I liked your book when iread it, and i would like to translate it into the arabic languauge for teaching purposes, the copy i have is edited on 1985. please, if you accept that i can translate your book, send me a letter of your approval.

thanks in advance,

nasser abbas

deseo saber si tienen el libro de parasitologia clinica del autor brown en español...de ser asi porfavor me escribe que estoy muy interesada en comprarlo, gracias.

Harold H. Martin, continuing the work of Franklin Garrett, offers a wonderful survey of Atlanta from 1940 to the mid-1970s. Martin selects anecdotes to beautifully evoke each period he discusses--Margaret Mitchell rallying recruits for World War II; youth reading comics in the basement of a church-sponsored hangout; gawkers driving to a hippie enclave in the late-sixties and early-seventies. Martin draws heavily, but not exclusively, from contemporary newspaper accounts to create a richly-textured chronicle. This is a vivid depiction of an era and a city.

Franklin Harold's the WAY OF THE CELL, by analogies with computers and machines, leads the reader closer to understanding the relationship of the 1-D genotype to the 3-D phenotype. In English, how does the DNA blueprint lead to the finished, living organism? He shows the cell as the nanobot machine able to produce the pieces of what we call life. One of his favorite thinkers is Richard Dawkins who says genes build cellular survival machines. On P. 81 Harold tells us, "from genes to cells is a journey without maps."

So what is life? This book is an apology for man's inability to create life in a test tube. Yes, the author ends the book by throwing up his hands but the journey is still exciting. Man's attempt to create life in a test tube is merely his attempt to magnify these cellular sized wonders. By magnifying the lego pieces within the cell Harold shows that man within is filled with a billion tiny oceans teaming with life. Life must lie hidden in the currents which flow within the cellular oceans. When man can navigate these currents he will understand what life is. The author helps to reveal the wonder of this fantastic voyage.

What is life? Man knows it when he sees it. The fact that we can't manufacture life from scratch is no different than not being able to create a second sun from scratch. If life were a book of blank pages, the cell is the printing press that imprints the book with words, sentences and paragraphs. Another analogy Harold uses is that of a river of DNA flowing within cellular banks. The author warns us that analogies are only half truths. Since his book is filled with analogies, the whole truth of what life is can never be told.

"The typical archaeon is likely to be a lithotroph, an anaerobe, and a thermophile." (p 167)

No, the author is not addicted to Latin and Greek. His writing is colloquial and accessible. It's hard to explain, but in its context that sentence above is amusing. This book is an easygoing but fairly detailed tour of cellular life. It brings us down to the level of the cell - even the bacterial cell - and then begins to investigate how things look from that perspective.

From a cell's-eye view, big molecules are important parts of the landscape. Particular types of macromolecules and complexes have just a few (hundred or thousand) representatives, so each is important to the cellular economy. From here, it seems as if we can, almost, understand how a cell lives.

Franklin Harold shows us, in broad strokes with descents into telling detail, what he knows, and what he (and everyone else) does not know at this point about the life of cells. This book gives us a rich picture of life at the most fundamental level, and shows us, too, the puzzles that are the subjects of current research. With his pictures of cellular action, metabolism, and growth, he is attempting to answer Shrodinger's question: what is life?

We know immensely more than we used to about the details of life's machinery. But do we understand how all that intricate, mixed-up chemistry can get up and live? Harold insists that we do not, and that these questions of biochemical detail have so mesmerized us that we no longer are even asking - as if understanding emerges from a pile of facts.

Franklin Harold's motivation is not lack of interest in these details (they occupied him during his years of research), nor an anti-scientific despair that says life can only be understood in some holistic and intuitive way. Rather, it is in the spirit of what is now called Complexity Theory (and used to be called General Systems Theory). Life seems to be an emergent property of the complex system we call the cell, whose many interacting parts we more or less understand if we think about them in isolation, but whose real-time interactions are too complicated and involve too much feedback to be grasped directly.

He pursues this question, too, in reviewing the current state of science as it investigates the origin of life. His agnostic, but still hopeful, take on much of the rather vaporous speculation that fills in for any real results in this area rather appeals to me.

This book is the best sort of popular science: it gives plenty of hard fact and cogent reasoning, but avoids the trap of exhaustive textbook detail. It is a surprisingly slow read: although the author is skilled at telling us what we need to know, he is reasoning along with us about fundamental matters that are part of the dialectic of current research. When you finish this book you will feel that you have been given a straight shot of some of the heady brew that biologists these days are imbibing.

The Way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms and the Order of Life written by Franklin M. Harold is a well-written book that helps us understand why the search for answers of the riddle "What is Life?" is one of the noblest quests. This book is not about biology, biochemistry or any other finished and finite discipline, but about life.

This book deals with what are a recognizable set of properties, to identify the essential features that distinguish living organisms from other things. That riddle embraces and transends the subject matter of all the biological sciences, and much of the phyical science as well. Now, you maybe wondering, is this book too much for the non-scientific? If you have had science in high school, you should be able to figure out this book, which touches on subjects of biology, chemistry, biochemistry, and microbiology. This book is superbly written and very accessible in its explanation making the reader an observer of science so you can understand better what the scientists are working on.

