This book made me feel like a fly on the wall in the Jackson household. The author does a great job of revealing Jermaine's dysfunctionality. Yet she still did so without bashing him, keeping in mind he is the father of her children. A must read for Jackson curiosity-seekers. The book is a bit one-sided. The author freely discusses Jermaine's infidelity, but fails to go into detail about her adulterous relationship with him during his union with Hazel Gordy-Jackson.

I've been an admirer of the Jacksons for many years, and it's so sad to hear of the layers of dysfunction that exist in this family. At the very least, this book talks about the other Jacksons besides Michael, which is a refreshing change. It is also the story of a woman who discovers that even celebrities are not immune from problems, and that fame and fortune are no substitutes for a healthy home life. What is WRONG with these folks? According to the author, it seems that Marlon and Tito are the only ones among the 'other' Jacksons who have made a life for themselves apart from sponging off of Michael and Janet (thank God Marlon and his wife Carol are still together; the smartest thing they did was to leave the whole dysfunctional bunch to themselves at Hayvenhurst!).
I have seen Jermaine Jackson on Feed the Children Informercials, defending his famous brother in interviews, and heard of his supposed conversion to Islam. I sincerely hope that by now he has dealt with his issues of abuse and womanizing, and that he is paying child support for the two sons he had with the author. I would love to see Margaret Maldonado write a revised version of this book, with updates as to whether or not things have improved between her sons and their father, as well as how she has rebuilt her own life.

This is a wonderful story on how Margret tells the tails of her ''memories of madness'' while being married to Jermaine Jackson and her experiences while living in the Jackson Family home in Encino California. For people who are or have always wanted to know what it would be like to live in the Jackson family home or who have always wanted to know what the Jacksons are like,this book is a must read for you. I am 13 years old and was still intrested in it. So if it can please me. I am absolutly,positivly sure that you will like it too.

The description of the book has more meat than the book itself. This disappointing book is a 15 short chapter breeze through a multitude of subjects, and does not linger long on any single subject. There are some nice diagrams and ten thousand foot views crammed into 374 total pages (the page count vs. chapter count alone should indicate how superficial this book is). An example is the 21 pages devoted to weighty subjects encompassing project management tasks, configuration management, verification and validation, quality assurance, decisions and risks. Any one of the topics would have merited at least 20 page in a serious book on systems engineering. Useful to sales and marketing types who are selling systems engineering services, and executive management who might like a quick overview of systems engineering. This book is useless for technical professionals.

This book is a great introduction to the system engineering process. It might be lightweight for a practicing system engineer, but for an IT professional whose background is service delivery, production support and data center operations this book opened a whole new world.

An example of how this book opened my eyes is the way configuration management is explained, and how it fits within the system engineering process. IT professionals with my background are subject matter experts in change control; however, few of us (certainly myself) realize that change control is a subset of a much larger picture. Every part of system engineering it covered in sufficient detail to understand the basics. This understanding created, in my case, a desire to further research some areas in greater detail. Overall, seeing the process from a high-level view provided some unique insights about what is missing in IT management that can be filled by borrowing from our system engineering brothers and sisters.

I found this book valuable because I did not have to wade through a dry manual and sort out the details in order to get a big picture of system engineering. The brief, succinct chapters and excellent illustrations provided me with a coherent approach to my own job. In fact, I personally believe that applying system engineering principles to IT service delivery and operations management will significantly improve the IT profession. As such I highly recommend this book to my peers and anyone else who needs to see the big picture of the system engineering and how its principles can be related to their job.

Stevens' Systems Engineering looks at the place ofrequirements in a world which consists of complex systems in a highlycompetitive marketplace. This may be the commercial world or equally the military-industrial world in which systems must literally do battle with their rivals.

Stevens and his co-authors (two of them from the UK's Defence Evaluation and Research Agency) know that in this environment, many systems fail, very often because they were inadequately thought out, and often also because their development projects were poorly managed. Chapter 1 begins "The world is currently gripped by changes more intense and rapid than those triggered by the ndustrial revolution..." : we are at once swept into the rich, complex, and dangerous life of real system development.

For Stevens, the problem in systems engineering is complexity, and its mastery is, as the subtitle implies, the key to success. The design of complex systems demands hierarchy - of organisations, of projects, of contracts, of documents. Hierarchy implies interfaces: if you split a system into three, you probably create three interfaces between the component subsystems. Interfaces in turn imply specialisation: someone develops the hardware; someone else, the software. Similarly, someone (the customer) writes the requirements specification, while someone else (the developer) tries to meet those requirements. This, like the prime contractor - subcontractor relationship, consists of a customer and a supplier: the marketplace reaches right into the core of system engineering.

