Two recurring themes of achievers are mentioned in the first few pages of this book, the importance of toughminded optimism and the power of persistence. It is in that spirit that Gardner develops his topic. With the inevitability of change, openness to new experience is vital to self-renewal he claims. Being active in intentional change leads to growth rather than change by default he explains. Knowing how to creatively interact with changes in the environment is a learned ability that can lead to the development of new potentialities Gardner writes.
This interactive process is experienced at the individual level also. Gardner describes healthy self-renewing people as those who both give and accept love. They depend on other people and are capable of having other people depend on them.
Passion is part of the self-renewed life. He says people of that bent know they must have conviction about what they are doing and if they don't, they need to find something they can have conviction about.
The principles he describes at the individual level have implications collectively as well. He goes on to state that "it is important that a society create an atmostphere that encourages effort, striving and vigorous performance" (p. 20). It is within social systems that individuals make their contributions. A lot of wise insight is provided in this book. He leaves the readers better off than when they picked up the book to read.

What a terrific book! What amazes me most is that this book was written over thirty years ago and still has so much to say to people today. A basic breakdown of the book is this: organizations and individuals must use innovation as a way of preserving and renewing their institutions. If one chooses status quo as a preservation method, one will do the exact opposite one intended: the institution will rot, not thrive. This book is great material for any leader who wants to understand the dynamics of change and the type of obstacles one will have to overcome if one wants to lead innovation.

A deeply perceptive (short) paperback on the self-renewal of individuals and societies; why some decay and others remain innovative and creative. Now in his 90th year, Mr. Gardner continues to teach at Stanford. In clear, concise terms the author sets down the factors that produce deterioration in people and societies. He maintains they are caused mostly by failure to deal with change. The factors? He names five.

SELF-DEVELOPMENT. Not just skills, but the whole range of our own potentialities for sensing, wondering, learning, understanding and aspiring. Gardner points out that this does not happen until one gets over the odd notion that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.

SELF-KNOWLEDGE. By midlife we are accomplished fugitives from ourselves. Our lives are filled with diversions; our heads stuffed with knowledge; we are involved with people. Result: we've never taken time to probe our inner selves. We don't want to know ourselves. We don't want to depend upon ourselves. We can't stand to live with ourselves. A better way is to develop a more comfortable view of who you are. It is the true basis of inner strength.

COURAGE TO FAIL. By the time we reach middle age, we carry in our heads a long list of things we'll never try again because we tried once and failed. Mature people learn less because they are willing to risk less. There's no learning without difficulty and fumbling, but if you want to keep on learning, you must keep risking failure.

LOVE. Develop the ability to have mutually fruitful relations with others. Be capable of accepting love and giving it; of depending upon others and of being depended upon. Develop the ability to see life through another's eyes and reach out to others.

MOTIVATION. A self-renewing person is highly motivated. The author points out that motivation isn't a fuel that gets injected into your system (motivation speakers won't do it); it's partly inner energy and partly the result of the social forces in your life. Gardner makes the point that we live in an over-verbalized civilization. Words have become more real than the things they signify and we need to return to the solid earth of direct experience because we are drowning in meaningless word tonnage.

"For those who have accepted the reality of change, the need for endless learning and trying is a way of living, a way of thinking, a way of being awake and ready. "Life isn't a train ride where you choose your destination, pay your fare and settle back for a nap. "It's a cycle ride over uncertain terrain, with you in the driver's seat, constantly correcting your balance and determining the direction of progress. "It's dfficult, sometimes profoundly painful."

For those who are able to achieve self-renewal, Gardner believes they will also develop a more realistic survival view of the world: "Sensible people will understand that there will never be a time when we are not in imminent danger. Cruelty, violence, brutality will be held in leash only by unresting effort--if held in leash at all. "Sloth, indulgence, smugness, torpor begotten of ease and flabbiness begotten of security will always lurk in wait." No society will ever solve the issue of the individual versus the organization. "No society will ever discover how to become civilized without running the risk of becoming overcivilized."

This is a profoundly thoughtful, penetrating piece on what makes you tick. Well worth your time.

Graphic thrills, wordplay and cosmic philosophy. This book is packed with the author's history of discovery of calligraphic possibilities, an reflections on similar structural themes. If you like Escher, you will enjoy Langdon.

