Words don't do justice to the work & imagination of Ray & Charles Eames! This is a beautiful book covering the creative minds of two of the best modern furniture designers. Filled with great pictures, & very complete text of their design & the many other things they created besides furniture.The Eames' are my biased favorite, if you love modern 50's furniture,fabric, & art you must have this book.They worked for the infamous Herman Miller company, who has reissued many of the Eames furniture pieces available again today.As creator of the modern molded fiberglass chair, & molded plywood, the Museaum Of Modern Art has Charles' chairs as Art, which they are & comfortable too!More than comparable to their Danish counterparts,this couple brought us sleek,smooth lined furniture that will take us into the space age for at least another fifty years!(check out A.I.-incredible backgrounds of modern furniture!)

This is a wonderful addition to any coffee table! I learned so much about this creative couple that I never knew before. The pictures are A+ & very well done. If you are a fan of Eames furniture, you cannot live without this book!!

The Eamses were innovators in many fields such as Architecture, furniture design, film, etc. But to my mind their gretest acheivement was the definition of a new profession, 'Graphic Design', or as I beleive they called it, a 'Design Office'.

Up till then, there was 'Commercial Art', and 'Art Departments', and whatever styling was applied to an industrial product was done as an afterthought, and usually by an amateur.

After The Eamses, a new recognition that the design of appearances was a craft and a profession, and not just an art, was born.

This book demonstrates in many ways, how Ray and Charles Eames applied this and many other insights to the various fields of endeavor that they entered and changed forever.

It was a privilege to learn the subjects of SEM and TEM from the the author of this book himself (David Joy). This is an excellent book which starts from the basics and it depends on the researcher how deep he wanna go. The book provides in depth analysis as well if required. Great resource book.

Goldstein et al have written a book that serves as an excellent introduction to the SEM, and is also a formidable reference. When I took SEM at NC State University, it was taught from this book. Between our professor and this text, I learned the ins and outs of the SEM, and I keep the book within arms reach whenever I'm at work.

Goldstein covers everything from the basics of operation, through image formation, sample prep, usage in particular fields of study -- everything!

If you get one SEM book, get this one.

This is an excellent textbook for graduate students majoring in Materials Science. The text is easy to read, and accompanied by plenty of photographs and schematics, is easy to understand. Covers almost every aspect of SEM and X-ray micro-analysis e.g. underlying science, technology, and practical use. Each chapter begins at a basic level and gradually develops the subject to intricate detail, and depending on the level of study one may skip chapters or part of a chapter.

This is an outstanding book despite being over 10 years old. The clarity of the text and examples is far superior to the average text. One of the few books I have been able to easily learn new material from without having the benefit of a class to attend.

This was my textbook for Water Resources during Engineering School in the Spring of 1985. I have the Third Edition. It is well worn, underlined, highlighted and annotated, evidence of a very useful book! At my current position as Water Engineer at an Air Force Base, it is at the top of my shelf with my most used refernces. The right mix of theory and application. You will need a basic knowledge of Fluid Mechanics to use this text effectively.

This book is one of the few books that introduced me to Water Resources Engineering as a student and I am still using it more than twenty years later as a University teacher and a Professional Consultant!

It contains some hydrology, some probability, some engineering economy, and some water resources planning to supplement the material on hydraulic machines and structures, water resources projects such as hydropower, wastewater treatment, irrigation, river engineering/navigation, flood damage mitigation, and water supply. It also has worked examples, exercises, and useful tables.

This book does not overload you with verbosity. It just gives you enough to make a topic sufficiently clear for one to proceed with using the same in real situations.

Using accurate, verified documentation, confirmed by subsequent Congressional hearings, Douglass, a career NSA employee and US War College professor, records the 1960s Soviet buildup of South American drug cartels and their infrastructure. The goals were to obtain funding for local wars of liberation, destabilize the US military, US inner cities and youth with drugs, and compromise South American politicians. Ironically, liberals sometimes like this information, as it provides a clear rationale for the US countermeasures, which allegedly included similar tactics.

