This book was so informative. It detail what the effects of diabetes are and how to adapt your life so that this very treatable disease will not overtake you. The writer of this book are the leading expert for Harvard Medical school and a hsuband of a diabetic.

They discuss diet, what to expect from doctor,monitors, medication, diet, complications and what to expect if you do and don't take care of yourself.

I suggest this book for anyone who deals with diabetes on a regular basis or wants to find out more. This book si great for both type I and Type II diabetics.

Ignorance of diabetes is not bliss, this book can scare you at first if you are just dignosed, but the information in this book will help you find the courage to find a good doctor ! and control this disease.

This is the first book on diabetes I have read since I was diginosed with diabetes. It is a great reference book with a philosphy that diabetes is to be controled by you and not you by it. It covers all types of diabetes, treatment, insulin, diet, exercise, complication, pregnecy, and how to deal with your new cronic disease so that one can live a full life.

I recomend this book for all diabetics because of the source, the ease of understanding, and the professionalism of its approach as well as it has tons of useful information. E. J. Boehm

This book is a fantastic introduction to 20th century composition techniques. It doesn't really get into too much depth on any one subject but I see this book as being a great place to begin if your interested in that kind of composing. Subjects covered include: Twelve-Tone Processes, Pointillism, Polytonality, Clusters, Microtones, Indeterminancy, Minimalization, Antimusic and much more. The writing style, ilistrations and assignments make this book very accessable to people who have no previous experience in 20th century composition techniques.

The growing skill, insight, tenderness & compassion of this lovely poet are abundantly evident in this collection. Everything radiates out of his sense of self within his family, & he extends that care & committment to the family of humankind. He is a scholar, but also a man who loves, works with his hands & still looks at the sky with wonderment.

Bob Rixon, WFMU-FM, Jersey City

...you will find part of your story in this book. A second reading may be required to appreciate its sociological insights. My primary satisfaction in first reading it was actually hearing about others who've had experiences similar to what have been the most defining yet harshly individuating and closely guarded experiences of my life. Especially poignant were the first realizations of serious mental illness, but the ongoing survival stories were important as well. As many stories as were outlined, I was still left wanting more. ...

In _Burden of Sympathy_, sociolgist David A. Karp presents a well-articulated view of how people today are trying to cope with mentall illness in their families.

However, it's important to note that the mental health system generally provides little help for *families* of the mentally ill, so the many people Karp interviews are very much trying to learn to cope. Therefore, this is not the book to read if you're looking for guidance. It is, however, a revealing picture of what it means to have mental illness in one's family today.

For example, this book's focus in on the caregiver and his/her relationship to the patient. Almost no one is prepared for the personal, spiritual, moral and emotional challenges (not to mention financial) that seem to burst on you when someone you love has a mental illness. The people in _Burden of Sympathy_ have not gone the whole journey, and this is particularly reflected in one mother's account. She and her husband are not able to fully acknowledge their son's illness until he cruelly -- and possibly life-threateningly -- attacks his brother. The mother expresses concern that because she is completely enveloped in caring for her ill son, that she's failing her other children.

The effect of mental illness on families is almost a system in itself, and due to the focus on caregiver-patient in this book, that system is not illuminated. Children who do not play a caregiving role are also profoundly affected and challenged, and have needs of their own that often are not met -- with consequences casting a long shadow over the rest of their lives. I hope David Karp will explore this issue in future books.

In addition, many of the other inteviewees are also completely enveloped in the mentally ill relative -- with hard consequences for their other relationships and lives. This, in my opinion, is where we are most challenged and most ill-equipped to deal with mental illness in our families. How do you get to acceptance? How do you distinguish your needs from theirs? How do you maintain that balance? How do you embrace the "4th C" (detailed in this book) of "All I can do is cope with it [the situation]"?

_Burden of Sympathy_ is a beautifully drawn picture of how caregivers attempt to cope. This book won't offer guidance in coping, but will offer you the solace of knowing you're not alone.

To write this book Karp, a sociologist, performed three-years' worth of in-depth interviewing of family members of mentally ill patients and attended support groups among these family members at McLean's Hospital in Belmont, MA. He also read extensively on mental illness and living with mental illness, mostly from sociological literature and some from medical books and a few medical journal articles. When I first looked at the book at the library, I noticed the chapter called "The Four C's." Looking at this chapter was what caused me to take the book home. I ended up reading almost the entire book carefully.

