Originally published in hardback as "Their Finest Hour", now bearing its original UK title. Not a formal history as such, but an effort to convey the flow and feel of the times. R. Collier has written a number of good WWII history books and this too is very well written. P. Kaplan has been the artistic mind behind a series of books of this type and format (see note). The book includes many photographs both from 1940 and as the sites, people and artifacts appeared when the book was first published (1988+/-), Sidebars have bits of poetry, songs, and passages from memoirs. (Note: in the same format are: "One Last Look", Little Friends", "Round the Clock", "Wolfpack", Convoy", "Fighter Pilot", and "Bombers". The first three are also excellent, the middle two very good, the last two fair.)

Published in the States as "Their Finest Hour". This is an enjoyable and evocative presentation of the Battle of Britain. The text, pictures and sidebars work well together. Great addition to an excellent series.

Some of the best open-space design that I've seen. I thought that the book promotes architecture with sensitivity to its surrounding environment. The photos are engaging, the projects are interesting with a diversity that I have not seen with other architectural practices. As a student of architecture, I feel that this firm really goes out of their way to promote community. Great !

Not a formal history, but an attempt to convey the atmosphere and flow of the battle; it is very well done. One of a series of books in the same format, all of them worthwhile.

This little book is a compilation of normal MRI images of the human brain. It contains 61 images, each on one page, with a list of labelled structures. The images include axial views (14 images), coronal views (21 images) and sagittal views, which, with only 6 images, is the weakest section. There are also two short sections on the sella turcica (mostly coronal views, with one close up sagittal) and magnetic resonance angiography of the major cerebral vessels.

Students and residents beginning to interpret neuroimaging are often in need of a basic reference that shows gross neuroradiological anatomy. This book attempts to fill that need. On the whole it does: the images are clear, the important structures for the most part are labelled, and orientative 'locator' diagrams for each image are provided. The book can however be improved in the following ways:

1. The author, an authority of brain and spine MRI, can begin the book with an introductory chapter that explains the basics of MRI images and how they are formed. What are T1 and T2 images? What structures produce high signals and what low? What do air, blood, bone and fat look like? For the beginning medical student, this is useful information.

2. For each image, a summary of what you should be looking for will be most helpful. Eg. What should the size of the normal 3rd ventricle be? If for each page, he gave in bullet form what you should be looking for, the value of the book would be immeasurably increased.

3. More detailed labelling would be a plus.

I agree with all of the three previous reviewers in both praise and critique, which force me to purchase this book. It absolutely worth five stars.
I enjoyed reading and learning from this pocket atlas. Extremely good quality pictures. I whished that I knew about when I started my Neurology residency, so I would always keep it in my bag, as I am doing now.
It is a fast read, very helpful. I highly recommend it.

Excellent Reference Book for your library for anyone interested in Cranial MRI. Very advanced for the everyday reader however it contains excellent pictures and brief text and I highly recommend.

What a wonderful book! I just bought it and I can't wait to get started. I've read it from cover to cover a few times, and I'm more than pleased with my purchase. The magnificent bodies are marvelous and breathtaking. It's true that the first few pages are bios and frou frou, but their stories are inspiring and motivating. Plus, they discuss why dancers' bodies are more agile and sculpted than most athletes, as well as tips on getting started, how to listen to your body and optimize your workout.

The workout is divided into six sections. Warm up and Stretch, followed by Abs (14-20 minutes), Floor barre (12-16 minutes), Ballet center (16-22 minutes) and Legs (16-22 minutes). Although they say you can do the entire workout as time permits, they offer suggestions for 10 or 20 minute workouts, as well as specialized workouts to correlate with specific sports for strength and flexibility or body parts of concentration. The instructions are clear-cut and detailed and along with the music selections they recommend, you'll feel like a prima ballerina. Personally, I have a lot of fat to lose so I plan on using this workout as a supplement to an aerobic regimen. I'm looking forward to using this workout every morning to get my day started.

This book is a wonderful way to firm and tone your muscles while achieving a balletic grace. I usually hate workout books or even using exercise machines because the routine seems so pointless. This book, however, gives a purpose to the exercises. It won't make you a professional dancer, or even an amateur one, but you'll feel more graceful and become more flexible.

Before you even start the exercises, you're inspired by the excellent photographs of the beautiful dancers. If you're as out of shape as I am, at first the stretches and exercises seem almost impossible, but after only just a few days they become easier as you regain flexibility and muscle tone. Most importantly, you develop an awareness of your body that stays with you long after you've finished your workout.

This is the best workout program I've ever used. I recommend it especially as a post-partum routine for women who want to regain their pre-pregnancy muscle tone and flexibility.

What this book WILL do is guide you through an exercise routine that is as challenging and fun as you want to make it.

The exercises are divided into different sections: warm-up, stretches, abdominals, legs, floor barre, and ballet. There are also sample routines in the back of the book for emphasizing different aspects of fitness: endurance, strength, abs, etc.

Each movement is shown step-by-step with written instructions, and almost every one moves your body through motions it is probably not accustomed to doing. After just the 10-minute stretch, I am already feeling energetic and relaxed. The exercises are fun, often quite challenging, and they accomplish what they claim they will.

This book will not make you a ballet dancer ~ one-on-one classes are irreplaceable for that. But using the exercises contained in it will supplement your dancing (or any other activity you're involved with!) by making your body stronger and more graceful.

if you work in the field of the cytoskeleton this book is very helpful. i have found many books in this series to be useful for finding techniques and methodology. although i must say that their methods are not always as specific as i would like.