The book therefore covers a startling breadth of subjects, but always with the same practical vision and with the same conceptual tools. The first few chapters broadly follow the European Space Agency's now-classical PSS-05 software engineering standard life-cycle phases: user requirements, system requirements, architectural design, integration (of subsystems) and verification, management.

(Requirements are involved in every one of these phases.) Once the reader is grounded in the basics, the next chapter discusses how to tailor the simple life-cycle just presented. A tell-tale section entitled 'smaller systems' gives the game away: the systems in the authors' minds are a great deal larger than the PC 'systems' beloved of advertising copywriters.

The second part of the book (chapter 8 onwards) starts by looking at more realistic life-cycles, based on the management of risk: when is it sensible to go ahead with something? The answer is, when success can be assured even if the bad risks materialize. That can only be guaranteed if the risks have been quantified. Concepts of requirement priority and benefit, risk, and cost loom much larger in the marketplace than technical issues.

The remaining chapters examine management in multi-level projects (hierarchy again), software and systems, prototyping (to control risk), information modeling, projects and the enterprise, a chapter on how to improve and a summary.

Each chapter consists of a double-page title/table of contents, overlaid on some crisp pencil artwork on the theme of engineering progress (from Leonardo's hang-glider to an agile jet). The text is broken up by plenty of simple flow diagrams illustrating life-cycles, trade-offs, business processes and information models, as well as short summaries of what the most important system documents should contain. Key points are highlighted or bulleted within the text. The chapters end with a page or two of realistically tricky exercises: the answers cannot be coded in C.

The helpful appendices include a list of websites: Systems Engineering comes with its own website which contains pointers to several related sites, and itself includes 'proposed' answers to the exercises which end each chapter. Students will find the glossary helpful and comprehensive. There is an extensive list of very varied references, and a detailed index. This book is a carefully worked out description of the process of developing any large, complex, and risky system. The book can also be read as a polemic: an impassioned plea for the discipline to graduate from its narrow roots, whether in academia or in quality control. The concluding paragraphs make it clear that system engineering is a human process, a 'game' in which there are losers as well as winners, something that can be played well, and that absolutely must be played better to limit the risks and losses that are still all too common....

The book will be of interest to several quite different communities: in particular development managers, clients having large systems developed, and students of system and software engineering will all find much that is of interest here. The book may also be a useful supplement (or perhaps an antidote) to the academic perspective on RE. Everyone should have access to a copy.

My Old french teacher gave me this book to read when i was about 14. He was of the opinion that reading helped improve concentration - he was right. The book, i do not think, would appeal to the average reader today, it is very long and heavey going - but not taking anything away from the writer - it is exquisitly written. However, there is a part in the book, i think it is a father telling a son a story, or something like that and it will go with me to my grave. It's about an adventurer who, once he has summeted one mountain, moves on to the next and when he has traversed one desert looks for another, and so on. He is never content unless he is moving, seeing new things and having new exoeriences, but then he runs out of mountains to climb and forrests to explore. I will not give anymore away except to say that i would read the book again - just for that one little story.

Shortly before Richard Jefferies first became ill he wrote two children's books, Wood Magic and Bevis, published in 1881 and 1882. The latter has been widely regarded as a classic boys' book and, based on Jefferies' own childhood at Coate, it follows the adventures of two boys, Bevis and Mark. They first 'discover' a large lake close to their home which they imagine to be a vast inland sea surrounded by a jungle inhabited by savages and wild beasts. After re-fighting the Battle of Pharsalia (between Julius Caesar and Pompey) with their friends, Bevis and Mark build a raft and cross to an island in the lake. Equipped with a few provisions and their own home-made shotgun, they live among nature for several days, learning the arts of survival and much about themselves in the process. Bevis is a celebration of the vigour and freedom of a childhood spent in the countryside, 'where there was magic in everything, blades of grass and stars, the sun and the stones upon the ground'.

Richard Jackson, The Dismantling of Time in Contemporary Poetry (U. of Alabama Press, 1988)

Yes, I did finally finish this book. Took me two days shy of nine months to do so, but I did.

It should be no surprise from the title of this work that Richard Jackson is a deconstructionist. All meaning, all perception, is arbitrary. Keeping that in mind, especially in the first sections (where it's not quite so evident), is a very good idea when reading Jackson. Here, he takes the work of six poets and focuses on the way they view time to resolve the seeming paradox of how narrative poetry, which takes place within a specific timeframe, can achieve timelessness.