I definitely recommand it to any Graphic Designer, Artist, Art Student, or just Art Lover! It's a completely different way to look at things...

Want to stretch your imagination? Get Wordplay and you'll never look at words the same again! John Langdon's intriguing ability with ambigrams will astound you. I find myself picking up my copy time and time again. Wordplay is a great conversation piece... worthy of a place of honor on any coffee table.

This early text might be his masterpiece or, if that's too grand, the key to the rest of the work.

You could probably retitle everything Garder wrote LIES! LIES! LIES! From the novels to the children's books, from the handbooks to the book on Chaucer. It has the properly shrill tone. It suggests what you'll find beneath the cover. A sham, a masquerade.

And it's probably his most postmodern: fragmentary, obsessed with the local, involved in pastiche, in appraisals of Mickey Spillane, in assaulting the icons of high culture (Thackeray and others), full of parody and play. Play. Play in a book by Gardner.

I have to tell you that I've taught his silly book for young writers to college students and they really can't stand it. It has the effect of shutting them up completely. It is about the poorest book on writing I have ever encountered. I'm now considering giving them this instead. They might relate to it more.

It charts the continuing development of a young writer who is urgently looking for something to believe. Desperately looking, really. Young writers might find a mirror in this. It might have the effect of comforting them.

I'm not sure how to recommend this, or to whom I should recommend it. Gardner scholars, certainly. Anyone interested in writing. Especially when that writer is, well, psychically troubled. There's a peculiarly voyeuristic angle (angel?) to this, or a psychoanalytic one, since Gardner is a very knotty, ambivalent subject.

This is a fascinating facsimile edition (with printed transcription) of a journal Gardner kept as a sophomore at Depauw University in Indiana. Well-known as the author of Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues, Nickel Mountain, and many other books, Gardner was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1982. Even for readers who have never heard of John Gardner, the journal will be a pleasant, interesting read. In a style that is at once self conscious and sophisticated, Gardner talks about school life, his reading preferences, the options open to writers of fiction, his opinion of various writers of the tradition. Early in the journal, he recounts some of the pranks and escapades that he and his dorm-mates staged at a small college in the 1950s, a sunnier time than now to be a sophomore. The humor in Lies! Lies! Lies! is, in fact, sunny and sophomoric: "Roger Getty is a sweet fella who never did anything more malicious than blow up a dietition's (sic) automobile (in 1951). Said Harold A. Peterson to Roger Getty in the hearing of John Robert (Goose) Berry, 'This place is too quiet.' Said Roger Getty, 'Uh-huh.' Said Pete, "Somebody should short-sheet some beds, or take screws out of doorknobs, or something.'" Already, along with the youthful tone, one notes the budding novelist's instinctively right sense of dialogue.

Lies! Lies! Lies! does not confine itself to college humor, fraternity capers, and day-to-day personal events; these are in fact in the minority. Throughout the journal Gardner experiments, sometimes explicitly ("Just for fun I think I'll burlesque the passage I just quoted."), with literary forms, conventions, language, techniques. While I doubt that anyone reading the journal in 1952 would have predicted the birth of The Sunlight Dialogues twenty years later, one would certainly have observed rumblings and stirrings that moved Gardner in the direction of that major and amazing novel.

Especially in the early pages, where he writes about his college life, Gardner's journal has a characteristically moral cast, a light-hearted but notable tendency to see life in terms of rights and wrongs. His fraternity pranks are "crimes," the perpetrators of which can't be held accountable as long as Gardner can claim he was "just telling a story." Remarks such as "Somebody's naughty, I'd say" are common. Even the title page of his journal is a comically moral display, and what are his (or anyone's) novels but elaborate, extended lies? A shrewd critic might see in the journal's moral tone the foreshadowings of On Moral Fiction, the book that got Gardner into so much trouble with his fellow novelists.

The journal offers interesting, sometimes extended critical commentary on such authors of the tradition as Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Jonathan Swift, and William Makepeace Thackeray, whom Gardner "hates with a beautiful, blood-dripping hate." "Reading Fielding," on the other hand, "is like going to a good play with someone who knows it well. Between the acts we have delicious commentary on the thing." Gardner also takes the time to analyze "a few of [Swift's] brilliant thrusts" and even has something to say about Mickey Spillane!

A good read in its own right, Lies! Lies! Lies! will fascinate and reward anyone with an interest in Gardner's life and work.

