Ms. Angier has responded brilliantly to the criticism of Mike Wigler (one of the scientists featured in the book) and refrained from writing "a textbook". She has instead taken us into the world of hardcore biomedical research to see the people behind the scenes as they race to unlock the secrets of nature. Focusing on the events and people in the Weinberg lab at MIT during the early days of the discovery of cellular oncogenes, the book leads us to share with them the excitement of discovery as well as the pain of defeat, for mother nature is often a rather cagey opponent. This book is an invaluable tool to budding biomedical scientists in appreciating the lives and work of their predecessors, and I highly recommend it to anyone who's ever been bored by their biology textbooks.

The problem with books about history is that they are almost always an interpretation: the author's. At best the author is willing to share the conflicting evidence with his reader, at worst the author omits it and pretends it doesn't even exist. But even the most faithful author can't put everything in a book so a selection has to be made. That's why the critical reader ends up reading a lot of books about the same subject. To be able to grasp most of the material, evidence and theories that are circulating. That way he/she is able to form his/her own opinion about an issue. But if the issue is Thomas Jefferson & Sally Hemings the reader will likely end up digging through tons of material and will still be very confused and very indecisive. Until recently one of the only books on the topic worth reading was Anette Gordon-Reed's "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Heming: An American Controversy". Because of it's painstakingly revealing of the mistakes, omissions and lies that previous writers had committed and for it's refusal to take a final stand.

This book however was written after the 1999 DNA tests that revealed that Thomas Jefferson very likely fathered Sally's last child Eston. And that he didn't father Thomas C. Woodson. But one has to keep in mind that the recent testing still don't prove Jefferson's paternity exclusively. Another male relative from the Jefferson line could have fathered Sally's last child, since they share the same Y chromosome. The book offers a number of refreshing essays written by scholars. Each one of them looks at the relationship from his/her own field. Trying to describe and explain what this new evidence means to themselves and their previous writings and views on TJ. Sometimes describing how they fell into the trap that so many historians fell into when dealing with TJ. They also try to describe the way the American mind thought about TJ and how this new evidence will influence peoples views and opinions.

The strength of the book is that it has been written after the revealing DNA tests. It also presents a lot of authors, each with his/her specific knowledge, views and convictions. Rather than just one author. But the really weak point is that the book fails to give a clear outline and explanation of the recent DNA test. That's the chapter that it should have started with. Since that test is the core, the very foundation upon which all these "revisionist" writings build. And also because a test like this needs explanation: not everyone is familiar with cellular biology and what it really means.

There a many texts available for 2-semester courses, but this text is one of few available for a 1-semester intermediate Spanish course. It separates the communicative activities and grammar review into different parts of the book, which is convenient and logical for students and instructors. There is a workbook and lab manual with lab cassettes as well. It does not include videos, CD-ROM's, overheads, and flamenco dancers, but in a 1-semester course, you may not have time to get all of that in anyway. It's not ground-breaking material, but at least your students aren't buying a two-semester book for a 1-semester course.

"Not for Beginners Only" would be a better subtitle. My happy aquaintance with Lewis goes back many years, but I'd not thought to dig to see what other kinds of gems there were in his writings than those I'd first stumbled upon. Mine tends to be a Some-stuff-interests-me-and- other-stuff-doesn't kind of mentality.

This book impells me to a much wider appreciation for Lewis by way of the author's logic and insightful discussions. It's a pleasurable read! In the past I've been put off by the phrase "in other words..." followed, as they tend to be, by the obvious. I'm thinking, "Yeah, yeah, let's get on with it." Not so with Peters. He says, "In other words" and offers me a truly fresh, deeper insight than was at first obvious. And I'm thinking, "Oh, yeah! Of course! Why didn't I think of that?" I so appreciated Peters' well-expressed views that I found myself thoroughly savoring his marvelous intro to the pr! evailing thoughts/ideas of the 19th century in his second chapter. ("Setting the Stage") Let's face it. Learning ought to be a joy, and Peters serves up a most palatable sociology. I came away with far more than I'd bargained for.

If you're looking for light summer reading, mindless and forgettable, a paperback you can toss without a second thought--you've got the wrong book.

If you're looking for something that catches and sticks with you, draws you into some real thought, and lifts you in the process, this is your book.

