This is a joy to read, concise and short, full of insight and authority yet never hard going. Luthi is a distinguished scholar, but keen to communicate his enthusiasm rather than any dry analysis. Scholars have analysed fairy tales according to many models, but this book becomes a primer for folklore theories too, as Luthi takes a tale or two in each chapter and examines them according to a different one of those approaches each time.

For anyone fascinated in adulthood by fairy tales, this really teases out the essence of the tales, their nature and appeal, and the various ways they resonate with us. 'It is quite likely that behind many features in our fairy tales there are old customs and beliefs; but in the context of the tale they have lost their original character. Fairy tales are experienced by their hearers and readers, not as realistic, but as symbolic poetry.' (chapter 4)

Here are the chapters: 1. Sleeping Beauty - the meaning and form of fairy tales 2. The Seven Sleepers - Saint's legend, local legend, fairy tale 3. The Dragon Slayer - the style of the fairy tale 4. The Uses of Fairy Tales - Cinderella, Hansel & Gretel, The White Snake. 5. The Little Earth-Cow - symbolism in the fairy tale 6. The Living Doll - local legend and fairy tale 7. Animal Stories - a glimpse of the tales of primitive peoples 8. Rapunzel - the fairy tale as representation of a maturation process 9. The Riddle Princess - cunning, jest, and sagacity 10. The Fairy-Tale Hero - the image of man in the fairy tale 11. The Miracle in Literature

This is a joy to read, concise and short, full of insight and authority yet never hard going. Luthi is a distinguished scholar, but keen to communicate his enthusiasm rather than any dry analysis. Scholars have analysed fairy tales according to many models, but this book becomes a primer for folklore theories too, as Luthi takes a tale or two in each chapter and examines them according to a different one of those approaches each time.

For anyone fascinated in adulthood by fairy tales, this really teases out the essence of the tales, their nature and appeal, and the various ways they resonate with us. 'It is quite likely that behind many features in our fairy tales there are old customs and beliefs; but in the context of the tale they have lost their original character. Fairy tales are experienced by their hearers and readers, not as realistic, but as symbolic poetry.' (chapter 4)

Here are the chapters: 1. Sleeping Beauty - the meaning and form of fairy tales 2. The Seven Sleepers - Saint's legend, local legend, fairy tale 3. The Dragon Slayer - the style of the fairy tale 4. The Uses of Fairy Tales - Cinderella, Hansel & Gretel, The White Snake. 5. The Little Earth-Cow - symbolism in the fairy tale 6. The Living Doll - local legend and fairy tale 7. Animal Stories - a glimpse of the tales of primitive peoples 8. Rapunzel - the fairy tale as representation of a maturation process 9. The Riddle Princess - cunning, jest, and sagacity 10. The Fairy-Tale Hero - the image of man in the fairy tale 11. The Miracle in Literature

Finding Fish, by Antwone Fisher is an awsome autobiography of a foster child that became a very good father and served his country in the army
This story is about a boy, Antwone, who was put into the foster care system as a child. He stayed with the very abusive family for about 12 years. He didn't want to believe at the time that it was a bad place to live. But when he got older he finally realized that it wasn't agood place to be living and that the foster parents weren't letting him grow up. He was thrown out of the house at the age of 17 and was homeless in the coldest weather. If it weren't for his social worker believing in him and telling him that he could make it. He wouldn't have made it as far as he did. His message is that you have to have help to get anywere and have confidence in your self.
I liked the story. I say this because it shows how going through a tough life can get a good life in the end. I can relate to the foster care system and not wanting to move. I know what his life is like, especially when he denied some bad things but not all of them.

Doing performance reviews--preparing for them, filling out the form, and understanding how to make them effectively improve an employee's performance--can be a challenging task. How do you make it a positive experience, for yourself and for the employee? It's not easy. How do you let the person know he or she is not living up to the organization's expectations? Again, not easy. This book can help in doing these things. The majority of book is given over to phrases you can use in over 70 different categories of performance. Each category has five levels of phrases, from outstanding to unacceptable. Even if some phrases don't fit exactly what you're looking for, you have a place to start and you can easily modify them to fit your purposes. I also like the first part of the book on how to plan, conduct, and write a performance review. The book also has two cool appendixes. One is titled "Ten Mistakes Managers Make When Conducting Performance Reviews," and the other is "Seven Mistakes Employees Make During Performance Reviews." For a retail price of [money], this book is a great tool for anyone having to do performance reviews. Highly recommended.

This is a marvelous book. It is extremely difficult to accurately capture the flavor of the original writing in translation, but Kunitz has done this and more - the English itself is poetry. The book is dual language, so readers of Russian can read the original next to the English. Both are excellent.

The selection is fairly representative of Akhmatova's life work, with early poems from 1909, through her affair with the poet Blok in the teens, the Terror and War, to her deathbed in 1961. I particularly enjoyed the translation of the epic "Requiem". Without a doubt, this is the best English version I have ever read. My only complaint is its berevity - at 40 poems, it merely whets the readers appetite for more - a pity, given the outstanding nature of both poet and translator.