Following the very disappointing BROKENCLAW, here Gardner gives us a different Bond story--one with very little action, lots of plot, and yet, a real page turner. This is certainly one of the most political Bond stories, and it is concerned with issues in the headlines at the moment (or from 1991), namely the Gulf War and also the shaky state of the former Soviet Union. The story concerns a free-lance terrorist group--The Scales of Justice--demanding the trial of a former Nazi SS officer largely responsible for a massacre of Russian Jews in Barbarossa during WWII. They claim to have the real man, but meanwhile the French Secret Service have captured another man whom they believe is the criminal. An agent of Mossad--the Israeli Secret Service, a Russian KGB official, James Bond, the French Secret Service, and various other spies all engage in a plot to unravel The Scales of Justice. What they uncover is an ambitious Russian general with plans to sabotage the crisis in the Gulf War by sending a nuclear strike among other things to the United States. There is a lot of plot and very little action--pretty much all in the next to last chapter or so. And yet it is very carefully laid out by Gardner, who doesn't give us an unbelievable love story nor a completely ridiculous ending as he did in the preceding clinker BROKENCLAW. In BARBAROSSA Bond finds himself confused about his role in the mission, and he also finds that a number of the people around him are not who they seem. One of the best elements is the way Gardner weaves an exciting tale involving elements from real-life modern stories and situations in the world--the Gulf crisis and impending war, the state of post-Communist Russia and quests for power. There are a number of intriguing characters and some great scenes, such as M receiving the news that 007 has been killed. Bond is not the central figure all of the time--he finds himself neck-deep in a complicated web of intrigue. The writing is certianly an improvement over BROKENCLAW, as! is Bond's relationships with the opposite sex here. Some may be disappointed by the greater presence of story and by the fact that action takes a backseat, but give BARBAROSSA a chance indeed. It is very well written, tightly plotted, and frankly very exciting. Do not disparage the name Gardner when it comes to Bond. Although this is more of a solid thriller and less of your typical BOND story, it is a welcome addition to the canon.

In this action and intrigue packed adventure Bond works with a Mossad officer, K.G.B. officers, and a sexy French D.G.S.E officer to stop a Communist hardliner from taking power in Moscow and helping Iraq during the Gulf War just before coalition forces are about to move on Iraq.

A thorough understanding the underlying modelling techniques is essential for succesful application of computer simulation to problems in digital transmission.

One of only a handful of books on this topic, "Simulation Techniques" provides a detailed presentation of the subject. The book is useful both as an introduction to simulation, and as a reference.

I have worked with this kind of simulation for over two decades, and I can thoroughly recommend it.

This book presents an excellent guide to the basic aspects of Simulation Techniques. Wheras the book by Shanmugam et.al. "Sim. of Comm Systems", does address some aspects, the book by Gardner & Baker gives a different perspective. It gives a nice overview of 'sampled data systems', with good backgrounds for topics such as interpolation and synchronization. Overall it is an invaluable book to have to master the art of simulating signal processing systems.

THE BOOK IS EXCELLENT. I USED THIS BOOK FOR MY CHEMISTRY COURSE AND I FEEL THE AUTHORS DID A FINE JOB WRITING THIS BOOK. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS BOOK FOR ALL OF YOU COLLEGE STUDENTS WHO ARE MAJORING IN CHEMISTRY OR THE ALLIED HEALTH FIELD. THIS IS FOR THE REVIEWERS WHO GAVE THE BOOK ONE STAR. HOW CAN YOU GIVE THE BOOK 1 STAR WITHOUT EVER READING THE BOOK.

This is a very good text book. It has many colorful pictures to keep my interest when I was reading it along my course. Generally, it is well written and easy to understand.

This book is very clear and easy to understand. It 's good for Undergraduate student. For working problems, you should buy a solution manual for full understanding.

maybe the best bond on print to date. wished they would make a movie of it. it keeps you clued to the page wondering whats going to happen next.. a must read... get if you can.

This one is good. VERY good! One of the best villians in a long time. Plot is a little twisted, but you don't notice two much. Final challenge is the best part of the book. Stunning!

This is such a great book and i love it i baught it have reading it when i rented the book at the libary. Now i have read it 3 times and i am reading a 4 time write now. I never get sick of it! Broken Claw should be a movie! You have to read this book it is the BEST!

