The most notable aspect of the 1909 Plan of Chicago was that the author's (Daniel Burnham) profession was not exclusively city planning. He was a business man. He viewed his plan for the City of Chicago as the best way to create an exceptional business and civic environment. It worked! Many elements of modern downtown Chicago that make it a truly great, world class city, are a direct result of Burnham's vision. For it is the grand vision that stirs the soul of mankind and allows a "planning document" -- normally a thick document, full of data, which sits on a shelf and collects dust -- to be embraced by an entire community. This is a must read for contemporary city planners, business men and government officials that want to "make it happen" in their communities. MAKE NO SMALL PLANS

aside from some poems that either copied bukowski's style or were pretty much just bad--the book has some interesting stories
overall henry was probably a pretty much a peice of sh@#t
but his writings shine thru

Some nice essays in here some really bad poetry (not Buk's, of course) and some good little interviews. Sheds a little more light on the The Man. Definetly worth a read, go for it.

Like the other guy said: If you like Buk you'll enjoy this book. Gives you more insight/perspective.
Also, be warned, a small portion contains some awful poetry written by some of these same folks who knew the man. Definitely worth having for your collection, though. Good deal. Read it twice already. The book almost brings Buk back to us.

Having recently finished reading the book, I wonder whether such debilitating attitudes still obtain in the African American community--attitudes that hold that dark skin is unattractive, even ugly. To answer my own query, my sense is that there are still elements of such thinking, born of self-denial and disafirmation. The character in Thurman's book, Emma, who was reared to think of herself as "too black"; was not suffering from a personal problem. Color consciousness is not a black invention; it is a product of centuries of white racism. This book will help black parents to understand their notions of beauty.

This Harlem Renaissance novel is a lost classic in African-American literature that must be reintroduced. My one and only complaint(and a slight one at that) is that sometimes the novel did not transition well between the two separate narrations of Emma Lou and Alva. This problem, however, is easily minisculed by the overall hard-hitting message of the book. At times I found myself getting infuriated by Emma Lou's seemingly silly and immature ways regarding color, but that is likely exactly what the author had set out to do--to make the reader realize the absurdity in being so color-conscious.
Though perhaps not as rampant as it was in the era that the novel is set, the whole light-complected/good hair complex is unfortunately an issue that still plagues the African- American community today. It is profound books such as this that will hopefully enlighten those practicing intra-racism that, light or dark, we are ALL considered 'black' by others, and that on a larger scale, regardless of anyone's race, we are ALL human. This is the realization that Emma Lou struggles with in the novel, and one that hopefully the reader will 'get'.

The Blacker the Berry is a truly classic novel and one from a great time period - the Harlem Renaissance. Wallace Thurman weaves an unfamiliar tale of a African American woman who struggles with her skin color, the acceptance of family members and racism within the black community.

At the time "The Blacker the Berry" was written, it was the first novel of its kind to address issues widely known among the black community, but never discussed.

It's about a young woman, Emma Lou, who's darker skin tone brings anguish and breeds hatred not only for herself but from her lighter skinned relatives. Set in the 1920s, the main character travels from Boise, Idaho to Harlem, New York in hopes of escaping her problems back home. However, she only runs into deeper problems in a new city.

The "Blacker the Berry" shares with us her journey for self love and social equality. Every woman of any race or background can relate to this book in some manner. After reading the novel, I encouraged all of my friends to examine their own views on skin color and share them with others in hopes of breaking down barriers and unwanted stereotypes. It was a wonderful book and I enjoyed reading it because it was very descriptive about Harlem - my original home town.

As one of Daniel Charles's sources and a very minor character in this book, I was disappointed at how a writer with so much inside information about what happened could tell a story that got what happened so wrong in an effort to make it dramatic and appealing.