After reading Peters' "Simply C.S.Lewis: A Beginner's Guide to His Life and Works," I see the familiar in a gratifying new light, and want to reread. And it goes without saying that now I'm eager to get to treasures of Lewis's which I've overlooked in the past.

Few people living today know that President Thomas Jefferson launched two expeditions into the Louisiana territory purchased in 1803; Lewis and Clark to the north, Freeman and Custis to the south. Lewis and Clark have been covered thoroughly, even triumphally, because they completed their task. Freeman and Curtis have been ignored because they were intercepted by Spanish soldiers after exploring hundreds of miles of the Red River. Historian Dan Flores, drawing on both American and Spanish sources, performs a real service by describing this southern expedition and placing it within the context of its time (1806). Flores reminds us that the Spanish tried to stop Lewis and Clark too, but missed them. He shows us that the scheming General Wilkinson wanted the Freeman and Custis expedition to provoke a war with Spain, and nearly succeeded. Flores provides an introduction before the expedition's own account, and an epilogue after. His annotation of the expedition's documents is exceptionally thorough and often fascinating. The book includes numerous black and white illustrations and reproductions of several old maps. A modern map of the area would have been helpful. This book is one of an excellent series published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

I thought his first volume of essays - THE LIVES OF A CELL - was more interesting, but there are still some essays here that will stimulate the reader to ponder the biology Thomas discusses.

The title of the book comes from one of the most unusual instances of symbiosis that exists in nature. A form of jellyfish accepts a snail larva, which then proceeds to feast on the jellyfish until it becomes a truncated parasite on the mouth of the snail. This remnant is capable of reproducing and the cycle begins anew. As Thomas writes so eloquently, it is a misnomer to label such examples of biological cooperation as a parasitic relationship. Both species benefit greatly, each serving to protect and nourish the other at some point in their life-cycle.
What is difficult to understand is how such a relationship could be generated. All organisms are marked by very specific molecular structures, which may be the most species-specific characteristic there is. How these two creatures could somehow forgive the presence of another until the relationship could develop is completely unknown. But any solution would have profound consequences for medicine. Any ability to turn the immune system on and off at will would allow for tremendous advances in battles against specific diseases. It would then be possible to turn on specific antibodies against whatever disease is currently a threat.
The remainder of the book is just as interesting, as Thomas continues in putting forward his philosophy of mother earth as a cooperative biological entity. While his analogy of the cellular cooperation of an organism to that of the biosphere of the earth is a stretch, there is enough truth to take it seriously. Like all his books after the original, I enjoyed it, but wish he would not recycle material used in earlier books. There is so much new biological wonder and he is so talented a writer that I would have loved to see what new material he could generate.

This is an accurate accounting of how Welch ruined the very heart and soul of a wonderful company--one which employees were proud of their association before Welch. I worked many years for GE, both before Welch was CEO and after, and the book read like "this is your life". It is so sad that other executives appear to be on the edge of their chair waiting for every word spoken by Welch and to learn from him the theme of the year or the latest corporate slogan to espouse. I do hope this book becomes a best seller as it would give me confidence that more people would understand the depth of the problems Jack has created. And lastly, I would hope that our business schools would make this required reading to best illustrate how NOT to run a business.

The public perception of Jack Welch's tenure at General Electric has been that he focused business effort on his company's core competencies, and thus rewarded the long term shareholder with great financial returns. Tom O'Boyle peers behind the curtain to reveal the darker side of Wizard Welch and his disastrous tenure at one of America's great industrial treasures. Yes, Welch increased GE's stock value; but Welch did it with a draconian management style that failed to pay all of the bills along the way. It is easy to look rich when you don't pay your bills.

O'Boyle identifies some of the unpaid bills, including:

1) The human cost of GE's massive layoffs througout the 1980's. Welch embraced and greatly popularized the "layoff" approach to business: lay off bodies, save money, show more profit. But for every dollar the company profited, others lost. Much of the cost of the layoffs fell on individuals, families and communities that saw jobs at US-based GE operations vanish. This caused untold hardship to both families and governments, which had to rebuild shattered lives and communities. Not all survived, literally.

