. CD's are lighter than phonograph records

-- Mental shelf space constraints. We have a limit to the number of items we can keep in our head..."the amount of information we can actually use is thus a declining fraction of the total information available."

-Weakening of regulations and civil society. At one time, informal and formal rules limited the winner take all markets. Now, like free agents in baseball, the top performers have the leverage to demand high prices.

-Self-reinforcing processes. This is another way of saying "success begets success." For example, a sales person does well and gets bigger customers. A person does well and the word of mouth referral causes them to saturate the market. This virtuous cycle increases the income and power of top performers.

The author argues that winner take all markets are not good for society. People are unrealistically optimistic about their own chances of winning "a prize." Thus they are siphoned off from other productive endeavors.

This book was helpful to me in understanding today's economy and job market. If anything, the winners are doing better than ever today, long after the book was published. Just take a look at the latest article on CEO salaries.

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...is absolute and unremitting damnation whenever there's a sociopolitical topic under consideration. In thirty years of reading (and citing) NEJM, I've found that there is no correlation whatsoever between the standards of scientific rigor with which they peer-review their clinical articles for factual accuracy and the politically-charged "public policy" stuff they publish when the editorial officers of the Massachusetts Medical Society have an axe to grind. Dr. McDowell's 2001 review of this book (quoted in its entirety on this Web site in order to extoll Cook and Ludwig's bogus-from-the-premises-up calculation of estimated costs associated with "firearms misuse") is a perfect example of the marshmallow gooiness of the NEJM's institutional excuse for intellectual rigor whenever the subject of individual autonomy comes under discussion.

By the standards of evidence-based medicine, the analysis upon which this book is predicated *CANNOT* be relied upon as a tool for the accurate evaluation of violence- or accident-related trauma associated with firearms. That same would hold true if Cook and Ludwig were looking at injuries and deaths associated with motor vehicles, toys, pharmaceuticals, power tools, agricultural equipment, or sports activities, and if there were a similar study -- using precisely this kind of analysis -- published on misadventures involving any of these other elements of modern life, the editors of NEJM would sandblast the authors with scathing sarcasm.

But because this book is about firearms, and because the Massachusetts Medical Society is collectively incapable of intellectual honesty in their continuing effort to restrict the rights of people to think and act for themselves, Dr. McDowall's review demonstrates precisely how deeply into blatant deceit the NEJM will shamelessly descend.

This book is bilge, but I encourage its purchase (along with Bellesiles' even more disgraceful and completely discredited ARMING AMERICA: THE ORIGINS OF A NATIONAL GUN CULTURE) as absolutely essential additions to the library of every defender of individual rights. Such works are powerfully demonstrative of the unspeakable dishonesty of the wretched neurotics who have long projected their unjustifiable terrors into the statute books and courtrooms of America in their campaign to secure a specious "safety" by reducing every law-abiding citizen to the status of a disarmed and helpless victim.

This book is obviously strongly on our side, but unfortunately it is not going to provide us with serious evidence. Suppose someone challenges me on how they got their $100 billion estimate of the costs of guns. Will I be taken seriously if I tell them that the book relies on one public survey question in one survey? If I do use this number, where does that leave me in arguing with gun nuts that cite these wacky surveys showing that guns are used defensively 2.5 million times a year? So they have 16 surveys. I don't believe any of them, but what do I say when they say I only use a survey to measure the costs, why not also the benefits? What if the gun nut morons point out that the estimates of benefits from the surveys are greater than our estimated costs? The one paragraph that Cook and Ludwig have on defensive gun uses being silly could just as well be used against their reliance on a survey. I want to use the figures here, but could one of the people on our side write a review saying how I could respond to these concerns. Absent that this book risks making us look rather silly and hypocritical.

Very, very helpful and well researched. If our elected officials would only realize what the real costs of gun violence, gun suicide and gun crime are! It is time to regulate firearms like any other consumer product!