For those who are not familiar with Anna Akhmatova, this is a gem. If you have read some of her work, this is a must-have volume. Enjoy!

This is the volume that introduced me to the works of Anna Akhmatova. After having read this in one evening, I could not sleep - I was so moved by her poetry. The translation must have captured her heart and soul because it certainly captured mine - it inspired me to get up in the middle of the night and draw pictures to go with what I had read. I understood at once the love the Russian people have for her. Since then, I have gobbled up everything translated into English that I can find, but I still think this little volume is the best of all and return to it again and again. Enjoy......

I've only been playing Go for a short time, but this was one of the first books I bought, and I'm very pleased with it. It's nice to pick it up and casually read some of the proverbs. Even if I'm not yet skilled enough to fully make use of all the strategies and tactics outlined in the book, just the general concepts I take away from reading it are invaluable. I highly recommend this to anyone who wants to learn more about the ins and outs of Go.

Human culture loves proverbs, i.e., those pithy little sayings that do some of out thinking for us. Whether they are partially silly ("a watched pot...") or tiresomely wise ("never count your chickens...") they all contain a smidgen of truth that all too often we remember one moment too late. It should surprise no one that the game of Go has plenty of its own proverbs as well.

For the most part books of Go proverbs are intended for beginners, who are looking for some easy to remember principles. This set, from the Nihon Ki-in are no exception. The proverbs are illustrated with excellent examples that make their points efficiently. There is a great deal of beneficial advice here for someone who wants to get past the 'being chased around the board' stage.

The great secret is that beginners are often too proud to read anything entitled 'Proverbs,' and insist on learning everything the hard way. It's us guys in the middle ranks who suddenly notice our game is stuck at some point and, after reading all kinds of esoteric Go books, finally by a book like this and read it when no one is looking. I just had one of those moments of sudden enlightenment when I encountered the proverb "a one point jump is never bad." How irritatingly simple, but the answer to a persistent problem I was having in the center. Another favorite of mine is "there is no defeat in Go."

This is simply one of those books that are handy to have around. For those of us that can't stand to know we are studying Go 101 again I suggest getting a plain brown wrapper. But don't let temporary embarrassment stop you from buying it. That goes away the first time you thrash that really irritating opponent who has been beating you every time.

My background is information systems service delivery. I stumbled across this gem when I was searching for resources on how to structure outage investigations for applications that did not meet service level objectives.

Prior to reading this book I viewed root cause analysis as a reactive tool to be used to investigate the causes of failures. The approach taken by the author is to also use this technique as a proactive tool in a manner similar to failure mode effects and criticality analysis (FMECA).

Here is a summary of what how this book approaches root cause analysis: it begins with a section on defining problems and collecting data. This approach allows you to take a proactive approach, especially if you are in an environment that uses statistical process controls to measure process performance. This is augmented by a chapters on task analysis and event and casual factor charting. This is where the author's approach begins to resemble FMECA techniques, which are proactive versus reactive methods of addressing problems and risks. This is followed by chapters on interviewing and reporting.

I particularily liked the chapter on interviewing techniques, which added a practical dimension root cause analysis. I also liked the way the author used hints throughout the book to reinforce methods.

The rest of the brief 135-page book is devoted to forms, worksheets and checklists that significantly add to the value or the book. I would have liked an accompanying diskette with this material in electronic format, but the lack of it does not detract from the book in any way.

If you want to use root cause analysis as a proactive tool in conntection with a continuous improvement initiative I recommend that you also consider Understanding Variation by Donald Wheeler. If you are seeking a more proactive approach to preventing problems in the first place you might consider augmenting Root Cause Analysis Handbook with Failure Mode and Effect Analysis by D. H. Stamatis.

Provides a clear, step by step methodology, with techniques, for problem or error analysis and identifying a solution. This is an exceptionally practical work offering a methodology for problem solving that is attractive; one which I subscribe to and use. Recommended.

Run-to-Run (R2R) control is a process control technique for batch-processing environments in which an algorithm is used to adjust process parameters prior to each batch (run). Information from previous runs, prior process inputs, or environmental information might all play a part in the control algorithm. The authors make a convincing point that run-to-run control has been very successful and has widespread application in the semiconductor industry, and is, in fact, "the least equipment-invasive control scheme that demonstrates real benefit."

This book is not a loose collection of case studies or a group of unrelated articles; it is, rather, a complete and integrated treatment of the subject of run-to-run control in its present state of development. The technical content exhibits the benefit of years of research through [the semiconductor research consortium] Sematech and excellent scholarship with over 300 references included. Both the theory of run-to-run control and the realities of implementation in modern manufacturing environments are covered.

[Excerpted with permission from review to appear in Journal of Quality Technology]

Having only recently gained significant acceptance in the semiconductor industry, run-to-run (R2R) control has been shown to be a highly effective method for minimizing the influence of systematic variations on the performance of semiconductor manufacturing equipment. Consequently, this book should prove to be a timely and welcome addition to the library of any manufacturing technologist in the semiconductor industry. Intended for use by novices as well as experts, it covers both the theory and application of R2R control in the semiconductor industry. Written by contributors from both industry and academia, the book is organized into seven topical sections. For the benefit of readers new to the subject, each section is arranged so that the first few chapters in the section are introductory in nature.