The easiest way to write this review is to say he succeeds, but harder is to get across exactly how he does that. It strikes me that in creating a book that attempts to resolve the question, he has actually created a different conundrum. As poetry's purpose is to express the inexpressible, Jackson has also expressed the inexpressible in his deconstruction of poetry (which, if course, makes it very hard to express). There isn't necessarily a specific method Jackson uses in his analysis, but he ends up with the feeling that, yes, the question has been answered.

Much is made by one reviewer on the book's jacket about the book's accessibility. Caveat lector. The person writing the blurb has been reading too many academic journals and not enough popular nonfiction, one thinks. The Dismantling of Time in Contemporary Poetry is, arguably, an easier read than most pieces of literary criticism, in that it doesn't require the reader to sit with a dictionary and have to look up three or four words per page. It is still, however, thick writing that requires a great deal of concentration to understand, and from that point of view, it is just as difficult reading as, say, Kristeva's Pouvrirs de l'Horreur or Greimas' Structural Semantics.

A good, solid piece of research for those who like to go below the surface of their poetry. *** ½

an exciting book, students will learn about pavlovian and thorndlike conditioning to the deepest terms

First of all, let me confess that my remarks are not entirely objective since I was a member of Captain Jackson's Mike Company during his command. His recollections are far clearer than mine, perhaps due to our very different stations. You see, Captain Jackson was a 30 year-old Marine officer with six years experience, while I was a 19 year-old PFC and LCpl, operating as a grunt rifleman and radioman in "Mike-2-Charlie."

I was fascinated by Jackson's account the circumstances leading up to his entry in the Marines, and his very remarkable career as an officer prior to his tour in Viet Nam. Captain Jackson provides the reader with a clear picture of life in Mike Company in those days, although from a quite different perspective than I had.

One difference of opinion I have with the author is his assessment of my Platoon Commander. Captain Jackson describes an incident in which the Lieutenant beats a Marine on the back with a steel bar, but dismisses the event as the officer merely trying to admonish the young man without really inflicting any pain. Well, I witnessed more than one incident where this officer either kicked or beat men in the head with a steel helmet in his hand. The opinion of the men under his command was that this "warrior" was a vicious and arrogant prima donna.

While the book will be quite interesting to students of the war in Viet Nam or those who were participants, the very poor (or nonexistent) editing done by the book's publisher is quite distracting. Virtually every page contains errors in punctuation, spelling, word usage, etc. My background as a Mike Company Marine serving under Captain Jackson allowed me to easily ignore these small issues. All in all, a very interesting and readable book.

I hope no one else has the same bad experience as me so this is just a warning. I spent around 20 hours trying to get the example in chapter 2 to work. I've installed apache/tomcat with IIS several times and it has never taken more than a couple of hours -point being figuring out struts shouldn't take very long. After struggling with this book I got another book "Apache Jakarta-Tomcat" and read their 10 page exerpt on struts. The 10 page explination in the Apache book helped me much more than the 63 pages in chapter 2. The explinations were much more clear and the struts frame work was very simple to understand. After reading the apache book I went back through the example found in chapter 2 and found SEVERAL errors in the source code! I wasted a lot of time because I had thought I installed struts incorrectly. It was frustrating to waste so much time just because the source code in chapter 2 was incorrect. If chapter 2 had explained struts more clearly I probably could have caught the errors in the source code. Chapter 2 explains about 500 ideas with no real concrete examples to show you what it's talking about. Then it speeds through an example (that doesn't work) and it doesn't really show you at all how everything is finally tied together.
To be fair, the book does have a disclaimer in the beging which states that it's for more advanced users. So if you aren't very very familiar with struts don't start with this book. Once you get past the struts nightmare the rest of the book is pretty good. I wouldn't say the explinations aren't very good but the ideas they present are very usefull.

I hope no one else has the same bad experience as me so this is just a warning. I spent around 20 hours trying to get the example in chapter 2 to work. I've installed apache/tomcat with IIS several times and it has never taken more than a couple of hours -point being figuring out struts shouldn't take very long. After struggling with this book I got another book "Apache Jakarta-Tomcat" and read their 10 page exerpt on struts. The 10 page explination in the Apache book helped me much more than the 63 pages in chapter 2. The explinations were much more clear and the struts frame work was very simple to understand. After reading the apache book I went back through the example found in chapter 2 and found SEVERAL errors in the source code! I wasted a lot of time because I had thought I installed struts incorrectly. It was frustrating to waste so much time just because the source code in chapter 2 was incorrect. If chapter 2 had explained struts more clearly I probably could have caught the errors in the source code. Chapter 2 explains about 500 ideas with no real concrete examples to show you what it's talking about. Then it speeds through an example (that doesn't work) and it doesn't really show you at all how everything is finally tied together.
To be fair, the book does have a disclaimer in the beging which states that it's for more advanced users. So if you aren't very very familiar with struts don't start with this book. Once you get past the struts nightmare the rest of the book is pretty good. I wouldn't say the explinations aren't very good but the ideas they present are very usefull.