Arthur Hailey's novels Airport, Hotel, Wheels, etc. comprise some of the better books that expose and glamorize the inside workings of an otherwise mundane industry. Of course, if it were really that enjoyable and interesting, they wouldn't call it work, they'd call it fishing and we'd do it for free. But Arthur Hailey wrote fiction, and he was smart enough to stay off the farm. Not so with Daniel Charles.

The enterprise of agriculture is more mundane than most, if only because it takes months of gradual growth and development to produce a crop, and years of almost imperceptible change to develop a new product. Much of the time is spent just waiting. Turning science into technology can produce beautiful and interesting results without the process itself being either glamorous or interesting. It's people going to work and doing their jobs. Most of us working in the field believed we knew what could be done and thought we could figure out how to do it. What made the process so difficult were the different visions of that same reality, visions sufficiently disparate that two people coming out of the same meeting had diametrically opposite understandings about what had been said and what had been agreed to. If that sounds like standard operating procedure in corporate America, welcome to the real world. It's three steps forward, two steps back, day after day. You might as well try to glamorize a trip to the barber shop.

Fact-based? It is. Balanced? It may be. But to at least some of us who were (and are) there, it still reads like fiction.

Daniel Charles' "Lords of the Harvest" succeeds in bringing perspective to the biotech industry and the contentious issue of genetically modified food. The author does this by personalizing the protaganists at the heart of the story: the scientists who were driven mainly by the quest for knowledge and discovery; the businesspeople who sought dollar returns from their laboratory investments; and the environmentalists who felt that genetic engineering was simply the latest ugly manifestation of an out-of-control agribusiness industry. The result is a highly entertaining and readable book that should interest a wide audience.

The scientists who invented and nurtured the industry tend to get much better treatment from Charles than either the businesspeople or the environmentalists. As a former science reporter for NPR, Charles seems most comfortable painting psychological portraits of the researchers at Monsanto and elsewhere. Charles lovingly details the innovative and pioneering work that these scientists undertook and the intriguing problems they solved. Charles shows how these early projects gave shape to the modern biotech industry, and his writing in these sections is vivid and interesting. And in the chapter "Infinite Horizons", Charles enthuses about the potential of biotechnology to help solve the world's problems. Throughout, Charles' enthusiasm for science and biotechnology is unmistakable.

On the other hand, the businesspeople of biotech get beat up pretty badly in the book. You get the feeling that Charles seems slightly upset that big business can't figure out how to bring the benefits of painstaking scientific discovery to the people. Specifically, Charles relates the numerous and sometimes humorous mistakes made by executives at Monsanto and Calgene (the inventor of the ill-fated "Flavr Savr" tomato) in their quests to dominate their respective markets. Charles successfully uses these case studies to add color and context to the larger story that he is telling (for example, the author's profile of Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro and his messianic-like appeal to the company's scientists to help save the world with biotechnology). Charles does an excellent job describing the corporate cultures and the motivations of key individuals, rendering his descriptions of the business wheeling-and-dealing that went on behind the scenes that much more interesting. However, I think that Charles is correct in concluding that it was the arrogance of Monsanto's top executives, more than any other single factor, that ultimately led to the company's demise and the public backlash against biotechnology.

Unfortunately, the environmentalists don't get treated much better. Although Charles appears to have abundantly interviewed scientists and businesspeople to gather original material for the book, it doesn't seem that he had much success contacting environmentalists; the profiles of well-known biotech opponents such as Jeremy Rifkin and Benny Sharlin appear to have been drawn from secondary sources. Consequently we don't enjoy the same level of insight regarding their motivations compared with the scientists. So although Charles does a respectable job of reporting why the environmentalists opposed biotech products and the actions that they took, the author's sympathies do not appear to lie with the environmentalists. Instead, Charles deftly swats aside several of the well-known studies that purport to show risks associated with genetically modified crops (such as Dr. Pusztai's rat and John Losey's Monarch butterfly studies). In fact, a certain level of hostility arises when the author makes the charge that environmentalists nevertheless publicized such "murky and ill-defined" (p. 208) studies purporting risk merely as a way to further their own agendas. But it does not seem to occur to Charles that many environmentalists might have organized the challenge to genetically modified food out of genuine concern for the welfare of consumers.