2) Welch took a rich and deep GE culture of research and development into technological fields, and utterly gutted it. GE's R&D abilities formerly covered a spectrum from steam turbines to appliances to jet engines to railway locomotives. Under Welch, GE's R&D arm became so weak and atrophied that the company's product lines lost the once commanding technological lead they formerly enjoyed. The company's future is betrayed. (Not satisfied with merely gutting GE's R&D, Welch purchased RCA and stripped its assets as well. Only NBC television remains in the GE fold as a major, former-RCA asset. Shockingly, NBC spends more each year to broadcast basketball games than GE spends on R&D. It is so sad, when you think that the only man-made object ever to leave the solar system, Voyager spacecraft, carries a camera that bears the RCA logo.)

3) GE's continuing failure to clean up the PCB's and radioactivity it has left behind in its numerous manufacturing operations; while at the same time making a business unit out of cleaning up PCB's and other pollution for other customers. The unpaid bills also do not include the people who remain afflicted with industrial illnesses from their exposure to chemicals in the GE workplaces over the years.

These are just a few of the topics. The book is profound, and will shock the unitiated. O'Boyle is a historian of American industrial history. He takes the reader on a trip through time, from the laboratories of Edison; to the early workshops of Ford; to the mills of Carnegie; to Tom Watson's IBM; to Rickover's nuclear navy; and so much more.

O'Boyle spent eleven years with the Wall Street Journal, and he knows how to dig out the story and tell it in the best journalistic style. Also, as the notes reveal, O'Boyle has met and talked with many of the luminaries and leaders of American and European industry of this era. O'Boyle has captured the essence of an American tragedy, which was GE's abandonment of its research-oriented, manufacturing legacy to satisfy the ego of one man.

Jack Welch started at GE selling plastics, and he has become his own product. It seems that Jack Welch, who came into control of one of the nation's greatest industrial enterprises, really wanted only to run a credit card company as his life's ambition. Today he has his wish, but the nation has lost.

Is the most profitable and valuable US company spiritually dead? That seems to be Thomas O'Boyle's thesis in "At Any Cost." His riveting book is the first that I have read which chronicles the dark side of Jack Welch's restructuring of the General Electric Company. In an introductory note, O'Boyle expresses regret that Welch and other executives "were unwilling to be interviewed" or to respond to his serious efforts to solicit their comments to issues and concerns raised in his book. His note is to explain the extremely negative views of Welch and GE that O'Boyle gleaned from mountains of court and government records and from interviews with restructuring and down-sizing loosers. Predictably, corporate and business reviews dismiss the book as "muckraking." It is also predictable, however, that this book will have an impact on the eventual replacement of Welch and re-restructuring of GE.

Although O'Boyle closes his book speaking of Welch and GE in the past tense, I believe that his objective is to help. If O'Boyle and Welch haven't, I urge these Irish-Catholic gentlemen to read "The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism" by Michael Novak, a leading Catholic theologian. I am not a student of such matters, but Novak's and O'Boyle's books arrived on my bedstand almost simultaneously as result of absolutely unrelated activities. The possibility that this confluence of books was ordained prompts me to share my observations.

This book permits one to quickly find a lot of usefulreferences. However it is quite misleading as all kind of heretics areincluded. The word "Christian" should have been avoided in the title. Those who are interested in Church Fathers will have to be able to sort out the Fathers from the heretics, and that means they will have to know already a lot about the issues of orthodoxy and heresy among the ancient thinkers. In this case they will already know much, and this book may not be so useful. I do not recommend this book to those conservative Christians who do not know which thinkers were heretic or not.

A few things to note in reading this book...

1. It is a resource of quotes, for the most part. So, it's not like a typical commentary, where you can read the passage of Scripture, then read the "commentary" and have an idea of what's being said. This book is full of quotes (a few lines long) related to each passage.

2. Which leads me to the second point... Usually, when you have a commentary you know the author's bias-- whether he/she is conservative, liberal, their theological leanings, etc., and you can make like adjustments when reading. Not so here. You will need to be somewhat versed in Church History (or have access to a book) in order to distinguish the sound theology of these individuals from the not-so-sound/heretical theology. And, it's possible (as was the case with Origen, for instance) that some of what they say is sound and some is way, way off... You just need to have some tool to make that distinction.

3. This book is very helpful, nonetheless, because we often forget that the ancient Christians struggled with the essentials doctrines of the faith for hundreds of years... and were versed in Scripture (although some of them get lost in allegory, etc.). It is both helpful-- and respectful-- I think, to know what these fore-runners in the faith said.