SMERSH is back in this intigue packed adventure that has Bond running from Ireland to Hong Kong. However, The Bond girl is ditzy and not as interesting as most of the women he usually shacks up with.

This is one of John Gardner's weakest bond books. VERY, VERY complex plot and hard to understand. 007 protects members of W.W.II spy ring. Kind of boring :(

Buy this and read it!! Grab something and hold on! Great excapism from the second author of the 007 books!

This book describes a relationship all of us has either heard about or lived with on some level. It is a well-written, captivating story. I could not stop reading. The great man or woman seduces, lures or entices the innnocent, less experienced man or woman. Neither is aware of the entanglement thay about to begin with each other although it seems obvious to everyone on the outside. The downward spiral that Gardner was on was a tragedy apparently no one could stop. Susan was only one of the victims of Gardner's alcoholic odyssey. I was happy to read that Susan was able to rise from the ashes and put her life on a different road. I wonder how his children and other family members endured.

This is a terrific, wrenching, oddly self-echoing book. I imagine a lot of women of will find it so. On Broken Glass is the true story of how, in the search for her literary self, one women raised in a genteel setting found herself willing grist in the mill of a self-destructive genius. The parable at the begining of the book, from whence the title comes, should prepare the reader for this story of the agony of physical, chemical and emotional addiction. It can not. Perhaps nothing can. John Gardner, an American Author-Icon and noted Medievalist, lead a troubling, talented, addicted and ultimately tragic life. This book, however, is not the story of John Gardner so much as it is the story of Susan, a niave and sensitive young writer with a taste for adventure, success, and a desire to live live to it's fullest. Struggling with her art and coming up against the barrier of love with a literary genius, Susan does everything to cope except battle with her own and Gardner's addicitions and impusive behavior. One week before her awaited wedding to Gardner, she hears the sirens of the summoned ambulance while on an errand in town, and finds the bridegroom has been killed in a motorcycle accident. Even though I knew what was going to happen through the book's deliberate revealing structure, it was still both terrifing and mandatory to read it through. It's not a story one can put down and walk away from. It nags you from across the room. It exhorts you to ensure you raise your daughters to emotional honesty. It is awful in it's truth, and is a story every woman should read.

As a big fan of John Gardner's "Mickelsson's Ghosts," I've wondered where the biographies and memoirs of this bigger-than-life figure were hiding. So I was looking forward to Thornton's book. I expected a riveting story; after all, Gardner led the world's most chaotic and colorful life. But Thornton - woo! What a writer! A reader will learn about Gardner, sure. But to call this a "book about John Gardner" is to do it a disservice. It should be a must-read for all of those with addictive personalities, for all of those in dysfunctional relationships, for creative and artistic people in all fields, and for all spiritual seekers. John Gardner may well have been a shaman. Susan Thornton, with this book, has become one as well.

If you're a beginning fiction writer, odds are that this book will be too difficult for you. Don't be misled by the glowing reviews. Sure, Gardner knows more about writing than most of us ever will. But his philosophical discussions and frequent allusions to classic literature make this book suitable only for the best of students. Browse it in the library before you plunk down your money.

This book contained some fascinating insights into the art of writing fiction, but frankly, I thought it was written very poorly(!). I did not flow at all and read much like some of the worst textbooks I've seen. He obviously has read a wide variety of books, but he assumes the reader is familiar with them.

I think this may be a good book for English majors or experienced writers, but not for young writers. For us young and inexperienced writers, he talks above our heads.

Even the style can scare a person away. He writes in the style of John Smith and others who could fit maybe one paragraph on a page. It's just not conducive to digesting the material.

In short, if you're a young writer, go trying "Writing Fiction Step By Step" by Josip Novakovich or something like that. But experienced writers, you may enjoy this.

I am sorry! A previous review had this to say: "...when I've used this text in my college intro to fiction-writing courses, it doesn't fly too well. My students are put off by Gardner's insistence that the young writer is always male, and they usually haven't read many of the works to which he refers...they feel it's impossible to do anything even remotely correctly." My opinion is that a good teacher will show his(or her :->)students the value of great tools that they can learn from, and put away their cheap opinions (bred by current politics and ideas) about very stupid little points in the style of writing. If we can't teach our kids this, then they will head in the direction of spoiled people who want everything on a silver platter. UGH to this reviewer. YEAH to this book