I have always wanted to go to Sweden. I started learning Swedish when I was 14, and I started a pen-pal friendship with a Sweden at the same time. When I was 21 I finally made a trip to Sweden (March 2002) for 2 weeks and I used the May 2002 edition of this book.

I spent my time in three cities: Stockholm, Umeå, and Skellefteå. Most guidebooks that I looked at covered the south of Sweden quite well at the expense of the North. This guidebook used 25% of its space to write about the two largest cities and 60% to write about the rest of Sweden. (The remaining 15% of the book deals with formalities of getting to/into Sweden, language, food, etc.)

The section on Stockholm was fantastic, and since the chapter was organized based on each island or section of the city, it was very easy to read. You could plot out which part of the city you wanted to visit each day with ease. The book specifies open/close times very well (although you always double check). As someone traveling in the winter, I appreciated that fact! Some guidebooks don't list the months that something is open!

Whereas some guidebooks have 2 paragraphs on Umeå and Skellefteå, this one had 6 and 3, respectively. The cities are described well and the information is as much as you'll probably need.

Another nice feature is that the guide features fairly detailed information about getting to/from each city, even the small ones.

The third section of the book, about history, food, money, language, etc was well laid out, and the history section was as complete as most general tourists would want it.

The book caters to a variety of tourists as it lists a wide (very wide) variety of accomodations, restaurants, activities, and methods of travel. Other guidebooks aimed at "poor college students" seem to cover mostly pubs and nightclubs at the expense of museums. Guidebooks aimed at the "one trip to Europe in a lifetime let's use all of our stock earnings" books seem to cover hotels at the expense of hostels. This book covers both.

Overall, a very good buy.

Sweden is a wonderful travel destination. It is beautiful country that manages to be both very tranquil and very dynamic. However, like most Americans, I was totally ignorant about Sweden. In fact, I don't think I would ever have gone there if I hadn't found this book in the public library. It got me interested enough to spend a few weeks in Sweden, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I will definitely go back!

The book was very detailed and accurate, and went well beyond the average travel guide in the level of interesting detail about almost everything you could possibly encounter in Sweden. Although the book was published in 1997 and I went in 1999, most of the hotel and restaurant information was still accurate. The book also provides a good introduction to the history and culture of Sweden.

I throughly enjoyed reading this book, about a country which so little is understood, I baffled as to why nobody has discovered this fancisating guide to a wonderfully exciting, beautiful country. It's a must that you visit the beautiful,wonderous, exciting, young and vibrant and little known cities in northern europe Stockholm. Stockholm has been described as the "The Venice of the North". But Stockholm is far more beautiful, spacious, less crowded but best of all it has 24,000 islands in it's archipalego to discover. Don,t take my word for it GO!

In the Foreword, Roland Huntford describes Amundsen's narrative as "all that Scott's is not". How right he is! This a very large book, but nonetheless an easy read. Amundsen relates a fascinating tale of fortune, misfortune, hardship, and ultimately - success. The narrative is detailed, but not overly so. In many places, a dose of humor is weaved in. Complete with numerous photos, maps, and scientific data, this book should be considered one of the great narratives of exploration. The great moral lesson of this tale is that preparedness ultimately leads to success. Is it any wonder that Roald Amundsen and his comrades won the race to the South Pole?

Recent years have seen a re-examination of the Golden Age of Antarctic Exploration. Roland Huntford in his excellent books "The Last Place on Earth" and "Shackleton" helped to debunk the myth of the glorious failure (Scott the Martyr) as an example to follow.

The greatest tale of this age was surrounded by no great tales of hardship, no honeyed or sanitised versions of the deed. In this book we hear in the words of the greatest exponent of the art of polar travel, the story of that rarest of plans - the perfectly executed coup.