Throughout the book, Karp discusses and quotes 60 caregivers (by "caregivers," I mean someone with a close relative with mental illness) talking about their relatives and about their own feelings, always focusing on the caregivers' reactions to the events surrounding the illnesses. Karp's main concern is with the obligation family members feel toward their mentally ill relative(s) and with how these family members cope with fulfilling their obligations toward the ill person(s) while trying to live their own lives. One theme that reappears often is that many mentally ill persons refuse to acknowledge their illness at one level or another, thus making their familial caregiver's role more difficult. This includes elderly parents who refuse to get help as well as young spouses with manic episodes who place blame on their healthy spouses. Another theme is the evolution of family caregiver emotions, from those of surprise and pain and hope at first to resentment and even severing of relations in some cases.

Karp notes that parental care and obligation is the strongest of the familial ties with the mentally ill. He also covers numerous siblings, spouses, and children of people with mental illness. Some of the interviewees have both a parent and a sibling with an illness; some of these people are living with the fear of suffering the development of the illness themselves. Many wrestle with depression, seemingly as a result of their problems with their sick relative.

Most of the patients related to Karp's interviewees have depression, mania, schizophrenia, or some combination such as bipolar disorder or schizoaffective disease. Most or all have had hospitalizations. Karp manages to cover a wide range of family relationship and ages with most of the concepts he introduces, thus emphasizing the similarities among those involved with mental illness in the family. The level of illness discussed is generally major.

This book is not for the faint of heart. It is powerful and brutally honest, with no happy ending or false hopes. Another strong theme in this book that is visited over and over again is the chronicity and incurability of much mental illness. Quote after quote from the family members discusses early hopes of cure that are dashed by later episodes of illness, medications that work for a while and then stop working or never work at all or cost too much, and hospitalizations that accomplish little besides crisis intervention. At the beginning of each support group meeting Karp attended, the members of the group recited the four C's in unison: "I didn't cause it. I can't cure it. I can't control it. All I can do is cope with it." This is probably the most important part of the book for family members of mentally ill persons. Karp discusses the four C's extensively, claiming that they unite the realms of "...science, therapy, and spirituality." He discusses cause, cure, and control separately. The lack of a section on coping at this juncture is curious; it may imply that the entire book is about coping or that Karp doesn't feel equipped to offer coping advice.

Reading this book was the closest experience I have had to attending a support group of family caregivers for mentally ill persons. As I read the chapter about the four C's, I could feel my own relationship with the four C's. Although I tried hard to consider myself an outsider, I was surprised at how many of the issues addressed in the book are ones that I am familiar with. Reading this book, I felt like part of a group that I would rather not be part of. Because of these feelings, I think other people with mentally ill family members might get something out of this book, but I am not sure a psychiatrist would be comfortable recommending the book.

Along with the four C's, Karp and his interviewees discuss a poignant group of problems that family caregivers face, such as the balance between allowing a person with mental illness to be independent and keeping him or her safe but dependent. Karp claims that, for the family caregivers, too much control results in being controlled by the illness. He acknowledges, however, that giving up control is not simple, as it may result in severe consequences for the patient, which can then tax the family.

The last chapter containing caregiver quotes is called, "Surviving the System." This section covers the family members' experiences with hospitalization, including the difficulties of getting a patient hospitalized sometimes when it is needed as well as insufficient care often encountered during hospitalization. A section is devoted to discussion of psychiatrists. Although most of it is not complimentary, Karp is careful to include some praise of psychiatrists.

Karp concludes with a sociological perspective on mental illness, somewhat summarily. The only optimistic aspect of this book is in the form of Karp admitting that he has heard of a few success stories. He mentions a few people who seem to have conquered these usually devastating mental illnesses, and he includes successes where he finds them. The book is not pessimistic, either. It is alive with the voices of people who are grappling with mental illness in a loved one. The book offers company and understanding, if not solutions, for family members of mentally ill people.

Rather than presenting just another account of the infamous Cope-Marsh "fossil war," Wallace has placed the conflict in a journalistic context, exploring the role New York Herald editor/huckster James Gordon Bennett played in the animosity between the two great paleontologists. A wonderfully detailed and readable book, with only a very small number of minor scientific errors to detract from its value. This probably won't be remembered as the definitive work on the subject, but it's a good place to start.

This marvelous volume by David Rains Wallace is a balanced, thorough, and insightful recounting of the greatest, most needless, and most tragic scientific conflict in American history: the Cope-Marsh feud. I say "balanced" because most writers, especially those with an environmentalist/naturalist bent like Wallace, have tended to side with Othniel C. Marsh over Edward D. Cope. The reason isn't hard to find. Cope's feud with Marsh eventually [pulled] into the controversy John Wesley Powell, a major benefactor to Marsh and impediment to Cope, and occasioned Powell's fall from power. Environmentalists rightly consider this a tragedy, because perhaps no one in American history possessed the depth of understanding about the geological and geographical logic of the entire area west of the hundredth meridian than Powell. Had Powell remained in power longer, perhaps many of the great tragedies associated with the development of the American West could have been avoided. Most other evaluators of the feud tend to be biographers of either Cope or Marsh, and those side with their subject. But Wallace is able to look beyond the effect the Cope-Marsh feud's effect on Powell and beyond partisan loyalty to any single participant to achieve a fair evaluation of each.

