In 1994 my wife and I made our first trip to Italy, and in preparation for that trip I made heavy use of "The Charming, Small Hotel Guide to Italy." Upon our return, I later came across the first edition of their guide to "Tuscany and Umbria" and another for "Venice and the Veneto."

I swear by these guides-- but I have to complain a little about the latest edition. First, it has changed very little from the prior edition-- there are only a handful of new entries. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, in the interim, many of the properties listed have acquired e-mail accounts and developed websites. The internet era has made it much easier to check on room availability, current pricing, etc., but very few email addresses or URLs are listed. That complaint aside, this is a good, useful book, one I would use to plan our next trip to Tuscany-- if we couldn't get a room at "our place."

We used this to plan our lodging in Tuscany, and we stayed in some wonderful places. I would highly recommend it for those interested in staying in smaller hotels with lots of charm.

We are the authors of Eating & Drinking in Italy and have used this guide for many years. If you want to have a memorable trip to Italy, stay in the small hotels listed in this helpful guide.

For the football fan, this is a classic work. Perhaps most compelling is the time capsule it represents, back to a simpler age for football, before advertising, television, marketing and crass commercialism took hold. The book is now thirty years old. Updated in the late 1990s Davies adds information on the team members, twenty-five years after they won their national cup. The reader can only marvel at how much things have changed in world football since this book emerged. Back then, an apprentice might earn [very]little...Even though that amount went a lot further back then, it was a pittance. Players were recruited at about age 13 from local teams. The glory, not the cash, earned their attention. Training consisted of some jogging, minimal weight training and drills in the basics. It was a pretty simple, and certainly unglamorous routine, ten months of the year. Medical care seemed primitive, some based more on superstition than science. Veterans would decry the lack of guts from some of the players, and the absence of grounding in the key, basic skills, e.g., ball trapping. But what a life it was! From the players' bios, it is clear that the alternative would have been to work the mines, unload ships, or collect garbage. Football was a joy! And even then, the players from the middle of the century would probably think those of the 1970s had it pretty soft.

Chapters cover several players, the manager, the early version of English hooligans, key games, a doting, almost sinister fan, and the club directors, in relatively brief, insightful and not-too-critical prose. The appendices include a study of the team's set plays and shows with statistics for the year how critical these 'dead ball' moves were to the success of the team. Brief surveys of player attitudes, life history, family, and hobbies offer a superficial profile of the club. We catch a glimpse of lives, from dads changing nappies to a manager's busy schedule, yet I felt more empty at the end than moved.

Tim Parks and Joe McGuinness have made more recent, intensive attempts to cover this same ground: a year with an Italian football team, up close and personal. A modern version of 'Glory game', featuring Man United (see, for instance, "Manchester Unlimited"), would offer stark contrasts, like Michael Lewis' recent book on American baseball.

The Glory Game was published in 1972. It has, as the author notes in his introduction to the 1999 edition, been in print every since. The book tells the story of the 1971-72 season of the English football team the Tottenham Hot Spur Football Club. This is the prototype of many such team stories that have followed. The book succeeds because it tells the story of not only a team in the collective sense but of the individuals that made it.It also presents to the present day fan of the cash saturated Premier League a study of almost sociological precision of an era in English football which, although only thirty years in the past, is now "your father and granfather's football."The players are fairly and insightfully treated. The book is in sum their stories and the stories of their competitions. The book is complete with appendices of team plays,player's attitudes, qualities and what the players did upon retirement.The treatment of the players and coaches is far from dull or superficial.In fact the revealing nature of the book created quite a contrversy when it was published. Its insights are enjoyable reading and tell a true team story.

We used this book for an MBA course and found it to have numerous errors throughout. Additionally, many of the sections are written to an audience of imbeciles, as the concepts of "repeatability" and "globalization" are explained in extreme detail. The text needs to be updated, especially the section on ERP (no longer in infancy stage). Nothing against Coach K, but the editors for this book have dropped the ball.

I used this book in my MBA studies and found it to be one of the best texts in any subject. As the subtitle suggests, it covers both strategic and analytical (or tactical) aspects of ops mgmt.
The book is a well rounded presentation of of the subject using text, graphics, equations, examples, and cases.

The most striking part of the book is in Aggregate Planning. For anyone who has worked in industry, we all know about strategic plans. How often though are other working plans created that are well linked to a strategy? Chapter 14 is the first time I have encountered a treatise on how to approach this. In addressing the types of plans, levels of plans, and their inter- relationships, the student is given the tools needed to actually implement a grand strategy, linked to workable sets of more detailed plans for each function.

Outstanding.

found the book quite educative. I think it covers the main topics of operations management very well and in depth.

As a certified yoga teacher, I have found this book to be a good, basic source of information. Perfect for passing on to beginning students who would like to know more about yoga, it's beginnings and how it can and will affect their bodies. Easy to navigate. I would use this as a supplement to practice with and instructor or video.

This wonderful gem came across my desk quite by accident and I am ever so thankful. The book is clear, concise and well written just for starters but more importantly gives very detailed advice for tailoring a yoga program to meet individual needs. The book is limited to a fewer number of asanas than many books but for most people this is enough when dealing with structural issues. The book also provides clear tools for evaluating structural abnormalities and suggestions for particular asanas. In addition, the discussion of yoga philosophy and traditions, as well as personal anecdotes all add to this books charm. One of the best I have come across.