For a coup it was. When Amundsen turned from the North Pole to the South after the question of "the great nail" had been settled by Cook & Peary, his decision was treated in many sectors (most notably an unbalanced and jingoistic British Press) as underhanded and double dealing. Amundens account of the reasoning behind it makes clear that any deceit was necessary to ensure no forestalling of his plans by others - not only Scott. To ensure the future of his extended plan (the drift across the Arctic which was eventually carried out in the "Maud") he knew the Press Barons would need an exclusive and juicy story. The South Pole would give him this currency.

The book is written in an honest and clean style - an extension of the Man and his nature. The hardships faced are almost disguised by the simple tale of their telling. To strike up an unknown glacier and forge his way over virgin ground on the way to the polar plateau and the Pole itself displays fortitude and grit we can only marvel at in todays world. But his description of the task is hidden behind a work-a-day narrative. To truly appreciate the splendour of the achievement is difficult in our modern era.

One cannot help but admire the total outcome of the plan. There are few tales in history and few great men who can truly say they accomplished exactly what they set out to do in the manner in which they planned. Those who can are Masters of their field. Amundsen is such a man - and master.

A feature of this book is the credit given by Amundsen to those who went with him. Where others claimed responsibility for the great deeds of their men, Amundsen retreats to the background and gives the credit to those who did the act. Natural humility is a trait of the Norwegian nature and Amundsen shows this in the writing of the book. There is no playing to the crowd but deeds are allowed to speak for themselves.

To appreciate the tale, read the book and marvel.

This book is an excelient book for both professional and student bakers. Not only does the book introduce the basics of bread baking, it also goes into the chemistry aspects of baking. This wonderful book offers a number of fasinating pictures that show many diffrent folds, rolls and techniques of developing dough. I highly recomend this book for someone who is interested in becoming a professional baker like myself.

This book is absolutely amazing, although it is geared towards the professional baker. There are great photographs of some of the decorative pieces, as well as helpful charts and tables. There are recipes for a number of unusual breads, as well as how to form animals, letters, woven bread baskets, wagons, and many other unusual and impressive breads. This is a great book for anyone interested in the nitty-gritty on bread-making and bread-shaping.

This is a wonderful book. I've found it very useful in my classroom as a teacher of Juvenile Delinquents who dropped out of school. At first sight of the book my students think it's a joke, but I find it as effective as other text boks when teching History. It's FUN and DIFFERENT. A change in the admission of information is very helpful and effective in the acquisition of information in youths.

Very unique presentation of African American history. Basically use two elderly narrators, one male and one female to take the reader in time. Each narrator has a different "voice". The female narrator has a bit of black nationalism, while the male narrator has a more balanced view of America in terms of race relations. Though a cartoon narrative, the book seems to be written for older readers (teenagers to adults). I recommend it for the entire family *and* ALL RACES. As author Russell Banks (Rule of the Bone) says on the back of STILL I RISE, "It's not just the history of African-Americans; it's the African-American history of *all* Americans."

I felt chilled reading this collection of Poe's all time best stories. I especially loved the eerieness of The Cask of Amontialldo and the insanity of the narrator in the The Balck Cat, all so frightly believable. The illustrations top it off by adding a magical touch of frightful imagery to the collection.

I read this book about a year ago and loved it. I'm the type of person who reads before they go to sleep and I had to put this book down because it was so frightening. I loved the way Poe drew me into the story and kept me begging for more. I was always curious to know what happened next, even if I was terrified. My favorite of all the stories was the "Cask of Amontillado". It was so creative how you became almost like a part of the story.

"The Three-Legged Stool" is a clearly written book by the CEO of a successful company. Author Roland Boreham shares his philosophy on how to do business that has worked well for Baldor Electric. The book is filled with helpful examples taken from his years with the firm.

Who should read it? Anyone involved in a business or non-profit organization of any size. The book will be especially helpful to those desiring long-term success in turbulent times.

What does "The Three-Legged Stool" mean? Simply that there are three key priorities to success: 1. customers, 2. employees, and 3. shareholders. These priorities reflect the author's belief that when relationships come first, profit follows. The book shows how to create, maintain and use winning business relationships.