Wallace begins with a biographical narrative of both Cope and Marsh, from their family origins and early interest in science, to their maturation as paleontologists and their initial encounters with one another, and on to their growing competition with one another and eventual implacable conflicts and feud. Wallace shows how this really was not primarily a scientific controversy, but a conflict between two very different personalities. Both men were exceedingly gifted, both immensely competitive, and both were extremely neurotic. Of the two, Cope emerges as the more sympathetic, if only because he strikes the reader as the more likable of the two. Marsh is less sympathetic because of the ruthless way he attempts to cut Cope off from all governmental support for his research, and the manner in which he attempts to keep Cope, who was probably the more gifted paleontologist, on the scientific periphery. In fact, Marsh comes across as a completely unlikable person; not even his closest acquaintances seem to have liked him. If Cope emerges as more congenial, he also comes across as more manic, more paranoid, and obsessed.

In the end, one is left with a feeling of disgust at both Marsh (especially Marsh) and Cope's massive stupidity in the entire conflict. Although they had some scientific disagreements, most of their antagonism was generated by who was able to get the most fossils, and the efforts of Marsh to cut Cope completely out of government funding. One is left with a sense of regret that the two great founders of American paleontology were unable to coordinate their efforts and be collaborators instead of competitors.

Anyone enjoying this book might also enjoy Deborah Cadbury's TERRIBLE LIZARD, which tells the story of the birth of paleontology in England at the beginning of the 19th century, a few decades before Cope and Marsh. Sadly, that book also tells the story of a needless feud, with Gideon Mantell taking the Cope role and Richard Owen the Marsh one. The two books make great companion volumes, and jointly make a magnificent introduction to 19th century paleontology.

Experiments in Musical Intelligence (1996) is actually a sequel to Cope's Computers and Musical Style, published in 1991. Both books together are, in the first place, a research report on and introduction to EMI and SARA, computer programs developed in LISP by David Cope for music composition. Whereas the 1991 publication concentrated on general aspects, such as the history of automated music, an introduction to LISP and general concepts for composition programs, the Experiments in Musical Intelligence elaborates more on the details of the algorithms used in EMI and SARA themselves. The most important contribution of Cope is EMI itself. After reading both Experiments in Musical Intelligence and the 1991 publication, one must conclude that Cope did a tremendous effort in the design and implementation of a complete set of tools for algorithmic composition. Whereas other tools for algorithmic composition, like Common Music, MAX or Symbolic Composer, are merely a set of tools, David Cope's EMI is a philosophy and a set of tools in one. Cope's philosophy is based on the Würfelspiel idea that composing music is mainly a matter of recombining musical phrases. EMI analyses existing scores and recombines the found elements into new compositions in accordance with the found style. The analysis has two main parts: (1) the analysis of musical phrases according to a Schenker-based hierarchy, and (2) a pattern-matching based analysis of so-called "signatures" (i.e. recurrent musical phrases, which seem to identify a composer's style). If a corpus of existing music is thus analysed, EMI provides a recombinatory algorithm, based on linguistic techniques (Augmented Transition Networks), recombining the analysed elements into a new composition. EMI, in short, is a style analysis and composition generation tool. In contrast with other algorithmic composition tools, Cope's EMI is data- or corpus-based instead of rule-based, which makes it a unique and promising tool for algorithmic composition, but also for the musicological analysis of musical styles. EMI seems to be a very powerful set of analysis tools for western-european classical music in any case, and maybe for other musical cultures as well. Cope has done an enormous effort to deal with all kinds of major and minor problems, like segmenting music into phrases, analysing tonal functions, analysing rhythm and meter correlations with tonal functions, and other problems one encounters when analysing a musical style. EMI is a repertoire of solutions to formal-analytical problems in the field of style analysis, and in this respect EMI is a major second step after Hiller and Isaacson's Experimental Music from 1959. The main 'discovery' of Cope is the concept of the 'signature': every corpus of works not only has general stylistic characteristics, but also some phrases that are used over and over again almost literally. Cope discovered that the recognizability of a style is significantly enhanced when these 'signatures' are used in their literal form now and then within a work. Although Cope did not prove his signature theory within scientific boundaries, he is at least providing musicology with a provable theory. When listening to the classical examples of EMI (Mozart sonatas, Beethoven sonata, Bach inventions, Rachmaninoff Suites), I could not suppress the idea that there was something missing. First I thought this was due to a cognition problem: the mere knowledge of the fact that Beethoven never composed this EMI-sonata already brings in a fundamental distrust towards the originality of the work. But even when one drops this historical consciousness, the sonatas and other EMI-imitations, although stylistically correct, lack a certain degree of originality. At first sight this seems to be due to the recombination idea: recombining existing elements does not particularly stimulate originality or surprises. But I think EMI can be enhanced very easily in such a way, that surprises are not excluded. The main point is that Cope restricts himself to the analysis of a stylistic coherent corpus (e.g. all Beethoven sonatas). It can easily be foreseen that this will always bring music with quite a predictable character, because they all stem from the same source. In reality, however, a composer never bases himself on his own music only, but mostly has a corpus of other works, other styles and musical elements that surpass the notion of a style and have a more general, cross-cultural basis, like melodic shapes, rhythmic patterns and retoric forms. The combination of corpus-based elements and context-based elements would enable a definition of the concept of 'surprise' or 'something-completely-different' as a stylistic element. If Cope would allow EMI to have not only a set of corpus-based elements, but also a set of generally applicable 'super-style' musical notions, I'm sure EMI will be able to surprise the listener with a really 'new' Beethoven sonata. It is important to stress that EMI is not only about new Beethoven sonatas. As a composition tool, EMI presupposes a style-conscious way of composition and a recombinant approach to musical form. In this respect EMI is more than a 'composition' generator; it has the potential to be a style generator. Although David Cope uses EMI to develop his own style, as he states in the conclusions of Experiments in Musical Intelligence, and is intrigued by the idea to prolong a style after the composer's death, I think the real futuristic potential and importance of EMI lies in the fact that it enables one to create style itself, to build an oeuvre of styles instead of compositions. As a book, Experiments in Musical Intelligence is not only a research report, but foremost a learning book for algorithmic composition techniques. The book contains introductions to pattern matching, programming in Object Oriented LISP (CLOS) and Augmented Transition Networks. Cope explains his algorithms clearly with many music examples which are very illustrative. Together with the complete code for EMI's subset SARA on the CD-ROM, Experiments in Musical Intelligence is a must for the education on algorithmic composition on graduate level. Regrettably the CD-ROM can only be run on a Apple Macintosh computer, disabling PC users unnecessarily, whereas most part of the CD is text, MIDI and sound which can be displayed and played on PCs as well as Macintoshes. It is also hoped that the more sophisticated algorithms of EMI, which are not part of SARA, will be available for research and compositional experiments in a next release.

