beautiful, compelling...a great study of one of the most interesting rebel artists of our time. everyone should know who howard finster is!

Fans of the odd and eccentric will find Howard Finster's Paradise Garden fascinating and entertaining. The quality and selection of photographs of the garden is fantastic, and Finster's statments regarding the vision behind his creation are intriguing. This book is definitely worth examining for its unusual scope and content.

Robin Jenkins - maybe unfamiliar to many American readers - is one of Scotland's most humane and accessible writers. His novels explore the origins of human good and evil and "The Changeling" follows the tale of Tom Curdie, a young boy taken from the slums of inner-city Glasgow by his well-meaning middle-class English teacher. Mr Forbes takes the tough young Tom on afamily holiday away from teh city in an attempt to prove that nurture, not nature, is the dominant force in establishing both personality and morality. The text explores the dilemma faced by Tom as he struggles to work out whether he fits into this new effete world, or in the dark and violent, drink-sodden existence he has temporarily left. Mr Forbes, too, faces some hard thinking about his own ideas as it becomes increasingly obvious to him that his social experiment is by no means as clear cut as he thought.

As an introduction to the style and concerns of Jenkins you could not do better than "The Changeling". The author's highly visual description and philosophical approach to the format places him in the great European tradition of the novel rather than in the sometimes insular British tradition.

Read this book ... and once you've read it, try any other Jenkins novel. I suggest "The Conegatherers", "A Love of Innocence", "Fergus Lamont" and ... any others! These are distinctly Scottish novels, but their concerns are accessible world-wide.

Incidentally ... "Lighthouses and Ropes"? Read the novel and get the symbols!

I ask my students to use this book in an anthropological course on globalism. It is a gold mine of information--historical, economic, social. It is a must-have reference book for the historically and geographically challenged. However, the information is aging. I fervently hope that there is an update in the wings.

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I completely agree with the review 'A well written book for BJ modelers' (so please read it first). This book has some notable shortcomings, however. While very well done, it contents might be considered an edited paraphase of Box & Jenkins classic text entitled Time Series Analysis, and therefore adds very little to existing BJ literature. It often discusses solutions in terms of what "computer programs" will usually do for the model builder, but it does not reference specific programs or completely elaborate on how to create these programs from scratch. There are software packages out there that can help in this regard (MATLAB for instance), but this title was written in 1983 and predates all the modern model prototyping tools. It shows its age with graphs and tables generated from line printer output. The first 300 pages are "concepts", the last 300 are "cases" (as the title suggests), and there is significant overlap. This kind of repetition can be good if one is learning something for the first time, but it can also be deceiving if one were to assume the 600 page content to be as thorough as similarly-sized texts.

It heavily references B&J 2nd edition with page numbers (sometimes quotes), B&J now being out in a later edition. As a result, the person that pays $200+ for this book (cost at the time of this review) will likely still need a copy of Box & Jenkins Time Series Analysis (and ultimately some kind of software). If you've already invested in a copy of B&J and found it unbearably intimidating or otherwise unintelligible, then this might be a book you can use. I would give it a strong 4 stars in that case, but I suspect that there may be less expensive books that might serve the same purpose. If the price ever comes down to under $50, this would be an excellent supplement to B&J.

Pankratz gives a nice and non-rigorous description of Box-Jenkins methodology. He does an excellent job of illustrating the technique through real data examples. The best features of the book are the large number of examples for which Box-Jenkins time series models are fit. It also gives the beginner a nice undertanding of "how to do it" but not "why do it".

I found this book to be very well written. Everything is clearly explained and it covers just what the title suggests. Each chapter ends with a summary and there is one short chapter which contains a list of practical rules for setting up the forecasting models. Then there are 15 detailed case studies to show you how to put the theory into practice. Many plots are included showing the result of simulations. This is a BJ model builders book. If you are seriously interested in time series models of the unvariate type, consider this work. The book is geared toward a student or individual with a modest background in statistics.