Mr. Boreham's approach helps with the big challenges business people face: 1. increased competition pressures, 2. less certain career tracks, and 3. faster trends. All business people must learn how to build islands of strength and stability for themselves. So it is hepful when one can learn from someone has been successful over many years.

One of the big challenges today is commodization. This is when products and services to become less special... and perhaps all too common. It results in ever-lowering prices, decreasing profits and lessening job security. As Mr. Boreham points out, proper pricing is one way to beat out competition. He explains how his pricing methods, sales approach and sound business relationships secured product prices that assured competitive victory.

It's clear why Mr. Boreham sees customers as the stool's first leg. Although educated as an engineer, he developed superb marketing skills. One insightful comment on sales people is that "professionals ask, amateurs tell." This expresses true marketing, and it created repeat customer revenue.

Not only is Mr. Boreham a contrarian thinker, he is a successful contrarian executive. This path leads to stand-out products or sevices. These command better prices, keep customers loyal and secure new customers. Take for example, his attitude to inventory levels. Most companies love lean inventories. Mr. Boreham likes them plump. His contrarian inventory meets demands quickly... and locks in customers.

The book combines practical experience and wisdom with leading-edge management thinking. For example, it stresses the importance of providing helpful information to customers. For successful companies, it's now part of their winning product package. It helps forge continuing business relationship with customers.

Relationships with employees - the second leg of the stool - is another plus. The employee challenge to Mr. Boreham and other CEOs is especially sensitive in an era noted for stocks going up when layoffs are announced. Mr. Boreham's contrarian approach is to stress meaningful work, steady work, better communications, education and training.

Reality, for many companies, is that stockholders and customers come first. Why? Largely because today's good news is the driver. It determines executive bonuses and tenure. The younger generation has gotten the message. Increasingly, they opt for entrepreneural opportunities - where life is quick - versus joining what they see as dangerously sclerotic, established businesses.

While they may separate businesses into the quick and the dead, the younger generation may be ignoring Mr. Boreham's key lessons. Solid business and customer relationships, created over time, are invaluable to careers. Individuals possessing such relationships are easily employable over a long career. As Mr. Boreham would see it, some are successful for the quick moment... others are successful for life.

Shareholders relationships are the third leg of the stool. Mr. Boreham outlines good shareholder relationships, which benefit both company and investor. He points out that investors want consistency as well as change. Consistency that makes investors confident in a company's stability. Change that shows it is responding to the qucksand essence of the business world.

Summing up, Roland Boreham's new book instructs us and challenges us. It is easily read guide to the key steps to business and personal success.

Question: Why would you buy this book if you are not a CEO of a company, and don't care to know about management anyway?

Answer: Because of the neat stories about successful men such as Sam Walton, Warren Buffet, Winston Churchill, and Peter Drucker, to name a few, with added emphasis from one of our favorites, Will Rogers. And along the way, while you chuckle at the anecdotes, you'll find yourself learning a few things about building relationships with everyone, no matter what business you are in, and no matter how unimportant you perceive your job to be.

Finally, we have an author who builds on customer relationships by recognizing the importance of the other two legs of the corporation: employees and shareholders (or owners). These three constituencies give a new meaning to CEO. The Chief Executive Officer becomes the facilitator for relationships among the new CEOs: Customers, Employees, and Owners. Author Rollie Boreham is CEO of Baldor, a leader in the industrial motor field that was named in a January 1998 issue of Fortune as one of the "100 Best Companies to Work for in America."

The Three-Legged Stool is well organized, highly readable, and adds new perspectives to the philosophy of management and profits. The author reinforces theory with humor, anecdotes, personal stories, and lessons learned through successful relationships with all three constituencies. You'll chuckle at the stories of Mr. Boreham wandering around Wal-Mart with Sam Walton, and you'll cheer at Baldor's practice of asking employees how to improve quality and increase production through better relationships.

You'll find no unnecessary long-winded philosophies, and no technical jargon. Even the Baldor Value Formula is not mathematical at all. It is merely a useful description of how customers rank quality, cost, service and availability when they make purchases.

