The stock market barometer is a completely unecessary defense of what the stock market is. It provides an incredible amount of uninteresting and completely trivious information. It is definitely NOT a must read.

William Hamilton was the successor (both at the Wall Street Journal and in expounding the Dow Theory) to Charles Dow, and the one who clarified the Dow Theory as most people understand it today. To students of the Dow Theory, and of Wall Street and Investment history in general, this is a must-have volume. Also see works by Robert Rhea.

This book was immensely helpful in my practice. Dealing with affective disorders can be trying, but this book lays out different methods for those with bipolar disorder to cope effectively.

This catalogue is an art book with 69 paintings by 61 artists of the nineteenth and early 20th century, "that focuses on the avant-garde movements of Paris..." It showcases The Beck Collection, part of the permanent collection of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which - following its recent expansion - is now the eighth largest in the United States. (NOTE: Most - if not all! - of these works are on display in the new $83 million, 192,447-square-foot Audrey Jones Beck Building.) --- I took this book to the museum, and compared its reproductions to several pieces of the artwork while seated before them. I took notes. My thoughts follow: (1) This book displays the paintings sans their frames... anyone who has gone through the arduous process of selecting a frame is aware that the frame color (and background wall!) as well as the lighting trick the eye into seeing some colors more intensely than others. Several works 'looked different' and the discrepancy seemed due to the absence of the frame. For example, Jean-Baptiste-Armand Guillaumin's "Le Seine a Paris" (1871), framed in a ornate, sand-colored frame decorated with acanthus leaves, appears much gloomier in reality than it does in this book. In this volume it appears quite 'naked'! (2) Unfortunately the colors and darkness/lightness of the reproductions frequently vary enough from the originals to be noticeable. Camille Pissarro's "La Gardeuse d'oies a Montfoucalt, gelee blanche" (1875), for instance, is much lighter in the original than in the book. The reproduction's blues tended to the purple and even the sunlit areas seem in shadow, whereas in the original they are possessed of that piercing winter light that filters down during a cold mid-afternoon. The dying leaves in the tree are muddled and dull compared to the painting itself. In Mary Cassatt's "Susan Consolant l'enfant (c1881) the oranges and blues are very true to the original, but the entire reproduction has a yellow cast, unlike the painting. (Curiously enough, the absence of a frame does NOT make any difference in one's enjoyment of this work!) (3) I was quite upset to discover, looking at Gustave Caillebotte's "Les Orangers" (1878), that a full 1/8th of an inch (of the reproduction in the tome) had been CROPPED off, both left and right! The left side was not distracting, but on the right the damage is serious, since a chair, with hooped top and round seat, are tangent to the edge of the original, but are cropped off in the book. For those (like myself) who enjoy finding the geometries in a painting (Golden Rectangles, squares, etc), this makes such a study impossible... Incidentally, this painting is also marred by the shift problem noted previously; the entire reproduction is lighter than the original. (The poppies look red in the painting, and orange in this work). --- All said and done, the work is unique, and printing technology is not perfect. This is NOT a bad book; it just needs to be used with some understanding of its limitations. The format incidentally is that each reproduction (right page) is faced by text (left page) describing the work, the artist, etc. --- Hopefully visitors to Houston will take the time to see the originals: they are gorgeous!

This was Peter Taylor's last novel and it begins with a mystery: "In the Tennessee country of my forebears it was not uncommon for a man of good character suddenly to disappear. He might be a very young man or a middle-aged man or even sometimes a very old man. Whatever the case, few questions were ever asked. Rather, it was generally assumed that such a man had very likely felt the urging of some inner compulsion and so could not do otherwise than gather up his chattels and move on to resettle himself elsewhere."

The narrator, Nathan Longfort, first sees his older "cousin" Aubrey in 1916 on a funeral train headed from ?Washington, D.C., back to Knoxville for the burial of Longfort's grandfather, an accomplished senator. A ward of the senator, Aubrey is also the illegitimate son of a mountain woman and the senator's brother.

