The Photographs are awesome! Many of the photos take up both pages, which are so clear and gorgious. The old castles are so neat and look completely beautiful in the middle of Ireland's green moors. It is DEFINITELY a book worth buying!

I recently moved to Ireland, and my wife and I wanted something to base our site seeing. It has been a great help in deciding our weekend trips. The pictures depict Ireland correctly. WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET!

This is an essential book for anyone of Irish descent or who simply loves and wants to learn more about Ireland. It features brief historical information and many large breathtaking photos on premium glossy stock.

In the Ancient sites section many mysterious tombs with huge rocks are shown. Next, you get a look into Ireland's stone monasteries & abbeys featuring majestic stone crosses. Grand Castles are then explored.

The following sections on Ireland's gardens & landscapes are truly dazzling. The colors are so vibrant they make you feel as if you're there. A few 3-page fold-out panorama's are included.

The cites chapter highlights Ireland's buildings including many impressive photos of doorways, churches, & cityscapes. Lastly, the Irish people are shown playing sports, celebrating holidays, & performing traditional dances & music.

The Crucifixion in Irish Art presents 50 examples, from 800AD to the 20th century. A full page photograph faces a single page of text, for each. Most are black and white photographs with four or five color plates depicting stained glass representations and contemporary oils. Yet so much in such a small book! The introduction places the art works in Irish history from the Celts on to today. The development of the crucifix as art is emphasized, as one is compared with the following. It was my good luck to stumble on this volume in Ireland and it inspired much of my trip as I plugged through fields, disturbing cattle, to locate some of the original crucifixes in the book.

This is a first-rate digest of Harbison's larger work, the definitive work on Irish High Crosses. My wife and I stumbled onto the book in a Kells bookstore. She was looking for examples of crosses featuring griffins -- and they are noted herein! Harbison maps the route to all the ancient crosses and gives a thumbnail sketch of iconography. Also a great gift to lovers of things Irish and arm-chair travelers. Thank you, Peter Harbison and artist Hilary Gilmore!

Smart Alliances clearly articulates the complex subject of strategic alliance in simple terms. The book also includes step-by-step "best practices", in general terms, to mitigate the uncertainties and variability (or increase the probability of success) in the outcome of an alliance. There are sufficient details in the book to provide the reader with an insight to the critical issues in formulating successful alliances as well as common pitfalls. While the book is short on case examples, it quantifies its position throughout the book.

When compared to other strategic alliance books (e.g., De La Sierra's "Managing Global Alliances", Hamel's and Doz' "Alliance Advantage", and Yoshino's "Strategic Alliances"), Smart Alliances gets pasted the (sometime obvious) generalities and assertions, as well as just observations found in these books. Smart Alliances provides the details for formulating and selecting the right partner(s), and getting to the execution of an alliance in the strategic context.

Booz.Allen & Hamilton consultants John Harbison and Peter Pekar make a compelling case for the following:

(1) Strategic alliances have consistently produced a return on investment that is 50% more than the average on investment that the companies produce overall.

(2) There is a positive correlation between experience in alliances and return on investment per alliance. In other words, there is an experience curve that one needs to go through.

The ambitious goal of this book is captured by its title: provide leaders with a repeatable, pragmatic framework for alliance planning and implementation. Through this framework, the experience curve might be shortened.

The framework is based on the authors' consulting experiences as well as surveys of more than five hundred major corporations.

From a Board of Director perspective, alliances create value but how the investment community reacts to alliances will vary depending on the structure of the alliance and the industry within which the alliance is formed. Pages 85-86 offer a useful framework for Board members when questioning CEOs about alliance efforts.

Based on our own experiences in developing an alliance of international firms offering senior level career consulting services as ours, we think the book is a useful addition to your bookshelf.

But it is a dry, abstract book.

In relation to our own experience, we think the authors did not devote enough space to the unanticipated pleasant and unpleasant conceptual leaps that one must make in day-to-day alliance work. The term "transfer of technology" does not capture these unanticipated leaps.

For example, we had certain expectations about an alliance we formed in 1987.

These expectations materialized but only weakly.

On the other hand, the alliance created opportunities we had not planned for. These opportunities included leveraging our participating in the original alliance to yet another alliance that was even more fruitful. The alliance forced us to create new services and gained leverage in areas unrelated to the original alliance objectives.

We call these events happy surprises.

Both the happy surprises and the unhappy surprises are worthy of more mention.

They are one of the reasons to enter alliances.....and one of the reasons to be careful about them!

I have been following Harbison's and Pekar's work for over a decade. I have also attended their annual alliance conference in NYC sponsored by the conference board. For those not familiar with their work, they have completed 10 alliance studies covering the top 1,000 global companies as well as a recent study sponsored by the Association of Corporate Growth of the top small & medium size firms in the U.S. and Europe. Their work is the cutting edge. We have passed out copies to our executive core. I highly recommend this book which discusses just the tip of their work and is based on a number of their studies. To become more familiar with their thinking, I would suggest the reader also go to the web site "smartalliances.com" to read some of their latest Viewpoints on the subject. Simply, they are the leaders in this area. Being an executive in a major high tech firm that does mutiple alliances, I can state that no other consulting firm or academic institution has amassed such a wealth of information or experience on this important subject.

City Pack Dubliin has good material and excellent photographs...but if you are planning to stay in Dublin for more than a day and do any sightseeing on your own, you'll want a more substantial guidebook. Not that I didn't learn quite a bit from this one. I learned, for instance, that the church where we will be attending a wedding was built by Cardnial Newman and is overwhelming in its Byzantine interior. But we will be in Dublin for several days, and I would have like more detailed maps for walking, more specific information about transportation options, and more restaurant and hotel choices. I also would have like to be able to find out if the Shelbounre is the hotel where Scarlett stayed in that most unsuccessful sequal to Gone With the Wind.

This is a wonderful introduction to the history of pilgrimage in Ireland. It is accessible (and entertaining with it); it is full of facts and folklore; it has marvellous plates. It is a companionable book: I felt that I was listening to a guide who not only had the story of each particular site but could relate them to pilgrimage patterns elsewhere in Ireland and abroad. The author obviously knows and loves his subject.

Coming as I do from an ancient place of pilgrimage - the parish of Glencolmcille ("the valley of the dove of the church") in County Donegal - I had never before experienced a yearning to go on pilgrimage in any other county in Ireland, apart from the Reek/Croagh Patrick in County Mayo, but this book has given me itchy feet!

One of the many nice things about this book is the author's generous praise of other writers. Go on buy this book! You don't have to be religious or spiritual or new-agey to enjoy it!