I also take slight issue with Charles on two other issues. First is his silence concerning regulation of the biotech industry. His techno-utopian bias leads him to claim that biotech is not substantially different compared with traditional plant and animal breeding practices, with the implication that the public should not be overly concerned about regulation of the industry. But the scientists' tools to recombine DNA in novel ways are so powerful and the effects are so little understood that it is not unreasonable to suggest that a greater level of corporate accountability should be required to ensure that the public interest is protected.

Second, Charles should have addressed the recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) controversy more adequately, given that this was a major Monsanto initiative (the heart of the book was about Monsanto and its scientists). His relative silence on this issue is defeaning: could it be that the environmentalists' charges about the risks of rBGH have at least some merit?

Still, I believe that Charles has done a good job of navigating some very tricky ideological terrain. "Lords of the Harvest" is probably as balanced a book on the subject of biotechnology as any other you'll likely find, and I highly recommend it.

In the epilogue of Lords of the Harvest, Daniel Charles talks about the power of stories to illuminate, and also to obscure. He talks about the mythologies that drive agribusiness and other competing mythologies that drive it's opponents. He can stand at a distance from both kinds of stories, and reflect on how well they are illuminating and obscuring.

On the other hand, Daniel Charles is himself a great storyteller.

I appreciated the way Daniel Charles helped me to think about both these kinds of stories, and what they have to do with food and science, religious faith and moral values in the 21st century. Mostly, Charles stays very close to the "everyday stories of ordinary people," end of the spectrum. How he managed to get so close to the lives of these people is something I wonder about! People on both sides of this issue obviously trust him a great deal, or he would never have been able to write this book.

The "grand myths" he talks about in the epilogue, this was a very nice way to wrap it all up. Part of the difficulty of these issues is that there is no overarching spiritual/ ethical framework that can encompass this conversation. Just competing ideologies, and very little common ground. (Where common ground does exist, Charles is good at finding it.)

It irritates me when scientists who write about agribusiness and genetic engineering castigate others who don't have their scientific credentials for being "sentimental" or ignorant. They do this in a way that intimidates ordinary people who do not have Ph.Ds, as if you have to have a particular diploma to discuss these issues. We need to fight this kind of arrogance and parochialism. Science may be an elite field, but food belongs to everyone.

Daniel Charles makes the discussion accessible to everyday people who want to know what is happening to our food, and who are trying to understand why it is happening.

Here we have a collection of several articles about balancing wor an life. I liked the book because of that. You don't have to begin reading on page 1. Just see the index for an article of choige an begin reading there. The ideas tha authors propose are written in an easy reading manner an are always backed on serious researches. I licked it a lot.

Great book for anyone who likes to question those things that are usually taken on faith. Also a great example of how histories based on oral tradition can evolve into more than they should be. Not for the religiously narrow minded!

Gee. This looks familiar. The nutrition program that Dr. Agaston gives us is in most respects the same as the Atkins regimen. I find it annoying that Dr. Agaston, in the first few pages of the book, takes a swipe at Atkins and mischaracterizes the entire Atkins nutritional approach. (The author should read Dr. Atkins most recent writings for an accurate picture of the regimen.) Frankly, I found Atkins' book to be far more informative, particularly in describing the medical effects of the low carb regimen. Having said all of this, I can highly recommend the nutritional approaches (Atkins or South Beach - they're almost the same). If you follow either approach faithfully you will feel better, lose weight and be healthier.