The novels follows Longfort's preoccupation with, and attempts to explain, Aubrey's appearances and disappearances over the years. Longfort flashes back to his parents, his schooling, and teaching career, and his own wife and son, but he always returns to Aubrey.

For the family the death of the senator represents the fading away of an era. Aubrey takes on mythic stature. To some degree, he becomes emblematic of the modern, rootless man, created in his own image, running away from the old mouth and dispensation. Without the senator, Aubrey must make his own way in the world.

The narrative reflects this sense of dissipation. "Time is nothing," Longfort quotes a Chinese philosopher and painter. "Character and experience and precious memory is all."

A retired art professor who wanted to be an artists, Longfort shuttles between past and present, attempting to buttress piecemeal discoveries against his own motives and discontents.

In this sense the story is thoroughly modern. Where the given and fixed have been abandoned, characters become increasingly self-conscious and wayward, having become mysteries to themselves. "Gone to Texas" reads a sign on one lonely homestead. That Longfort was raised without a father merely worsens the ambiguity.

At the same time, Taylor shows that the rest of the Long fort family does little better than Aubrey in sustaining a legacy of order. The manners they claim to cherish, but abuse, confine more than they provide. To them Aubrey is simply an outsider from ignoble birth and a target for easy jokes.

An unobtrusive author, Taylor develops these conflicts and tensions, often leaving the reader, like the main characters, very much on his own. Here are two lives, each falling short in some way but each eliciting sympathy. This complexity makes them more real is a measure of Taylor's talent. With its quiet prose and nudging toward sometimes discomfiting revelation, In the Tennessee Country is a solid work.

There is a variety of views in which the past can be seen and Stonehenge has been a subject and inspiration over many centuries and especially in the period of the 80s.
"Who owns Stonehenge", is the result of a discussion about the site, at the world Archaeological congress, in Southampton, in 1986, within the larger framework of the question, who owns the past?
Due to the different backgrounds of the authors, this work approaches Stonehenge from five directions, a fact that makes the book more interesting and at the same time less subjective.
The first chapter, written by Christopher Chipindale, an Archaeologist, who also works on the history of ideas about the past, discuss issues of physical Stonehenge, as well as the intellectual history of the place and claims that have been made to it.
The next four chapters contain four individual views: P. Devereux has researched into lays and associated geomantic subjects. He attempts to show the connection of the site to the general picture of sacred ones. Peter Fawler is a professor of Archaeology and talks about aspects of archaeological constrains to the site. Rhys Jones has a particular interest in the sacred sites of the aborigines in Australia and he relates cases from there to Stonehenge. Lastly, Tim Sebastian, the Secular Arch-Druid(!)
These four chapters offer to the reader an interesting chance of thinking about the complex index of Stonehenge, as it is not just an archaeological site, but has a lot more meanings to a variety of many people.
The sixth chapter gives the whole story of the events that occurred there during the 80s and the last chapter looks to Stonehenge of tomorrow and makes some suggestions that concern a multi-purpose view of the site.
Beside the references and the index of names, there is also an additional reading compartment, for those who might want to explore further the themes of this book.
The work is well illustrated, with lot of b&w photographs, drawings, paintings, maps & posters.
"Who owns Stonehenge" is a different way of looking into ancient sites, a way, in which many more sites around the world should be approached, as it is a quite holistic approach, covering, as far it is possible, all aspects of this particular case, from its archaeological importance until administrating problems and social conflicts related to it. The writing of the book allows even to non experts to get the general idea of Stonehenge as an ancient religious and sacred site.
However, it can also be seen as a just good presentation of what Stonehenge really stands for, while a case like that requires further discussion.