So, what is the realtionship of living things to the inanimate realm of chemistry and physics? As you read on in this book, you'll find out and understand this realtionship. How can molecular interactions account for their behavior, growth, and reproduction? Living things differ from non-living ones most pointedly in their capacity to maintain, reproduce and multiply states of matter charactered by extreme degree of organization.

This book works with research on E. Coli, though a simple organism, it manifests well the example of life, the cell is a unitary whole. This book works with a vivid picture of the cell as opposed to the sub-celluar level of the gene. Heredity is in the genes, but life is in the cells.

If you have ever wanted to know the answer posed by Erwin Schrodinger, "What is Life?" read this book as some of this question will be answered. Other authors to read are: Stephen Jay Gould, Ernst Mayr, and E.O. Wilson are only just a few. This book has a very well appointed bibliography and your reading can start from there. You'll find this book to be an extremely witty, comprehensive and up-to-date work.

Going back and forth to school in Brooklyn, and then later working in one of the neighborhoods devastated by the desegragation canard, made me an urban historian with a book in my head that still remains to be written. Also, doing some family geneology and ethnic geneology of Brooklyn and New York County led me to do some urban exploration which, EARLY, on a Sunday morning would find me creeping around 150 year old churches, examining statues honoring the war dead of WW1, the Kings County armory etc. I wanted to know more about how the finest neighborhoods in the world circa 1880-1949 were so completely, and utterly destroyed in a 20 year period. I looked for books on race rioting, desegregation, blockbusting, integration, etc., and the only one I have found thus far that was on target was the 'Destruction of Franklin K. Lane'.

The author, a teacher at Lane through the 60's, chronicles the events that led to decent people vacating the neighborhood, rioting, looting, assaults on teachers including setting one on fire after shooting flammable fluids on him, that otherwise put one more coffin into East New York. Surprisingly enough, a colation of 'social activists' 'black panthers', a 'corrupt mayoralty' and a zoning irregularity resulted in the destruction of a school that was already desegregated proir to Court decisions mandating busing and desegregation. Author Saltzman is also honest as he too, at the time anyway, supported integration if same was done properly. Therefore I believe his book deserves extra credence.

The book is problematic because it is not chronological and refers to the same event by different nicknames. Some chapters appear to go over the same set of events from different perspectives, but this takes place throughout the book making the entire picture somewhat difficult to grasp.

What you do get with this book is an honest man's grounded view of school beaurocracy, police, the mayor, the teacher's unions, and various revolutionary groups who were laughing all the way. You get gems of urban history that the useless teacher's unions forget to mention when they hail the education revolution of the 60's, like the fact that Lane High School's rifle team stopped race rioting Lane students from destroying and looting Cypress Hills by firing their rifles at them. When do hear that repeated by . . . .

As always, real history is stranger than fiction, and any urban historian or honest cultural critic should have this book on their shelf, and then go drive to Bushwick, East New York, Bedford Stuyvesant, etc., and see the brickwork, the stained glass in the churches, the architecture, and then contemplate how much of America's finest places have been ruined, perhaps for good. The area in Brooklyn by the Interboro spilloff is full of these things, and they are worth a look!

This could have been a great book. The story of a daring attempt to find polar explorer Sir John Franklin (analogous in importance today to finding lost astronauts) based on the personal journal of an officer in the rescue expedition's company, R. R. Carter. So many interesting aspects could have been explored: the collegial but competitive feeling between the ill-equipped US expedition and the advanced Royal Navy counterpart; the escapist focus polar exploration enjoyed on the eve of the Civil War; Carter's personal evolution. Instead, the author merely wraps Carter's Spartan journal in a perfunctory introduction & summary. Drama aside, this is no scholarly reference either. Not one map to help the poor reader trace the expedition's progress; no helpful amplifying commentary that could have helped the reader put Carter's often esoteric colloquial references into context. A work of FICTION (Yoyage of the Narwhal, Barrett) is a more interesting and scholarly work about this subject.

This could have been a great book. The story of a daring attempt to find polar explorer Sir John Franklin (analogous in importance today to finding lost astronauts) based on the personal journal of an officer in the rescue expedition's company, Randolph Carter. So many interesting aspects could have been explored: the collegial but competitive feeling between the ill-equipped US expedition and the advanced Royal Navy counterpart; the escapist focus polar exploration enjoyed on the eve of the Civil War; Carter's personal evolution. Instead, the author merely wraps Carter's Spartan journal in a perfunctory introduction & summary. Drama aside, this is no scholarly reference either. Not one map to help the poor reader trace the expedition's progress; no helpful amplifying commentary that could have helped the reader put Carter's often esoteric colloquial references into context. A work of FICTION (Yoyage of the Narwhal, Barrett) is a more interesting and scholarly work about this subject.

This book is anything but complete -- it only covers Pentax's 35mm cameras. If you are interested in Pentax's medium-format cameras, it is an utter waste of time, as I found out after I bought it.