The shocking inside story of how the Soviet Union bosses contrived, plotted, planned and then put into action a world-wide drug offensive against the West would be unbelievable if the writing were not so scholarly and well-documented. Douglass's careful work that gets at all the horrible details of the story of our undoing by drugs is worthy of careful reading and rereading by intelligent people everywhere. Beginning with the very effective initiative against our soldiers, up to the present, there are very few families that have not, by this time, been touched by the awful epidemic. But embarrassment, guilt and other intensities apparently have crippled our abilities to even talk about the problem, much less fight an effective war against it. And then there is our government's impotence if not collusion. We are in denial and in the closet. It is time we came out. This unique book helps immensely in that effort. By seeing how the drug plague is really a war being waged against us, we are in a position to come out of the closet of denial and begin to take appropriate action. Red Cocaine is a must read for parents, helping and medical professionals, religious people, educators, employers, the military and our law makers and enforcers. Roberta Gilbert M.D.

I recognize that their are no easy solutions to the plague of drugs. It has spawned numerous criminal and social pathologies that erode the freedom and stability of the West. America's war on drugs has only contributed to the growth of a police state, which has been wholly ineffective at curbing the drug trade while eroding our constiutional freedoms in the process. One solution is that the public began to understand the concerted communist involvement in the drug trade, both past and present. Reading this book is a good way to start.

Dr. Joseph Douglass brings the hidden truth to light about the large Sino-Soviet role in the drug trade designed to demoralize and weaken the West. He does a good job at tackling a difficult and largely untouched subject where credibility is at stake. Red Cocaine proves to be straight-forward, well-documented and meticulously footnoted by Douglass. Douglass offers disturbing revelations from interviews with high-ranking communist defectors within the Soviet intelligence establishment.

Perhaps in the next decade, when the U.S. escalates its drug war against "Marxist Narco-Terrorists" in South America, people will rediscover this ever timely ground-breaking classic.

This book is just perfect. It's very well written. Conrad shows an understanding of the predicament of women of his time. Conrad advances the plot though the voice of the characters, who tell a story, which involves another character telling a story, etc. At one point the tale is six levels deep; but such is the skill of Conrad that you do not notice and are never lost. One of Conrad's two or three best. A book I was sad to end because I was enjoying it so much.

I cannot believe that there are no customer reviews already for this spectacular novel - full of intruiging situations and wonderful characters - certainly the best Conrad female character I have read. Conrad is a wonderful writer in style and the manner in which he tells a yarn - how then has this novel become so 'lost'? It has wonderful lines ('Don't be in a hurry to thank me,' says he. 'The voyage isn't finished yet.' p22 Oxford World Classics), great insights (women respond to the smallest things, which immediately had me nodding in agreement from my own experience), spectacular descriptions ('Yes, I gave up the walk [along a cliff top with the intention of killing herself],' she said slowly before raising her downcast eyes. When she did so it was with an extraordinary effect. It was like catching sight of a piece of clear blue sky, of a stretch of open water. And for a moment I understood the desire of that man to whom the sea ans sky of his solitary life had appeared suddenly incomplete without that glance which seemed to belong to both of them. p231). The characters are admirable in behaviour sometimes, victims sometimes, regrettable in behaviour sometimes, or just plain confused - just like real people. But one thing I really like is the way the narrator of the story is an observer, barely a participant of the events being described.

This may not be the perfect novel, but I urge you not to miss it. The chapter 'On the Pavement' by itself is worth the read!

This book is an essential read for civil/water/hydraulic/water resources/environmental engineers who need a bit more hydrology necessary for understanding the hydrology applied in their disciplines.

The book defines hydrology and proceeds to indicate the essential difference between applied hydrology and just scientific hydrology. Beginning with the traditional presentation of the hydrologic cycle, all the components of the cycle are dealt with in more detail in the subsequent chapters of the book to indicate the applications involving each and appropriate examples given.

Non-verbose explanations with adequate real examples are used in presentations of meteorology/solar radiation, rainfall/snowmelt, evaporation, infiltration, streamflow and hydrographs/unit hydrographs, groundwater occurrence and hydraulics, probability distributions/extreme value analysis/design floods/storms, river morhology, sedimentation, computer modelling, flood routing by hydrologic and hydraulic methods, and introduction to applications. These are by no means all the main contents - but just indicative of the variety of included essential topics.