Hello! I am Italian so sorry about any mistakes. (If you have comments, write to Giovani_Bassi@Hotmail.com) This is yet another General Chem. clone. Linus Pauling and the Swedish Gunnar Haegg (=Hägg) once started this tradition of elementary chemistry pedagogy with writing two magically good and inspired books, but since then nothing has happened, except for the dawn of lengthy prefaces, lists of reviewers, increase in format, thickness and the many hundreds of colour pictures and endless pedagogical aids (many on CD or in supplementary volumes) that just have to explain the simplest things over, over, over, over and over again with the aid of distracting colour diagrams and flow-charts, reducing the concentration of facts vastly, as well as logical continuity and coherence. General Chem. is today an extremely elementary course that probably does as much good as bad to people. It explains not in one case the physical basis of the discussed phenomena or from where the crude formulas used have come, which destroys one's sensitivity and criticism - and often interest. (As it did for myself, who already after one year of chemistry courses had learned to hate the subject and its ever-practically-minded view on the world. Only after three years of physics could I return to chemistry again, but at that time I was equipped with the tools needed to put the chemical situations into a broader perspective and felt independent of other's explanations. This is a possible path to follow, you know, you really interested students!) This is really very unsatisfactory and it would at least be less confusing for the more curious student, if someone could just put down, honestly, all the facts (that it has been agreed that one must learn in the course), say what simplifications that had been made in these, and show briefly how the ten or so central formulae can be employed. Then the students would know why they get stuck all the time, when they try to "see what is going on at the molecular level" - they do not have all the needed pieces, simply, which the G-chem. books so boldly dare to suggest in their simplifications - and not waste a minute more time than required by their colleges on various doubts over the funny presentation! Chemistry is the disicpline concerned with change, and the description of change tends to involve differential equations, derivatives, integrals etc. - none of which we see in G-Chem and therefore the subject cannot allow one to "gain eyes to see with". All the dozens of books with this same title have similiarly named and ordered chapters, an identical lay-out, give the same analogies, the same cute comments, discuss the same'ol classic compounds (when millions of fantastic compounds are available that are far more interesting than graphite...) and provide the same problems and the same solutions to them. I seriously recommend studying Atkins's little "Elements of Physical Chemistry" (Oxford) parallel, for all those who are taking General Chemistry. (Advanced students will purchase the "Physical Chemistry" proper, too.) It contains about the same information and is no more deep (no more advanced maths either, except for the occasional high-school integral), but ties all facts together in a coherent way - which mostly has been possible due to the avoidance of cluttering the pages up with useless pictures and review boxes. Learn all in this thin little book and you can feel that you have really done the best of the situation with your first chemistry course and are well-prepared for the coming ones. Atkins's "The Second Law" is also very useful and brilliant. The most advanced problems are found in Petrucci-Harwood "Gen. Chem." from Prentice-Hall, a rather good G-Chem clone. The simplest book is Umland-Bellama's "Gen.Chem." from West Publishing. ALL suffer from the perverted idea of diluting ten formulas into 1200, or so, pages, however. (Pauling and Haegg/Hägg remain the very best, as said before.) It is somewhat disappointing that the truly great scientist Atkins agrees to put his signature on a book that is so incoherent. Atkins is very intelligent, creative and inspiring as a writer and lecturer, but in his textbooks (except for those recommended here, "MQM" and "Quanta") he just happily follows the standard, affixed college concept and walks in the leash of his publishers' demands, leaving no possibility for a reader to even guess that Atkins is the author.

I am in sweden - in a local university liberary - They had just bought in the book - And I am sitting here chocked about it. This is exacly what I wanted - exacly I realy can't say anything more than I have struggled for years with this subject - and now finaly I can see that the clowds disapears Its a real pleashure to have this book in my palms - And I beleave that the time will stand still for a while - VERY GOOD WORK!

I am an instructor who has learned to be skeptical of general chemistry textbooks, so this book was a pleasant surprise. Jones and Atkins have a terrific art program, but more than that, the art is creatively designed and tied to the text. The result in my experience is deeper student understanding. The problem-solving support is extensive. It has to be seen---and used---to be appreciated.