The book begins with an historical overview of process control in the semiconductor industry and the reasons why R2R control has emerged as one of the key process control technologies in use in the industry today. The rest of the section traces the evolution of R2R control in the semiconductor industry, including the barriers to its implementation and the enabling technologies that have helped to overcome these barriers, and provides a brief introduction to R2R control and process optimization methods.

The second section of the book focuses on control algorithms and the application of these algorithms to R2R process optimization and control. Particular attention is paid to R2R algorithms based on the exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) statistic such as the "gradual mode" and the "predictor-corrector" controllers. A significant advantage of these EWMA algorithms is that they are relatively easy to implement and they have been shown to work well for a variety of applications in the semiconductor industry. The rest of the section is devoted to several adaptive algorithms that can be used for both process optimization and control. The last chapter compares the performance of the R2R algorithms discussed in the previous chapters under a variety of conditions for both linear and non-linear processes. It should prove quite helpful to anyone trying to evaluate R2R control strategies.

The third section addresses the role of integration and automation in implementing R2R control in manufacturing environments. These are key enablers for R2R control and, as the authors note, if careful consideration is not given to them when implementing R2R control systems the solutions developed could turn out to be too costly or cumbersome to be useful. Because integration and automation span such a wide domain of technologies and disciplines, standards are absolutely vital to its success. Fortunately the first chapter in this section provides a thorough review of integration and automation standards that have been developed and proposed by organizations like SEMATECH, SEMI, and SIA. The subsequent chapters in this section address specific implementations of R2R control and the integration and automation strategies used with these implementations. A minor criticism of this section is the emphasis in these chapters on the Generic Cell Controller (GCC), although it should be noted that the authors have a wealth of experience with the application of the GCC to R2R control. The remaining sections of the book cover case studies of the application of R2R control to specific semiconductor manufacturing processes like Chemical Mechanical Polishing (CMP) and photolithography and advanced topics such as methods for dealing with process upsets and control strategies that span multiple process technologies. The book concludes with a discussion of the future of R2R control in semiconductor manufacturing and suggestions for further reading which are in addition to the thorough list of references included at the end of each chapter of the book.

In conclusion, this book is a very useful reference for any manufacturing technologist in the semiconductor industry. It provides a good introduction to the basics of R2R control and illustrates its application to semiconductor manufacturing with specific examples and case studies based on the authors personal experiences.

I read this to my 4 and 7 year olds. They thoroughly enjoyed it. It made them laugh, but it also has a great message. Illustrations are cute too.

The moral of the story offers a genuine message about unconditional love. My third grade class was delighted to have read it and they enjoyed it very much.

This is the very best book on HUNA philosophy and Spirituality I have read so far, and I highly recommend it to you.

Mr Long gives simple step by step instructions for clearing blockages between the middle self, and the Higher self so you can create the future you want.

I am very eager to read Mr. Long's later book "Growing Into Light".

If you have questions or comments; E-mail me. Two Bears.

Wah doh Ogedoda

I read this book while I was in Australia visiting my sister-in-law, I have read many books that I have come to appriecate more & more over the years(I am 51), any way this is the ONLY book that gave me a formula to solve my connecting with my Higher Self. It may or may not have the same effect on you but if it does, let me know at: aglogeo@yahoo.com Thank You George J. Miller

I remember when I first saw this book at the bookstore and turning the pages, read a little about how artists have gone digital and showing the kind of art they have created digitally and also how they did it. I was really amazed by it.

But I guess if anything, I was more or less inspired by buying the book because of Peter Max's foreword on digital art.

I really enjoyed learning about the digital artists and why they went digital, that was awesome. The bonus is a certain artwork shown and then how they created and what type of hardware/software they used and I'm just very passionate about this book because no other book at this time on digital art comes close to this one.

Price may be a little steep for some but for those who dreamed or have a passion for digital art, think of it as a worthy of investment because this book is indeed a rare gem.

Highly recommended!

This book has a unique way (as far as design books go) of illustrating concepts. Instead of the usual and typically boring style of writing out information and then giving the reader a few tutorials and examples to illustrate, this book works only with examples. And the examples aren't just any examples, there is an entire collection of beautiful examples written and explained by top designers and artist of our time. I've always been one to learn best by a visual example and if you feel that way too, then this book will kick off your study of digital design in a fresh unique way that is unparalleled in today's publishing world.

I am a kindergarten teacher who uses this book every fall. My children can relate to the animals feelings about the seasons changing. This book is very cute and leads to many discussions. Children are anxious to see what will happen next and so will you!

My kindergarten children loved this book! Sidney the squirrel certainly is silly in his attempts to re-attach the fallen leaves to the tree, and we giggled a lot about that. While the sound effects were not repetitive in a predictable way, they enjoyed getting into the act with those, as well. Finally, it is a great book to illustrate the cyclical nature of the seasons,which is difficult for young ones to understand.