Buy the book-- but only if you already have some other commentaries (or resources) you can consult.

Any book which meets its aim to present the thoughts of the church "Fathers" (as this book does) deserves to be evaluated on its stated intentions. Does this volume do an admirable and coherent job of offering Christianity's earliest theologians' thoughts on the letters to Corinth? Absolutely. Is it reasonable to expect views from this period to be in sync with intricate theological statements written hundreds (even thousands) of years later? Of course not. Walking through these early reflections on Scripture with the Fathers creates a fresh sense that Christianity is rooted in history, and that Christianity has an observable historical development of its own. Fascinating, on its own merits. Also of merit is the opportunity to have multiple historical sources available in the same volume. Who likes to pick up and put away dozens of books at a time?

I can hardly think of a book that has been more disappointing than this one. Expecting to read a scholarly analysis of the Lewis and Clark expedition, I read instead a nit-picking critique of words used in the explorers' journals. One chapter entitled "Hunting" barely recognized that these men had to shoot animals to live in its fevered attack on the fact that the explorers and their men actually shot animals. The reek of political correctness overwhelms this book. Certainly Lewis and Clark were human and not saints as they traversed the continent, but the conclusion one would draw from Slaughter's book is that Lewis and Clark (and Columbus and James Cook along the way) never did anything right. A sadly deficient work.

"Exploring Lewis and Clark" makes some interesting points about Lewis & Clark, somewhat in the spirit of being the devil's advocate.

Slaughter is clearly trying to draw a contrast between the worshipful view of L&C popularized by Stephen Ambrose and Ken Burns and what Slaughter views as the reality. Slaughter notes, for instance, that L&C hunted excessively, repeatedly stole from Indians, and generally exaggerated their historical importance. Slaughter also has a very interesting discussion of the life of Sacajawea and the possibility she lived longer than is conventionally acknowledged.

All this said, this is very much a niche product. One has to know a great deal about the L&C journey prior to reading this book. I would also suggest that it's a relatively thin book. I think Slaughter's interesting points probably could have been presented in 30 or 40 pages, but he has puffed it up to somewhat get to a book length.

Exploring Lewis and Clark constitues Corps of Discovery #202. First complete course#101 by reading Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose or the Lewis and Clark Journals and then you are ready to delve into the incisive and provocative critique of the Corps of Discovery by this author. As a Native American and the author of Yazoo Mingo - The Journeys of Moncacht-Apé Across North America 1687-1700, I appreciated slaughter's informative and thoughtful chapter on Porvio, also known as Sacagawea. The(rest of the) story regarding York was also of great interest.

Whether or not you agree with all of the author's conclusions this book will increase your knowledge and understanding of the Courageous Captains and their Corps of Discovery.

In creating this book of maps, the authors have not merely stepped on one of my pet peeves. They have kicked it, stomped it, gouged it, whipped it, and beaten it with a stick. My pet peeve is maps that have no mileage scale. I see it all too often in newspapers and magazines. Maybe ignorant reporters and editors can be excused. But how can these scholars give us an entire book of maps without a single mileage scale? Besides knowing the routes of the explorers, we want to know how far was their journey from one point to another.

I would like to know why mileage scales were omitted. Did the editor think people would use the maps for navigation and sue the publisher for any errors? If this omission was just an accidental oversight, then it should have been corrected before the book was published. Please explain.

But, that said, this is a beautiful and interesting book. Most of the maps are a full page, and each map is accompanied by a page summarizing the accomplishments of each journey and its importance. Also, many of the maps are accompanied by a contemporary drawing, painting, litho, etc. that illustrates the journey. Students of early North American explorations will enjoy this book. If the authors will revise it and add mileage scales to the maps, then I'll raise my rating to a 5.

This atlas serves a real need for any serious student of North American history. The alternative is to chase down many sources that have individualized map information for individual explorers.

In some cases, however, the colors are difficult to actually discern. There is so many route information, with so many colors that are similar, that it is difficult to distinguish one route from another.

Also, a stated map scale of both miles and kilometers for each map would be helpful.

Otherwise great! -- in my opinion.

Why is the atlas no longer in print, at least at present?

Are the authors planning a revised copy?

I'd like the authors to know about this, and receive a big pat on the back from this old history student and high school history teacher.

Les Falk, Kelowna, BC, Canada