This is by far the best general chemistry textbook I have ever seen if you are interested in students really learning concepts. Instead of glossing over the concepts, the authors introduce a rationale for learning a topic, help students to visualize it, then show how concepts are connected to problem-solving in the toolboxes. Finally, the worked examples have explicit strategies for every problem, which helps students to understand what they are doing when working the problem. They can then test themselves on the self-tests.

The book has a large number of interesting case studies that some students really like, especially if they are majoring in another subject. My students also liked the summaries at the ends of the sections and the checklist at the ends of the chapters.

I must agree with the previous 2 reader. Not a good book. It did cover the basic, but did not go far enough to help you to pass your exam. (I did get A by using other references.) Ex: 4 lines to describe how to do redox reaction. Poorly describe how to draw molecular structure.

THis text book contains a substancial amount of information and is presented in a straight foward manner, but some of the information is not correct. Chloric acid is NOT soluble!

I may be mistaken but i do not think there is such a thing as chloric acid....

It's just as easy for a Christian to say that all other religions are wrong and that they're all lying as it is for a Pagan and that is exactly what Peter Jones has demonstrated here.

I am not sure if the critical 'reviewers' actually read the book, but it is a very helpful guide to distinguish the neopaganism (yoga, Western forms of Buddhism, New Age, etc.) we find fashionable today among our cultural elites and the Christian world view. The only drawback is that the title is too confrontational to attract readers who have sided with neopaganism to consider the book's good arguments as to why they shouldn't.

Dr Jones work was not intended as a tool of hatred or intolerance. It is a vehicle to demonstrate that the Biblical Christian worldview is uniquely different from all others and nothing more. The book with great accuracy details step by step the different way Christians and Non Christians (pagans) view Creation, Reality, Ourselves and our place within what has been created. Does he make assertions that pagans are wrong? Yes, but that is not intolerance, rather it is a mature realization that two the different worldviews reject one another. Is that biased? Yes! We are all biased. Ken Ham said "We are all of us biased, Its just a matter of choosing the best bias to be biased with!"
The cacophonies of opposition seem to miss the point of the work. Criticism without sighting specifics is like cooking without heat, the products of your efforts are unfinished, tasteless, and will quickly spoil. "Gospel Truth Pagan Lies" engage specific Ideas with polite clarity. We are all free to reject such ideas, but in doing so by using words and phrases such as, intolerance, Bigotry, and Teaching hate, without a fragment of effort devoted to exposing or refuting the errors or problems with the authors ideas one proves themselves either lazy or irresponsible.

Here is an example, which may demonstrate a topic in which the two opposing worldviews will never reach concord. Aspecting, Channeling, Spirit Guides or Relationships forged during Astral Projection are all terms the New Age (Pagans) may employ to describe what Christians refer to as Demonic contact/possession. We are talking about the same thing (Summoning specific non-corporeal entities) but the two worldviews hold dramatically conflicting judgements as far as the outcome of such undertakings. The Christian view is based upon the absolute prohibition of such activities outlined clearly in the Bible. The Pagan viewpoint is for the most part based on personal decision, with the only absolutes being self imposed and ultimately even those changeable based upon feeling.

Dr. Jones did not threaten anybody with hell; however; The God of the bible does promise that end to those who choose to reject him. The Bible and the worldview that it teaches make clear that we humans are creations and not the creators of the universe. One may reject that view. In doing so we find we have given birth to a new view, that makes two, each with its own set of consequences. That profound division I believe is what Dr. Jones is trying to communicate and that's all the book really says.

Have bouhgt many WROX books and found this to be by far the hardest read, made simple things difficult and ponderous (suffering from verbal diarrhoea), referring too much to later content. Go read something else even from the web it'll save you money and time.