I have just started a Yoga practice, and I am interested in the therapeutic use of asanas. This book goes in depth enough to help me in this way. Mr. Stiles makes it possible to learn about and self treat all types of musculo-skeletal issues safely, though he does recommend having a teacher to supplement your own practice. This book has explained what muscles I need to stretch and strengthen. The history and background of yoga given in the introductory chapters is well written and interesting to read, which was an unexpected bonus for me. I am looking forward to using the exercise series outlined in the book.

I found this book very hard going. DesJardien's writing style was not very fluid at all and the book was an awkward read. It also lacked period detail which means this is not a good one to read if you are a true fan of the Regency era. 'The Reluctant Lord' started badly but did pick up. The characters were quite enjoyable though not compelling. It was basically an Ok read though I wouldn't read any more by this author.

I gave this book one star for the interesting premise (an American inheriting a title in Britain), and two more for the attempt at an interesting book. Here are the things that strained my credibility:
1) The old lord's mistress is living on his estate... not in the nearby town, but on the estate. Further, she won't marry the old guy when she has the chance.
2) The relationship between the two are supposedly a "secret." C'mon, an unmarried woman living on the estate without a male family member? And THAT's supposed to be a secret in such a small town? Get real!
3) The mistress agrees to let her unmarried neice live with her. All that will do is spread her own infamy to an innocent young woman.
4) The mistress & niece are strapped for money. As part of the estate, the dower house they live in would be regularly supplied with food and fuel from the estate.
5) The mistress is supposedly accepted in the local town's society, and the town matrons invite her to their homes. C'mon, never happen. (At this point in the book, I quit reading and skipped right to the end.)
6) The new lord shows up at his father's funeral, and then asks the niece (whom he only just met) about what he should be wearing. In reality, that subject would have been discussed by the extremely competent valet he inherited from his father, and the matter would have been solved before he ever left the house.
7) The American knows only one person in all of England, and this one person happens to turn up in the same small backwater town that the American is living in. Oh please.

Such a promising premise this book had... such mediocre execution. I was disappointed.

[Please, let me start by warning you to take this review with a grain of salt. I couldn't read all of this book because my copy had been mispublished. Double check to make sure that page 161 (and not 129) follows page 160 through page 192. But I will review what I read: the beginning and end.]

I enjoyed this book. It was not super great, but it was amusing. The premise of the book is that Fane Westby comes to England to search out the father he thought was dead. Turns out his mother had fled with him when he was a baby and just recently he learned he was the heir apparent to an estate. When he arrives in England, he meets the tenants at the dower house, Miss Marietta Hampton and her delightful aunt, who have both been banished from the rest of the family for being too free-thinking. Enter an evil villian and you have the plot.

The characters are very delightful and have some depth, especially the aunt and Fane. The writing is well done and clear. But the plot twists and some of the set-ups are so contrived that you know it could only happen in a novel (Fane only knows one other person in England who happens to be his deadly enemy and this enemy happens to be in the same obscure villiage? ). Also, the plot starts out very, very, very slowly, though it picks up nicely in the pages right before the publisher misprinted it...er, I mean, right in the middle of the book. The ending is, of course, happy and resolved.

This book is enjoyable. Just make sure your copy is whole and unblemished prepare to turn off your mind to any attempt at plot reality.

Davies is a lazy researcher and an even lazier note-taker: nearly every passage from Stevenson in this book is misquoted, often distoring Stevenson's meaning. (See my online review in the Boston Book Review). Don't buy this awful book, read Stevenson's wonderful letters instead.

Hunter Davies is a strange writer. His most popular book, on the Beatles, has the crudity of Pacific Art, but is no less enjoyable for that. He's not "literature", but he boasts a lack of selfconsciousness - in fact, wallows in it - that borders on viable stylism. In tackling Robert Louis Stevenson his technique is similarly informal and it similarly works. Stevenson, of course, is great literature, but he was also a focussed populist and one of the truly great pure storytellers of all time. You can't dip into Stevenson. To really enjoy him you follow the full presciption, from Travels with a Donkey to the Letters. His oeuvre is a rainbow display of unparalleled imagination and brute energy (it has been said his prolificacy killed him), and it invites just such a quirky, jaunty imagination as Davies' in analytical engagement. Davies travelled in RLS's track through Europe, to San Francisco, Hawaii and Samoa and presents his quasi-biography as a journal "in the field". The text is peppered with letters "to Louis" in the modern idiom, informing him of the societal and cultural changes in 100 years in the places of his childhood and adventuring. There are mad cameos, and some surprisingly elegant writing (he is good on Calistoga and SF and Hawaii), and what emerges is a totally fresh paparazzi picture of Stevenson as a hefty soul in a fragile body living a jampacked life. No, it isn't "accurate". There are "generous" interpretations of RLS's own journal writings and passages of wild conjecture. But it is, as it proffers to be, a work of imagination - and RLS, who had humor to burn, would have loved it.