Michael Todaro writes from a left-of-center perspective and is more ideological than most textbook writers. However, he presents other points of view and presents them pretty fairly in my opinion. And I have to say that he scores some pretty big points against the neoclassical theorists by showing that their assumptions are frequently at odds with reality.

While some of Todaro's more stridently ideological statements can be annoying, I know of no other book that provides such a comprehensive, well organized, and engagingly written introduction to economic development.

Beautiful songstress Sharon Sharpe provides a hot addition to the list of living characters, as the madman's future target.

Read The Music City Madman, and you'll quickly embrace the back wall of your mind, as Stephen J. Hill takes you on a fast and slick journey into public madness. Five Stars - Webmaster of Twilight Surfers

The devotional includes not only Hill's take on scripture, but also stands on the shoulders of many of Christianity's greats to drive God's Word into the hearts of readers.

It's arranged in a "daily" format and includes four scripture selections at the bottom of each page that lead you through the whole Bible in the same time it takes you to get through the book.

Buy it and prepare for God to change you!

The figure of Kokopelli is found chipped into desert stone at various ancient sites throughout the American Southwest. It also appears in contemporary forms, painted on canvas, etched into glassware, printed on Christmas cards, and sculpted into candelabra, in presentations that range from the holy to the kitschy. What energizes the frequent appearances of the enigmatic hunchbacked flute player? The authors suggest that the centuries-old drawing power of this archetypal figure may lie in both its protean nature and its spiritual origins.

Hill acquaints the reader with images of Kokopelli as hunter, warrior, healer, gambler, fertility bringer, and even mythological insect who appears in some Native American accounts of the Creation, by presenting a broad review of the available literature on the topic. Wisely, he presents Kokopelli's multiple manifestations without seeking to narrow them to a definitive representation that would deny the complexity of the image. His smart narrative contains a mine of information that yields a pocketful of nice nuggets with each perusal; and his readable style turns them up without a lot of digging.

In stunning visual images that complement the text, Montoya presents Kokopelli as an avatar figure who both generously offers and thankfully celebrates the receipt of the gifts of a bountiful earth. To Hill's scholarly analysis, Montoya adds the cultural insights of one steeped in the kind of ceremonialism from which Kokopelli likely first emerged, and the imagination of a skilled contemporary artist. Their collaboration is a complimentary one in which the text illuminates the paintings, and the visual images add an intuitive content that transcends the text.

Hill is frank about his intention to produce a hybrid text that is concurrently an art book, a study of Native American spiritual beliefs, and a review of Kokopelli literature. The challenge in such an undertaking is to do it seamlessly. How that challenge was met produced my only caveat, and a small one considering the ambitious nature of the project. The book's divisions make it seem a bit episodic, particularly the insertion of a short chapter by art critic James Bialac that might better have been placed in an appendix. At the same time, the holistic approach to the book's subject matter is an essential part of what makes it original and interesting. Hill and Montoya have added an important spiritual component to an art/cultural study without becoming simplistic or sappy, a laudable achievement.

Kokopelli Ceremonies provides some satisfying depth in an area in which much of the available material only skims the surface. Although the book is brief, it contains a well-selected bibliography for those readers who wish to further pursue the elusive Kokopelli through the avenue of cultural studies. For the text-challenged and those who prefer to see beyond black and white, sixteen gorgeous color plates provide a visual feast. Leave Kokopelli Ceremonies out where you can reach for it often--you'll probably make frequent journeys following the elusive notes of the ancient pied piper.

Box's contributions to statistics are diverse and large. He developed many practical statistical designs including the central composite design. He is responsible for evolutionary operation and wrote a book on it with Norman Draper. He has also made major contributions to response surface methodology.

With Gwilym Jenkins he systematized the application of the ARIMA models and led the development of software for easy application of these model building techniques. He championed the concept of parsimonious models and insisted that model building should be an iterative and continually evolving technique. He contributed to the area of control through his stochastic time series models and found ways to incorporate it in manufacturing process control.

With David Cox he developed the Box-Cox family of transformations. These simple power transformation can be used to make the data have an approximate normal shape. he gave a prescription for how to estimate or pick the power to use based on the data.

These enormous contributions can be found in the volumes of collected works that Tiao and others have edited. His contributions can also be seen from his books on evolutionary operation, time series analysis, automated process control, empirical model building and response surfaces, and practical experimental designs ("Statistics for Experimenters").

However in the decades of the 80s and 90s from age 60 to 80, instead of retiring, George Box took on the challenge of developing a center for quality and productivity at the University of Wisconsin. This volme, edited by Tiao, Bisgaard, Hill, Pena and Stigler provides a collection of articles by Box. These are mostly articles written in the 1990s covering the subjects of A) continuous process improvement, B) designing experiments to gain quality information, C) sequential investigation and discovery (including response surface methods), D) quality control and E) learning how to identify and reduce variation or be less sensitive to it by constructing robust processes (i.e. processes not sensitive to minor changes in process parameters). The articles are mostly directed toward quality issues and are mostly articles that were published in the 1990s or 2000 with a few from the 80s. Some are important technical contributions but many are also very philosophical.

George Box is one of the great thinkers of the 20th century and his philosophy on statistics and scientific inference is as important as his many technical contributions. There are 46 articles in total 4 on topic A, 12 on B, 10 on C, 11 on D and 9 on E. Each topic area has a brief introduction identifying a unifying theme in the papers in that section.

Box has a terrific sense of humor that often comes out in his lectures and sometimes in his writings. One gets a good appreciation of it by reading the three songs on statistics that are included in Part F of the book. This is only a sample of several that he has written that are parodies of familiar tunes. Of these three my favorite is "There's no theorem like Bayes theorem" to the tune of "There's no business like show business."

There is a nice bibliography in the back of the book that is followed by a biography on Box and a list of his books and articles published between 1982 and 1999. This includes 3 books and 91 articles! Believe it or not he published even more in his earlier years.