It may be old (my edition of 1988) but still contains all the hydrology an engineer may ever need.

This is an excellent book out of the 12 I've consulted for my final year dissertation, when I ordered if from Amazon I was torn between this one and the Adriana "felt hat: A life told" but the costumer reviews put me off. Having read Adrianas "JB the art of cooking" from the library, buying this book from editor Gene Ray was certainly the best way to go. The book is similar to, but more accessible than, the Critique of Beuys from the tate series. It contains however, the vital "Twilight of the Idols" by benjamin Buchloh which, if nothing else reveals some of the misconceptions and horrors that beuys provoked...but it offers another article by Buchloh, written 20 years later that acts almost as a retraction. the presentation and the much needed balance of argument makes this book an absolute must for anyone, from any level of understanding to purchase. A great, essential read on Joseph Beuys.

Mr. Ray's Weekend Novelist is an excellent reference book. However, I wouldn't necessarily use it as a template for writing a novel . . . unless you plan on writing novels similar to Mr. Ray's or to Ann Tyler's "The Accidental Tourist", the novel that Ray uses as an template throughout citing it as a perfect example of a well written novel.

For those new to the daunting task of writing a novel, this book can pigeonhole you into thinking this is the only way to tackling writing. I came across that dilemma. After getting halfway through the book, doing the exercises and starting to write my own novel I began to abandon my old habits of writing and started to adopt Mr. Ray's. I started to feel that I couldn't put pen to paper UNLESS I completely plotted my novel, developed my characters and set up every scene. This didn't work for me. The natural flow I usually feel when writing was taken away and eventually I completely gave up on the process returning to my methods of writing: sitting down with a pad and pencil and allowing the ideas to flow. Then fine tuning the story only after I have a huge chunk of it written and some idea of what I want to convey. Not all novels are structured in Mr. Ray's manner, not all novels use Aristotle's incline to develop plot and storylines and not all novels can be written in 52 weekends.

Not to say this is a bad book at all. It's a wonderful reference book full of ideas and exercises to help you strengthen your writing. For example, it never occurred to me to create backstories and timelines for each of my characters giving them dimension and realism. Ray also offers exercises to help you set up scenes, write dialogue, write action and plot your novel. I now find that I refer to these exercises to help me develop my writing but I no longer follow the program.

This book is a great starting point for those interested in writing a novel but do not have an idea how to start (one more thing: you definitely have to have some idea of what you want to write BEFORE you start). However, for experienced writers you will find that this book is more useful as a reference guide rather than a program to follow.

Robert J. Ray's "The Weekend Novelist" can help just about anyone realize their potential as a novelist. I don't think any of us out there can drop everything to become a professional novelist (unless you're born into wealth, I guess). We all have to work sometime. So, Mr. Ray puts together a program that will allow you to not only write a novel on the weekends but also write a novel with depth and meaning.

Before I read this book, I wrote lots of short stories and the start of a few novels. I used this book to turn some of my old ideas into the reality of a manuscript.

I felt myself getting bogged down at first by following his program of hashing out the details of the lives of the characters. But I quickly realized the commitment that is involved in writing a novel. It's important to develop meaningful characters/structure before you start writing.

Thanks, Mr. Ray! I highly recommend this book to any aspiring writer.

I wish I had studied this book before I ever put pen to paper. I used to think that if only I had something very interesting to write about, then all I would have to do is start writing, and a great story would magically appear. Robert Ray helped me understand just how much planning and preparation go into writing a good novel, as well as what to focus on when plotting your story. There are three things in particular that this book taught me which were especially helpful.

First, this book taught me that what really drives a novel is the characters and their relationships to each other and to events. I looked at Grisham and Clancy and thought that smooth prose filled with action would make a novel into a bestseller. Although that is sometimes true, Robert Ray showed me that the real key to a compelling, meaningful story is a stellar character through which the reader can identify. A good character can drive the whole novel.