It is definitely not a beginner book.

But all the chapters are good even though it was written by different authors.

The section on refactoring in the beginning set the tone of the book. Good authors. Would recommend this book to anyone working with jsps. Very easy language to understand too. The reason I gave it a 4 is 'coz I understood it more only after I began working with jsps for a while.

The main reason I purchase this book is because I am the HUGEST college football fan. I thought the name sounded pretty catchy and was interested to check it out.

When I finally got around to reading it, I found out that it was basically some guy telling stories about his growing up and going to Marshall to play football. He wasn't even a very good football player and the book got it's title from a conversation with one of his coaches after they crossed paths years after he graduated form Marshall. He tells so many boring stories about him and his friends growing up together. If this book can get published, then so could any book by anyone who ever played college football.

The author has done an excellent job taking the reader back into the time of his youth in Huntington and Marshall College. The reader will be drawn to the past and the memories of their own youth. Unfortunately, not only are the fonder memories brought to mind, but also the social injustices of segreation and the unsettling years of the Vietnam War. Most will find this book very enjoyable to read, and the trip back to their youth entertaining and mind opening.

Jo Carson lives and works in East Tennessee, and her work, in this book, has been taking overhard conversations around her, modifying the language into something that approximates folk poetry, and writing it down. Normally, this is a recipe for disaster. However, Carson's ear is finely-tuned enough that what comes out more often than not does resemble both rural dialect and poetry. And that in itself is more than enough reason to consider this a noteworthy book. But every once in a while, the stories she tells are the kind that tug at the heart without the naked appeal of obvious emotional manipulation (though there's certainly some of that here, too; if you go into this not expecting to find the cliched "boy, I wish people wouldn't treat East Tennessee folk like hicks," you're going to be disappointed-- but Carson does amnage to keep it to a minimum). A good, solid volume that's worth a quick read. ***

Don't dismiss the complexity of these "simple" poems too early. Jo Carson's STORIES I AIN'T TOLD NOBODY YET gives voice to an often misunderstood culture, and when we listen to this voice, we learn that economic differences are overshadowed by similarities of dreams, wants, and concerns. Carson's collection of poems might be described as an oral history in verse. These aren't the rhyming poems of greetings cards or the poised verse of classic poetry anthology. These are poems in the style of someone talking to you, or, perhaps even more powerfully, the style of overhearing others in a candid conversation. (Carson gives credit to overhearing many of these dialogues.) The result is simple language addressing complex themes. Loosely divided into main sections like Family and Work, the poems center on rural peoples' perspectives. Sure, economic hardship is a common theme, but more universal themes of family, responsibility, and dignity are also addressed. Yes, the simple language of the poems allows for a quick read. But a reader would be wise to give the collection a second read. And a third. And so on. There are layers to these simple dialogues, and even lessons to be learned. Literature can sometimes bridge the gap of misunderstanding between groups, cultures, etc. Although simple in language, this is literature that can do just that.

All reliable evidence indicates Sacco and Vanzetti are emblematic of rather low-level, low-life anti-intellectual types. They were clearly guilty but unfortunately (for them) they committed their vile murder in a time when decency still reigned (even in Massachusetts) and fair trials were still the norm of the day. Lost in all of this is the name of the poor victim. You can read entire essays railing against the evils of racism,etc. and not find the name of the victim. The poor fellow is lost in the fray of leftist babble. In the end, justice was served and the two immigrant anarchists who, after all, sought the destruction of American society were put to death for their evil actions. Still, reading this compilation of their letters serves several useful purposes: 1) it clearly indicates how stupid they were; 2) it reminds one that even evil nuts have families whom they care about (can one imagine reading the prison letters of Dr. Joseph Goebells "I love you, deary and the little kidders too."); it demonstrates once and for all the boorish mentality of the nutcase (admittedly a redundant phrase)leftwing; 4) it demonstrates that liberals have always been stupid.