I liked the book and it's approach in introducing to XML Application Development. Unfortunately, Microsoft has withdrawn msxml.exe on which most of the content of the book is based. I am not sure if there is any plan, by the authors, to help the developers to get around this and yet, refer to the book for it's excellent approach to mastering XML Technology. I, particularly, liked the chapters on XSL, and practical applications (case studies), including CDF application. I, however, did not like the XML-Data chapter so much. This is mainly because it really does not provide the learning steps as much in detail as other chapters. I wish the author had followed the method used in authoring of CDF-chapter. The book does not provide step-by-step procedure (including that of tools required, setting of tools, personal web server etc.) for testing the source codes provided in the book. It is left to the imagination and the exhaustive work, expenses of time and communications for advice etc. of the learner of this new technology. It took me several hours before I could successfully test the case study source codes. Also, the author/publisher should provide after-sales support due to lack of the basic tool (msxml.exe) on which the entire book is based. Publisher should withdraw this book from the distribution/sale. It seems the author is planning to publish another book in lieu of this, later in Year 2000. Hope the publisher will be kind enough to give some discounts to the buyers of the current book.

This is a typical wrox book: covers mostly microsoft material, good code examples. You can read about XML from resources on the web, but this book gives you an idea on how actual applications may be implemented, at a time where there is little published browser support. 4 stars for the material, 1 for the timing.

For each person who read this book I'd like them to pick up a copy of Vivianne Crowley's, A Woman's Guide to the Earth Traditions. Unlike the text contained in this book,Crowley's examination of a host of spiritual paths promotes tolerance and understanding, not blind hatred.

As she herself notes, killing, maiming or despising another human being simply because their concept of the Divine doesn't look quite the same as yours, is ludicrous!

To dispute the religion of another
is the mark of a narrow mind
O Lord! O Magician!
With whatsoever faith or feeling we call on Thee,
Thou art pleased

I suggest you stop saving souls already and listen a little more clearly to what the Creator is trying to tell you. It is pure arrogance to think you and only you know how everyone in the world should approach spirituality.

I started reading this book and was confronted with a lot of isms--monism, theism, syncretism, etc. and thought to myself that this is over my head and I subsequently put the book aside. It was a gift so I thought I'd better give it another try. I grabbed my dictionary and started over and I am so very glad that I did. This is a ground-breaking work that pulls the mask off of the spiritual warfare being waged in and around our churches, especially here in the United States, ultimately for the hearts and minds of every man, woman and child on earth. Gnosticism (the need for hidden self-proclaimed knowledge for salvation) parading as New Age spirituality is revealed to be Old Age paganism dressed up in modern garb. There is not one area of our lives that has not been touched by this deadly heresy. Read about:

The Destructive Generation: From Berkeley to Washington;
The Sexual Revolution as Government Policy;
Destruction of the Christian Culture;
The Same Old Alternatives: Christianity and Paganism;
Christian Liberalism: Crisis and Conversion;
Christian Liberalism and Ancient Gnosticism: Long-Lost Cousins;
Dismantling the Bible;
The Use and Misuse of Scriptures;
"Pro-Choice" Hermeneutics;
Genesis 1-3: A Feminist View of the Garden;
The Text: Anything You Want It To Be;
God Versus Goddess (Sophia);
The Heart of Gnosticism is the Heart of Paganism: Man is God;
The New Sexuality (Androgyny, Homosexuality, Feminism);
The New Spiritual Experience;
The Gnostic Sacraments;
Queer Millennium.

Not a casual read (it helps if you are well-versed in all the ism theology) but worth the extra effort. As the author states "The 60s came of age in the 90s" and just think of the "me generation" now all grown up and running the world, injecting that world-view into every aspect of society with a special emphasis on their "New Age" spirituality. What a drag. -- Moza

Beautiful book. Professionally and honestly and lovingly depicts the age-old garbage that has plauged mankind (YES! mankind!)and is repackaged for today. The pea-wits that attacked the book are so self-centered they failed to realize the author isn't writing about you. This book is about the so-called Christians that populate churches and believe in new-age drek. Infecting their toleration of every ill imaginable. Beautiful scholarly book.Put down your prejudice and read it. You will be impressed.