This diet doesn't seem any better or worse than its competitors. But the editing of the book is really problematic. A reviewer above mentioned the inconsistency about whether to use real of low-fat mayo. I also noticed that early in the book the doctor says that when it's time for Phase 2 to add fruit gradually and at first only have one piece a day after lunch or dinner. But then the menu plans for Phase 2 have you eating three pieces of fruit and dairy and multigrain breads throughout the day. It's really confusing. I think that everyone who says the diet is easy to follow is referring to Phase 1 which is really restrictive. Of course when you can't eat much of anything it's easy to follow. Where the book lets you down is guiding you out of the first two weeks. My feeling is that they are really pandering to people who want a "new" diet and who will only try it for two weeks anyway.
I'm not really complaining that I only lost 5 lbs... but the hype made me expect more. I think I could have lost 5 lbs in two weeks on multiple other diets. And did I stop craving chocolate? No way. The bread cravings come and go.
I will continue though. The diet seems very healthy and I'm hoping it will lower my cholesterol.

I've always been intimidated or annoyed with diet books -they are sort of like reading manuals, which I also hate. But this book is concise and really easy to follow, and the fact that the diet is so restrictive and unambiguous in the first two weeks makes it easy to stay on track. They key is that you are allowed to each as much as you want as long as you stay away from the sugars and the refined-foods carbs. But, you still end up eating a lot less than you used to because you aren't hungry. I can't say that at first I wasn't finding it hard to resist a huge pile of pancakes, but I was losing about a pound a day and that is an amazing motivator. Also I found that my energy level for my cardio workouts was down at first. I'm a victim of the high tech world and I've gained 25 pounds in the last six years. I'm going to South Beach in a few months, which was a great motivator to loose weight, and I'm achieving amazing results with this book. All my pants were loose on my after the first four days - it's like after all this time my body is saying "thank you!" for eating right and is rewarding me with rapid weight loss. This is a healthy diet that encourages the consumption of food in a satisfying quantity in its most natural state - not overly processed or refined or sugary. It's the type of food we are meant to be eating.

As an Apple employee I liked Jim Carlton's book because of the behind-the-scenes glimpses at a company that I love. But, geez, I've never read a book that needed a good editor more... there are literally sections that repeat themselves word for word (and how many times can we read a gushing description of Steve Jobs' "long flowing hair and rock-star good looks"? Give me a break. I also disagree with people here who say that he gives Apple a "fair shake". I found his portrayal quite biased and one-sided. Carlton's history of Apple is one that is full of major blunders that would have saved the company (his view). The reality is that, for all its missteps, Apple did a lot of things amazingly well... but you won't find that history in this biased book.

This book focuses on the business side of Apple Computer, from the departure and return of Steve Jobs. Little is mentioned of the history before John Sculley took over as the 'sole' CEO of the company. The book starts off with a bang, but ultimately it gets tougher and tougher to digest the information; not because of the writer's ability, but because of the repeated failures of the company to recognize success. You are constantly dumbfounded by the repeated mistakes that are made over and over, which ultimately sealed Apple's fate and made Microsoft billions! I found the chapters on Spindler and Amelio to be particularly difficult to follow.

I must admit that before reading this book I had a low opinion of Bill Gates, but the book has shed new light for me on the whole history of the GUI wars, and my opinion has certainly changed; Gates had no choice, but to create the Windows platform, since Apple was destroying itself internally and not advancing the Macintosh platform successfully.

I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to understand why Apple did not succeed beyond it's wildest dreams.

I found Carlton's book to be well-written, stimulating and unbiased. It seems that other reviewers feel that Carlton was flat wrong in his prediction that Apple will ultimately not succeed (he devotes only a few pages at the end to this). To these individuals, I suggest that you reread the book. Carlton did not say that Apple has always been a complete failure. His book was about how the company, which was YEARS ahead of others in terms of technology and design, lost its market share. His prediction is simply that Apple will most likely not thrive in the LONG-term.

To those who thought that Carlton's book was overly negative: What else could you call what happened to Apple? A success story? Of course not. Apple DID create an unbelievable company with brilliant design, technology and marketing. But the tragedy is that it chose to ride on its past successes without devising a strategic plan to maintain its lead in the ever-changing technology industry.

I suggest that anyone interested in learning how to manage a company over the long-haul read this book.