Polenberg of Cornell University The introduction to The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti (Penguin Books 1997) by Professor Richard Polenberg is richly informative. The publication is timely and useful. Readers must ask whether these letters offer a clue to the moral character of convicted murderers Sacco and Vanzetti. John Nicholas Beffel, radical journalist who roomed with chief defense counsel Fred Moore during the Dedham trial, declared in “The New Republic,” December 29, 1920, that Vanzetti was a “philosophical anarchist.” In “The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti” (March 1927), Harvard Law School Professor Felix Frankfurter called Vanzetti “a dreamy fish peddler” (p. 101). Bruce Bliven, “managing editor of the liberal New Republic” (a phrase from American National Biography), wrote of Sacco and Vanzetti: “Their faith is philosophical anarchism.” See TNR: June 22, 1927, p. 121. When an unknown reviewer in the April 1929 issue of the anarchist journal “The Road to Freedom” argued that Upton Sinclair’s novel “Boston” was the work of an unfit historian, Sinclair replied angrily in the June issue: “It is a fact that Sacco was a ‘Militant Anarchist.’” Anarchist editor Hippolyte Havel agreed. In the August 1929 issue of “Lantern” Walter Lippmann wrote: “By every test that I know of for judging character, these are the letters [The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti] of innocent men.” Note: The brackets are by Lippmann Frederick Allen (Only Yesterday, 1931) said Vanzetti was “clearly a remarkable man--an intellectual of noble character, a philosophical anarchist of a type which it seemed impossible to associate with a pay-roll murder.” Alfred Jules Ayer, Professor of Logic at Oxford, reviewing Francis Russell’s 1962 book on Sacco and Vanzetti, wrote: “Both men were active anarchists of an idealistic kind.” Ayer said the letters of Vanzetti revealed “a man of great swetnesss and nobility of character.” See New Statesman: 5 July 1963. Sacco-Vanzetti scholars who met at the Boston Public Library on October 26 and 27, 1979, reminded readers that time is a great corrective. Professor Nunzio Pernicone, on the second conference day said: “ . . . these men [Sacco and Vanzetti] were not philosophical anarchists; they were genuine, militant revolutionaries.” See “Sacco-Vanzetti: Developments and Reconsiderations--1979,” the 1982 publication by Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston. In “Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background,” a 1991 publication by Princeton University Press, Professor Paul Avrich wrote: “Both [Sacco and Vanzetti] were ultra-militants, . . .” See p. 161 for Avrich’s citation to Sinclair’s letters that acknowledge the militancy of Sacco and Vanzetti. On page xxxix of his Introduction, Polenberg calls Edmund M. Morgan a historian. In fact, Morgan is called Royall Professor of Law at Harvard University on the back cover of the 1978 reprint of “The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti,” that 1948 book by Joughin and Morgan that Tom O’Connorr said had educated a generation of college students and professors. Polenberg’s assertion (p. xxxix) that Joughin and Morgan, . . .believed Sacco and Vanzetti innocent, . . .” must be severely qualified. Morgan said Ehrmann’s book, “The Untried Case: The Sacco-Vanzetti Case and the Morelli Gang,” failed to convince him that the Morelli gang, not Sacco and Vanzetti, had committed the crime at South Braintree. Morgan also said that if Sacco and Vanzetti “were alive today [1934] and were to be tried again, . . . and if a verdict were returned, it could not be set aside as contrary to the weight of evidence, at least against Sacco.” See Harvard Law Review, January 1934. Morgan has more telling concessions in the book he and Joughin published in 1948. On pp. 55-56 he calls Vanzetti’s Plymouth trial fair, the verdict just. On p. 46 Morgan writes: “ . . . this cross-examination, taken alone,

tends strongly to show that a group of Italians had framed an alibi for Vanzetti and had coached this bright youngster [Beltrado Brini] to tell his story with details which would tie in with the incidents related by other witnesses.” On pages 48-49 Morgan says Vanzetti’s statements on the Plymouth trial are suspect. A handbook on the two disputed trials is “Kill Now, Talk Forever: Debating Sacco and Vanzetti,” an ebook by 1stBooks Library. Soft cover issue will be available before the end of summer....

This is the most important testament to a now largely forgotten tragedy of American politics. Sacco and Vanzetti were essentially convicted and executed for being unpatriotic foreigners, regardless of the crime they were accused of [for which no specific evidence was presented against them]. They waited for seven years in prison before their execution, during which time they wrote these letters. Their English, though it improved through the years, was never fully accomplished. But the results are extraordinary. The letters express ideas about life, society, faith, politics and human feelings, and the often clumsy and misused language actually makes the expression more lucid and more beautiful. The path of trial, appeal and final sentencing runs through clearly, and as the end approaches the letters are inexpressibly heartbreaking, as when Sacco asks his wife to tell his daughter "that I love her so much, and again, so much." This book has been in and out of print since the late 1920's, and is often unavailable in libraries because patrons steal it. It is a blessing that Penguin has brought it back.