The second thing this book taught me, which was perhaps the most valuable for me, is that the basic building block of the novel is not the chapter or even the major plot points, but the individual scenes. Robert Ray shows that each scene is like a compact story within your story, with a set-up, a middle part for conflict and development, and a climax which pushes the story into the next scene. The section on scene building in this book was excellent, and it gave me the breakthrough I needed in understanding how to give a story real structure.

Finally, this book helped me understand the importance of the major plot points, and what has to happen in the scenes at these points in order to make your writing tight.

In addition to the above, this book has many basic tips on how to organize yourself, how to approach your writing, and how to work through the major revisions of your story. There's even an appendix at the end with tips on getting published.

For an amateur like me who has never had any classes in story writing, this book was the most helpful guide that I was able to find.

Although I am an avid reader of American military history, I read few first-person accounts of war because I tend to prefer books about geopolitics, grand strategy, and decisive weapons systems. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this book about a marine officer's experience during the Korean War. It was easy reading, its narrative was straightforward, informative, and, I believe, honest, and it provided some valuable insights into the harsh realities of the first of the Cold War's regional conflicts.

The United States' "forgotten war" began on June 25, 1950, when the People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) invaded the Republic of Korea (South Korea). At the time, Author Joseph Owen was a Marine Corps lieutenant stationed in North Carolina, living with his wife and their two young children. According to Owen: "Nobody at Camp Lejeune had expected a shooting war. Nor were we ready for one." A captain who had been an adviser to the South Korean Marine Corps predicted Korea would be "[o]ne lousy place to fight a war. Too hot in summer, too cold in winter, and straight up and down mountain terrains all year round. Except for those stinking rice paddies down in the valleys. Human manure they use. Worst stink in the world." Nevertheless, according to Owen: "The possibility of American Marines in a combat role excited us." Owen writes: "The North Koreans continued to overpower the meager resistance offered by the South Korean soldiers....Seoul, the South Korean capital, fell with hardly a fight, and the Red blitzkrieg rolled southward. In response, President Truman escalated American involvement in the war. He ordered General MacArthur, America's supreme commander in the Far East, to use U.S. Army troops stationed in Japan to stem the invaders." And: "General MacArthur called for a full division of Marines to help him turn back the North Koreans. According to Owen: "The Marine Corps welcomed the call, but we did not have a full division to put in the field;" and "More than seven thousand of us at Camp Lejeune received orders to proceed by rail to Camp Pendleton. There they would form into companies and embark for Korea." Owen's unit, "Baker-One-Seven became one of three rifle companies if the 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment....Our ranks were filled by 215 men and 7 officers who had never before served together....Many of [the privates] were beardless teenagers with little training beyond the basics of shouldering a rifle and marching in step." While training, there was much concern about the readiness of the Marines for combat. At one point, after a sergeant remarks that the troops need more training in boot camp, Owen succinctly invokes reality: "They are not going to boot camp. They are going aboard ship. And they are going to fight." On September 1, the company boarded a Navy transport for the three-week voyage to east Asia. According to Owen: "Ready or not, we were on the way to war." And, according to Owen, the 1st Marine Division's orders were "to go for the Yalu River," North Korea's border with China. At one point, a veteran officer provides this paraphrase of William Tecumseh Sherman's famous dictum: "War is hell, but you never know what particular kind of hell it's going to be." The Korean War hell was cold and barren. Owen writes: "We were chilled through and bone tired as we slogged our way back to battalion....The bivouac was lumpy with rocks and boulders;" "The cold weather was as formidable an enemy as the Chinese;" and "Rarely did the [daily action] reports exceed zero degrees, and there were lows of twenty below."

