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Chapters include silence, work, prayer, and the other components of monastic life. Clear, understandable rational for the benefits of the specific practices are given. A minor drawback is a lack of reference to the Rule of Benedict or Holy Scripture for the practice. However, the readability of the book makes up for this.
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The book's anecdotal content reflects the limitations of the sources from which they were drawn and have a decided bias toward lower-class, violent antisocials. Although a brief and rather superficial chapter discusses "successful" antisocials, the text constantly returns to the extreme and violent end of the scale.
Throughout the book, a tone of subtle condescension toward the lay-reader and the antisocial is detectable, albeit disguised in simple vernacular. When serial-killer Gacy responded to the author that he was filing their correspondences under "People Up to No Good", the author seems to find this a humorous anecdote which he rather smugly posits as an example of Gacy's pathology. Perhaps Gacy may have recognised that the author, like so many others, had intended to exploit him in order to produce a work that would be sold for financial reward and for personal benefits to career and reputation.
At the risk of seeming like another attempt to plead pity for criminals, Donald Black insists that these men be held responsible for their actions, and avoids placing blame on anyone but them for the destruction they seem to willfully cause. He discusses various causes for the disorder (ie: genetics, brain trauma, abuse, poverty), the history of its discovery, and gives us case studies of men who he has tracked down more than twenty years after their initial hospitalization and diagnosis with ASP, often with unsettling results.
I liked this book for its scholarly treatment of this psychiatric subject. It was complex and in-depth, but at the same time, still accessible to me as a non-psychiatrist. I was fascinated with the descriptions of personalities that he gave, and riveted by the petrifying account he gave of the sociopath John Wayne Gacy. At the same time, I did have some problems with this book. At times, it did not hold my attention and would read like a textbook. I also found that Dr. Black's treatment of the antisocial was rather contemptuous and seemed to emphasize the fact that these people are virtually impossible to treat, rather than trying to show optimism or enthusiasm. I don't think you can help somebody (no matter how unlikeable they may seem at face value) recover if you attack them. There is a difference between holding someone responsible and beating them up over their bad choices. (Or perhaps this shows I didn't get as much out of this book as I should have.) Along the same lines, Dr. Black did not support his descriptions of antisocial behavior with the responses of the patients. He told us antisocials have no remorse, but I don't feel he really articulated that in telling the stories of follow-up interviews.
Overall, I felt that this was a pretty good book, and an important introduction to a disorder which has extreme ill-effects on society (poverty, crime, etc.). Hopefully, over the years, their can be more research to define a way to treat these individuals.
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Unlike other authors who address many of the same issues, Tichy also includes a substantial Handbook (pages 285-394) which consists of ten Sections: The Teaching Organization, The Hand You have Been Dealt, Building Your Teachable Point of View, Pulling It All Together, Building a Team Timetable Point of View, Architecting the Leadership Pipeline, Scaling the Teaching Organization, Building Teaching into the DNA, Global Citizenship, and finally, Start the Journey. In the Handbook, Tichy explains provides decision-makers with with just about everything their need to know to design, implement, and then strengthen their own Teaching Organization, one within which the Virtuous Teaching Cycle sustains leadership development at all levels.
In his Introduction to the Handbook, Tichy quotes a brief statement from Thomas Stewart's most recent book, The Wealth of Knowledge:
"The knowledge economy stands on three pillars. The first: Knowledge has become what we buy, sell, and do. It is the most important factor of production. The second pillar is a mate, a corollary to the first: Knowledge assets -- that is, intellectual capital -- have become more important to companies than financial and physical assets. The third pillar is this: To prosper in this new economy and exploit these newly vital assets, we need new vocabularies, new management techniques, and new strategies. On these three pillars rest all the new economy's laws and its profits."
Tichy includes this brief statement because it is directly relevant to his own objectives in The Cycle of Leadership but also because, unless and until an organizations has all three pillars (not one, not two but all three), it cannot survive major challenges which await them, many of which have yet to be revealed. That is to say, the Teaching Organization can only be built on the foundation they provide.
"Winning leaders are teachers, and winning organizations do encourage and reward teaching. But there is more to it than that. Winning organizations are explicitly designed to be Teaching Organizations, with business processes, organizational structures, and day-to-day operating mechanisms all built to promote teaching." However, Tichy doesn't stop there. More importantly, the teaching that takes place is a distinctive kind of teaching. It is interactive, two-way, even multi-way. Throughout the organization, 'teachers' and 'students' at all levels teach and learn from each other, and their interactions create a Virtuous Teaching Cycle that keeps generating more learning, more teaching, and the creation of new knowledge."
Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Peter M. Senge's The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990) and The Dance of Change: The Challenges of Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations (1999), William Isaacs' Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together: A Pioneering Approach to Communicating in Business and in Life (1999), Carla O'Dell's If Only We Knew What We Know: The Transfer of Internal Knowledge and Best Practice (1998), and Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak's Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know (1997).
It is otherwise a versatile instrument for reference and revision
There is no access to the authors for feedback comments etc.
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As General Johnson makes his way through life, he seems destined to be viewed as a man of contrasts. He was born into a Quaker family, yet attended the U.S. Military Academy. While serving in the quartermaster corps during the Mexican War, General Johnson was dismissed from the Army for proposing a bribe to a superior officer. He operated military schools in Tennessee and Kentucky during the period before the Civil War. When war broke out, he petitioned for a command in the Tennessee contingent. At the battle of Chickamauga on the Tennessee-Georgia border, he made his great move leading his troops through the Union enemy. He was denied any lasting glory of the battle until Noble Wyatt researched the total tale. Noble Wyatt lead the initiative to construct a monument on the Chickamauga site in 1975.
The death and burial of Bushrod Rust Johnson in Illinois, far from his home and the grave of his wife in Tennessee, seems the ultimate blow to a man befallen by bad luck and timing.
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This book also has a chapter on scanning, which is the best I ever seen in any compiler design book I have ever read. They talk about concepts of set theory as it relates to lexical analysis. Then they talk about regular expression and Fintie automata. This book is a great read indeed, and very easy to read.
There are quite of few chapters dedicated to parsing. In the chapters related to parsing they give a comparisons to Top Down and Bottom up parsing. They even go well known utilities like Yacc. The last few chapters go into depth chapter by chapter on implementing control structures:conditional, itereative, recursive. Even the appropiate runtimes, like code generation. There is even one chapter that goes into the fundemental Data Structures for a compiler. The last chapters is called "Parsing In The Real World".
The code example in this book are based off of a language the ADA-CS langauge. There is a brief tutorial of this language. But the code is just illustration, as they do not use a full langauge for the illustration. I think this is important, because the book focuses more on design rather then design with a particular langauge.
I really cant find anything wrong with this book. I definitely got more than my money's worth on this book. As I only spent [money] on this book. But I would have easily spent [money] on this book easily. Simply because I am drawn to this type of information. And even in 1999 when I found this book, compiler design was not demanded in the workplace much, I still find this a great book for students.
I would encourage anyone to purchase this book. If you can find this book that is. I'm sure this book is very hard rto find. My book is a Instructors book, and was not previously for sell. But if you ever see this book at a yard sell, lirbrary sell, please pick it up. Especially if you are student.