Delmar's Standard Guide to Transformers (or DSGT) is definitely worth owning.

It's a book targeted at vocational school students, but valuable to anyone that uses, installs, specifies, or services transformers. Every idea the book's text attempts to convey is supplemented by a drawing, photo, or illustration. The author left his ego out of the pages; at no point did I every feel talked down to nor did I detect any hint of academic condescension. Not to oversell the product, scientists and transformer company engineer/designers probably won't benefit as much, for the book is decidedly slanted to the users of transformers, not the makers of them.

After reading DSGT, transformers will be real to you, not just an abstract concept. The book begins with the basics of magnetism and a painless review of electrical theory, then starts building on that foundation. Unlike many EE text books that contain mostly page after page of verbiage and equations, this book has many large photos and detailed cut-aways of real transformers: tiny, small, medium, large, and enormous. Photos are numerous, all high-quality, professionally shot of every kind of transformer...but one.

This is a mild criticism, no photo is included of a common dry-type transformer of 30-60 KVA transformer very commonly found in most businesses and industrial settings. I would also liked to have seen a reproduction of a sample manufacturer's transformer data plate from this same size and type of transformer along with an explanation of how to read it.

After finishing the section on autotransformers, I was impressed by the depth of my personal ignorance and misconception on that subject!. The coverage of single-phase systems is quite good and 3-phase systems especially good. The most complete and concentrated collection of transformer interconnection schemes I've yet found is in this book.

When I first read this book by James, I was preparing to write an essay on Melville and his "isolatoes." James gives ample evidence for establishing the reasons why some of the protagonists appear elusive, enigmatic, and, of course, reclusive. I found this text quite helpful in its explanations of why Melville portrayed his male characters the way he chose; perhaps James own exile for passport violations sets up the framework for presenting his theories on the characters he analyzes. The work is a fine read, although the socialist commentary remains controversial.

C.L.R. James's analysis of Moby Dick brings the book to life and makes it understandable for a 21st century audience. You'll read "Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, and want to immediately run out and read Moby Dick and Melville's other classics. James argues that Melville used the novel to explore dramatic changes in the fabric of American culture including the rise of industrial capitalism, the international working class, and the increasingly savage character of political and industrial life and leadership.

C.L.R. James wrote this book while he was interned with the newest generation of "Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways" on Ellis Island awaiting deportation. James's fate--that of a foreigner who offers the finest existing interpretation of one of America's greatest books and is still deported--serves as a cautionary tale for our own times. James concludes, "What the writing of this book has taught the writer is the inseparability of great literature and of social life."

This book is more than a little bit of early Postcolonial writing. The intoduction by Donald Pease is new, and the last chapter - an autobiographical sketch and personal appeal by James - was omitted from a previous edition. In terms of literary criticism, this is what Pease has to say about James and his writing: "He was one of the few critics who emerged from the Third World in the 1950's and traveled throughout Britain and the United States generating what are now called post-colonial readings." The real value of this book however is in its brilliant reinterpretation of MOBY DICK.

Rather than see Ahab and Ishmael as representing respectively "totalitarian" and "American" cultural themes as critics in the 1950's saw it, James offers a vison focused on the Pequod and its crew. A view in which the MARINERS, RENEGADES & CASTAWAYS of the ship were at the mercy of their Captain. In James' interpretaion the Pequod is a factory ship and the crew are the workers. Ahab is no longer a mere sailor but is now illustrative of a "Captain of industry."

I agree with the reviewer from New Haven regarding the peculiar situation James found himself in. The established interpretation of a Cold War allegory was in keeping with the times in the 1950's. If James or Melville himself were writing today, the interpretation on offer here - rather than something to be persecuted for - would be considered far more plausible than the narrow and blinkered view of the 1950's mainstream critics.