Mr. Boreham does not insult our intelligence nor waste our time by giving us excessive descriptions of problems or by over-explaining solutions. He gets right to the point, giving illustrations of successful relationships that really worked.

The Three-Legged Stool has great possibilities of becoming the next generation of One Minute Manager books. It's the perfect gift for your new MBA, and should be mandatory reading for every rising star in your organization.

I had physics in my first year of engineering studies and this was the recommended textbook. Even then, the explanations and examples in the book were often more illustrative and simple than our professor's version, and up to now I have always taken this book with me just in case a physical problem rears its nasty head somewhere. The examples, exercises and annexes replete with data help with comprehension and serve as a reference aid; the quotes introducing each chapter are priceless. All in all a very useful book for students.

The book itself is amazing. It shows the true power of physics. It is a must for the true physicist to have in his book collection. And you can't beat the price!

This large (perfect size for reading on your lap) book contains a series of intelligent essays and sumptuous illustrations and photos mapping the history of utopia from Plato on. I believe that the thing that makes it such a spectacular work is the wide range of disciplines, works and forces that the writers identify as utopic.

When people think of utopia, they often think of science fiction, fanciful and ideal worlds that make life better than our wildest dreams. In truth, most science fiction these days explores utopia as a critical paradigm, realising that we can not live in a perfect world, they explore the possibilities, the way they work and the way they fail. I'm all for this, but the thing that I loved so much about the New York Public Libraries book on Utopia, was the way it is very solidly linked to the real world.

It is, indeed, a book that explores the search for an ideal society in the western world. From the communes of the 1960's and '70's to the environmental housing collectives of the '80's and '90's. From the South Seas in the British imagination to Urban Geography, from Communism to Architecture, Romanticism and Formalism and Futurism, this book identifies attempts at and dreams of utopia from our own history. Rather than the speculation and fabulation of science fiction, the book provides us with our own speculation and fabulation, our own hope and idealism.

I've always been fascinated by Utopia, growing up reading Ursula Le Guin, Yevgeny Zamyatin and others, Dostoevsky's happiness versus freedom dillema grounded itself deep inside me, living in New Zealand often feels like paradise, and hopes for a better world got me imagining. I have a deep attachment to science fiction, and I'm not saying that this book is good because it neglects the genre's speculation, I'm saying it's good because it provides the social context that encouraged us to speculate in the first place. This book, to me, is a background to every speculative utopia work I have ever read, and the further understanding is invaluable to me. This book is a fascinating read. Devour it.

It also contains useful notes to illustrations, an index of personal names, a chronology of utopian/dystopian cinema and an extensive chronology of utopian literature .

If you have any interest in the subject of utopia, this book would be worth it for the pictures alone. It has marvelous reproductions of more than a hundred images associated with ideas of utopia. These include illustrations from famous utopian novels, artwork and architecture inspired by utopian longing (including a lot of political art and propaganda), and pictures of actual communities devoted to utopian struggle and living. But it's not just pictures. The book is also filled with brilliant, provocative essays about historical and philosophical utopias. I am teaching a course on this subject right now, and the material in this book is better written and more apt to provoke discussion than most of the "primary" material that you see listed in utopian bibliographies and web-sites. This book originated as a catalog for an exhibit at the New York Public Library. I hate to say it, but the book is even better than the exhibit. If you have any interest in thinking about the project of making a better world here on Earth, this book will be a valuable resource. And much of it is fun and exciting to read.

I just love reading, looking at and laughing at what Roland creates. I've been purchasing many of his cartoons either throug you or at my local bookstore as long as they have them. unfortunately not many copies here! So I not only purchase them for myself but for other friends too! Everybody likes his art sense of humor. Thank you.

I am a dentist and I loved the humor of this book. Even though I have to admit it isn't really acurrate about actual dentistry, it is a great laugh for anyone.

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i have a paper research and on the same subject.