By the time Owen's outfit arrived in Korea, he writes, "we were making bets that the war would be over before we got into it." Owen's Marines could not have been more wrong. While Owen is inspecting his men's weapons, a private asks: "Think we'll get shot at today, Lieutenant?" Owen replies: "We're taking the point for the regiment. If the gooks are there, they'll be shooting at us." A few pages later, after the outfit's first experience in combat, Owen comments: "We were fortunate that the enemy had not chosen a "fight-to-the-death" defense of this hill, as they would when we advanced farther north." But some fighting was hand-to-hand. At one point, Owen writes: "Judging from the noise they were making, and the direction of their grenades, the North Koreans were preparing to attack, not more than thirty yards away." The Captain tells Owen and the other subordinate officers: "The Chinese have committed themselves to this war....The people we will fight are the 124th Division of the Regular Chinese Army....They're tough, well-trained soldiers, ten thousand of them. And all of their officers are combat experienced, their very best....A few hours from now we'll have the Chinese army in our gunsights. We'll be in their gunsights. You damn well better have our people ready for some serious fighting." The combat was, indeed, brutal. According to Owen: "The Chinese attacked in massive numbers, an overwhelming weight, but they also endured terrible casualties." Owen recalls that, while waiting for one Chinese attack, the "men stacked Chinese bodies in front of the holes for greater protection." And the fighting around the frozen Chosin Reservoir may have been the most brutal of the war. Owen ultimately suffered wounds requiring 17 months of treatment, and he never regained full use of one arm.

A few months ago, I reviewed James Brady's wonderful The Coldest War: A Memoir of Korea here. This book has different charms. Whereas Brady is a gifted professional writer, there is no elegant prose here. But Owen provides an equally vivid account of this ugly war. Big, sophisticated studies of military history focusing on geopolitical principles and grand strategy rarely offer narrative moments like the ones in this book. Reader are unlikely to forget the Korean War after reading Joseph Owen's Colder than Hell.

When preparing to travel to an Asian country on business, I seek context by reading of the wars the U.S. has fought there. When I look in those Japanese, Chinese and Korean eyes, I see the children of old enemies and old friends. While plowing through Fehrenbach's canonical Korean War history, "This Kind of War", I took a break and lost a weekend of yard work to "Colder Than Hell" which I ordered based on the praise given by my fellow Amazon reviewers. My thanks to the other reviewers, for this is a superb first person account of a Marine company fighting it's way up and then back down the Korean peninsula in 1950. Marines of Baker one-seven fought and froze to the death too often, but their sacrifice has let 47 million Koreans in the South build a democracy and learn the meaning of freedom. The price of freedom was huge for Baker one-seven, but the esprit de corps so crisply described by ex-Second Lt. Owen carried his Marines from hill to hill. This is an excellent book and a must read for fans of first person stories of war and sacrifice.

Colder than Hell: A Marine Rifle Company at Chosin Reservoir. By Joseph R. Owen. Reviewed by Mike Davino

Army Korean War expert Lieutenant Colonel Roy Appleman has called the 1st Marine Division of the Chosin Reservoir campaign "one of the most magnificent fighting organizations that ever served in the United States Armed Forces." The remarkable and inspiring story of the division at the Chosin Reservoir has been the subject of numerous books and several films. During their fighting withdrawal, the Marines decimated several divisions of the Chinese People's Liberation Army while at the same time fighting an exceptionally harsh winter environment.

Joseph Owen's new book on the subject tells the story from the cutting edge perspective of a rifle company. The author served as a mortar section leader and rifle platoon commander in Baker Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines from its activation in August 1950 through the Inchon-Seoul and Chosin fighting where he was severely wounded.

There are many reasons given for the outstanding performance of the Marines in northeast Korea during the winter of 1950. It is clear from this book that a large measure of the credit goes to the Marines and their leaders at the small unit and rifle company level.

Owen's narrative covers the hasty activation and training of the company, its brief participation in the fighting north of Seoul after the amphibious assault at Inchon and the details of its intense fighting at Chosin. He candidly discusses the mistakes made by the leaders and Marines of Baker Company, to include his own. More importantly, Owen covers what they learned from these mistakes and how they used that knowledge to defeat the Chinese in a series of intense actions.

Although focused at the company level, the author frames his story with the overall conduct of the campaign. Refreshingly, unlike many books about the Chosin campaign, it is free of partisan sniping about the contributions made by the various services involved. Owen gives credit to the Army units that fought at Chosin as well as the contributions of naval and air forces and our British allies.

This book is rich in lessons about small unit leadership, training and combat operations. It is an excellent addition to the personal narratives on the Korea War.