David Cope's signifcant theories of musical creativity as recombination are advocated articulately and aptly demonstrated through his ground-breaking EMI software program. Descriptions of the process give an insight into the working process of this system which allows for thinking about the elements of music in different ways.

This book provides an excellent overview of what Cope has done as well as presents a scaled-down version of EMI, SARA, which allows any user to gain a feeling for the workings of the software.

This is significant research, and this is a book worth having for anybody interested in algorithmic composition as well as those who are interested in theories of musical creativity.

This book has excellent information about what children at each stage of development are likely to think and feel about the death of someone close to them. However, the suggested ways of dealing with those feelings were somewhat limited, and allowed little flexibility for differing family circumstances. For example, the book is extremely critical of ways religious families may choose to explain death to children, claiming that many religiously based explanations may lead a child to believe the person may be coming back someday. The book also asserts that a closed casket is the ultimate form of denial of the death, and that even young children should attend funerals. Many recommendations, like the three mentioned above, might or might not be right for a family trying to cope with a death. Overall a good resource for understanding a child's possible perceptions, but not so good for determining how to address them.

This is a clearly written book by a funeral director and psychologist. It provides helpful suggestions to parents and caregivers on how to inform children of death in many different situations. It respects the child's need to know what has happened in a way that is appropriate for his or her age. It discusses listening to children's thoughts and feelings and addressing common misperceptions. There is an excellent quick reference crisis section at the end of the book that clearly outlines various kinds of deaths, suggestions as to how to explain them to children in different age groups, and how to prepare them for what comes next. This is an excellent book to guide parents whose own grief may be interfering with their thinking about how to help their children. As a grief counselor at the Barr-Harris Children's Grief Center, I highly recommend it.

David Cope is well known for his attempts to induce computers to compose music in the style of various famous composers such as Bach and Mozart. Unsurprisingly, the compositions are not an unqualified success, but the account of the process presented in this book is interesting.

This book was not very helpful for me because it only described things I already knew and the tips it offered werent that many and werent that helpful.

This great book for adults with ADD. It offers some great tips. This is must for a newly diagnosed adult or an adult who supsects that he or she has ADD. The lay out of the book is also easy for people with ADD to follow...

ADD does not end with adulthood. For millions of adults throughout the world, in all types of careers, ADD is something they deal with on a daily basis. This book gives strategies for adults coping with ADD that are informative and easy to follow. I would highly recommend this to individuals and counselors alike.