McKinsey partner Richard Foster and ex-McKinseyite, Sarah Kaplan, combine with an extensive McKinsey database of 60 variables about 1008 large U.S. companies from 1962 to 1998 in 15 industries to measure how the stocks of the companies did versus the S&P 500 and their industries. Since few such stocks outperformed, the authors conclude that large companies need to be better innovators, being more like new industry entrants funded by venture capital firms. The bulk of the book highlights their proposals for encouraging innovation . . . from the top down. Although the ideas may work, they seem counterintuitive and are not supported by any significant research base. The book takes dead aim against the notion that building a company that lasts for a long time is the proper objective. The notion of "built to last" is indirectly challenged here. The book develops a concept of taking Schumpeter's famous concept of how markets foster creative destruction and transferring that inside your company as an organizing principle.

The authors did not look at companies which were not large and those that were not "pure plays." So there is little in here about outstanding stock market successes among large companies like Tyco International and General Electric. Remarkable performers among foreign forms, like Nokia, are also missing.

The model operators are General Electric (I was surprised too, after they were left out of the quantitative study), Johnson & Johnson, Enron, Corning, L'Oreal (yes, I know they are a French company and are not in the quantitative study, also), Kleiner Perkins, and KKR. I guess there were so few good examples of what the authors wanted to share that they had to stretch to find them.

Almost everyone else is a negative example. These include Intel (with DRAMs), Storage Technology, Thermo Electron, and others who experience flops after periods of short-lived success.

The best parts of the book deal with mental models and their strengths and weaknesses. At their worst, these models are wrong and encourage complacency, arrogance, and sluggishness. When the environment changes, they may leave the experienced totally at sea or following incorrect instincts. The prescription is to encourage the creation of new mental models by providing more permissiveness while reducing the amount of control in organizations. You will come away with a good sense of where stalled thinking comes from. On the other hand, the suggested solutions are very institutional as opposed to being focused on changing how each person perceives their own situation.

I have some nits to pick. First, it has been reported for decades that 80 percent of the stocks in the S&P 500 underperform the index each year. No study was needed to report that large companies do not routinely beat the market averages. You can go to many on-line brokers' sites and spot who has outperformed whatever index you want to use over many time periods in a few minutes.

Second, I recently studied dozens of companies who had successfully changed their business models in fundamental ways four or more times in a row and had outperformed the market averages and their competitors. I found only one of these companies mentioned in this book. So the way the sample was drawn excluded many interesting cases.

Third, the authors picked some strange cases to look at. They focus on the failures of Storage Technology, but say almost nothing about EMC, the company that surged ahead of both IBM and Storage Technology in data storage to become the fastest growing stock on the New York Stock Exchange in the 1990s. EMC's market capitalization is one of the largest in the world. They are also very good at making mental model changes. The company's leaders are also very accessible. The omission is puzzling. Could it be that the cases chosen to detail had something to do with who was and was not a McKinsey client at one time or another? I don't know the answer to that question, but my curiosity was piqued.

Fourth, McKinsey has been advising companies on how their decisions affect stock prices by influencing valuation for many years. The book made no reference to that discipline. Is it irrelevant?

Fifth, the database excludes companies who are acquired. So, potentially AOL or Time Warner would have to be viewed as a loser not worthy of further study if they had been part of the group, even though the combination was probably a merger of equals . . . And both company stocks outperformed the market averages for many years in the past.

Sixth, the quantitative and the qualitative parts of this book don't seem to connect very well. It seems to me that you could have written exactly the same book without the quantitative study. So what was the point? I think most people would agree that the rate of change has been speeding up, and will probably do so more in the future.

Seventh, the innovation model they propose may work, but it doesn't match well with what I learned from looking at those who successfully change business models often. Realize that there are other ways to pursue this.

Contrary to popular belief, Foster and Kaplan show that the majority of so-called "buy and hold" companies fail to keep pace with market index funds. Fundamental changes in the marketplace have made it increasingly difficult for companies to remain competitive for sustained periods of time. The authors not only discuss these shifts in the environment, but also uncover the structural factors inhibiting companies from effectively reacting to these market changes. Traditional models of corporate planning and control combined with "cultural lock-in" prevent even the most innovative of companies from taking the difficult decisions required to evolve with the market. Foster and Kaplan convey this message, its implications, and potential remedies through colorful, easy-to-read case studies of successful and unsuccessful companies. So what can an investor do? First, understand the reasons why only a few companies have the ability to continually re-invent themselves for sustained shareholder value. Second, be thankful when an investment outperforms the market for more than a few years time and question your broker's recommendation to "hold on to the winner." Finally, realize that strong past performance is not guarantee of future returns and might even be reason not to invest in a company, since the odds are stacked against continued outperformance. This is a 'must-read' for investors everywhere!

This book couldn't have come at a better time as companies face difficult economic conditions and a turbulent stock market. Drawing on almost 40 years of industry data and using real examples of successful companies and the innovators who are changing their industries, Foster and Kaplan clearly show how the few winners have behaved in the past and present a compelling argument for how businesses who want to survive over the long term will need to react to increased competition and discontinuities in the future. This book is a must read for all business executives who want to stay on top in this rapidly changing environment.

This book is good for second year medical students taking Step 1 of the USMLE. It's a concise and comprehensive text of what you'll need to know for Step 1. If you understand the material in this book, you will do alright on Step 1. The information could be better organized (and it's not fully comprehensive), but otherwise this book is well recommended.