This guide provides excellent pre-retirement planning suggestions. Has traps, obstacles and helpers outlined for quick review and advice. Has a number of "tools" in the form of worksheets to assist in planning for both before and after retirement events. Presents a number of post-retirement ideas with several suggestions of how to manage and/or increase your income in retirement. Authors are somewhat short on information for the mid 50's retiree concerning how to access 401k and IRA funds without penalty between 55 and 59 1/2. No info on what forms are needed and where they are available, or what needs to be filed and where. Has one slight reference in the appendix on how to accomplish withdrawals without penalty. Having read a number of retirement planning books available on the bookshelf, I found this volume excels in providing useful information not found in similar guide books.

Although this book deals with many aspects of retirement and retirement planning, what distinguishes it from the dozens of similar books I have read is a truly outstanding calculator for determining how much money will be available then and how much needs to be saved or invested to eliminate any shortfall. It includes pensions, social security, and savings and investments. It factors in life expectancy, income sources that will automatically increase with inflation and those that won't, savings and investment growth rates, withdrawl rates that must increase with inflation(which--unbelievably--some calculators don't consider). It allows for early retirement (that is, it doesn't factor in social security until it's available). Similarly, it allows for staggered commencement of retirement income sources (for example, a pension that starts at age 65 while you may start social security at age 62). I've not found another calculator that does ALL of these things! I couldn't recommend it more highly.

This guide really lays out, step by step, how to think and act to plan your retirement. I found this a surprisingly quick read, comprehensive, easy to understand and specific -- from spending, lifestyle, insurance, investing issues. The book makes a great gift for friends or parents because too many of us are not paying attention to the easy "Action Items" that each chapter ends with. Highly recommended!

There is hardly any significant fact about viruses that missed-out in this edition of "Fields Virology". Page after page, this sound all-inclusive reference doles out authoritative information on both viruses and viral syndromes. From taxonomy to etiology, metamorphosis to replication; the analyses of this text is grand. The same applies to its attached CD-ROM. Its practical outlook was intended to benefit both microbiologists and pathologists. Bernard Fields and his colleagues made their mark with this book. It is a great effort.
However, most botanist may not be pleased to know that little attention was paid to plant viruses. Again, many potential buyers may be demoralized by the rather high price that this virology-set demands.

It covers all fields of virology. Perfect and wonderful ! Easy to understand. I really recommend this book to who is involved in biology

This book writen by Gilbert and Martin provides an excellent help to the student who is currently studying organic chemistry. It is full of useful information and it provides assistance for the completion of the organic labs. it is full of helpful pointers and they provide alot of useful knowledge

Native literatures from around the world have enjoyed a surge of popularity in the past few decades, and this volume is a good example of why that is so. The Aboriginal song poems have been ably translated, but the editors decided to have the poems in their original languages facing the English versions. This adds much to the feel of a foreign, exotic literature. Explanatory notes are placed with the original versions, causing some difficulty in switching from page to page reading the translation and then the explanation (the meanings of passages are not always clear from the translation). The selections cover four distinct literary traditions within Aboriginal Australia, from varying geographical locales. This allows the reader to appreciate the wide variation in Aboriginal culture.

When I started out to write a paper on semantics, my professor advised me to use this book as a guideline for defining the exact subject on my paper and for becoming more familiar with the vast field of philosophy of language. Since I had already followed a course on philosophy of language, Robert M. Martin's book did not tell me much that I did not know yet. But for students just starting out in the field, the book gives a wealth of very clear information. Martin covers all aspects of the philosophy of language and the logic of language in short and accesible chapters. He gives a lot of good examples, which make often difficult theories a lot more clear. For me, as a more advanced student, the references at the end of each chapter were very helpful: Martin refers to a number of books on each specific subject, and I must say they are really good. Using the references on Speech Acts I found some essential articles that went on to form the base of my paper. In his Amazon.com-interview, Martin states he hates the boring way most academic philosophy is written in. I do not totally agree on that, but I do admit that Martin does NOT write boring or vague, and that makes his book all the better.

This book is best described as the application of nonlinear ordinary differential equations to immunology and virology. It's primary emphasis is on understanding the time development of viral infections, drug treatments, and viral resistance of the HIV and hepatitis-B viruses.

The authors do a good job of describing the relevant equations needed to model virus dynamics. The book would be a good beginning for mathematicians interested in going into the field of mathematical immunology. And, even though it should be classified as a monograph, rather than a textbook, since there are no problem sets, students of mathematical immunology should find this book a useful introduction to the subject. In addition, the authors give a large list of references at the end of each chapter for further reading.

Mathematicians who need a background in the biology of the HIV virus will find a good discussion in Chapter 2 of the book. The authors give an historical summary of the origins and treatment of the virus in this chapter. This sets the stage for the mathematical modeling of virus dynamics in Chapter 3, where the authors define the basic reproductive ratio and write down a system of three coupled nonlinear ordinary differential equations as the basic equations of virus dynamics. They remark, though without justification, that an analytical solution of the time development is not possible, and so they use approximation schemes to solve the equations. The equations are a phenomenological representation of virus dynamics, and no attempt is made to relate the rate constants to the underlying microscopic properties/structures/processes of viruses. They do however discuss the empirical data associated with studies of SIV infections, and show convincingly there is a correlation between the initial growth of the virus and its value at equilibrium. They caution the reader that the basic model does not give the true reproductive ratio, and show how to correct for this by introducing time delays.

The efficacy of drug therapy is treated from both a mathematical and experimental viewpoint in the next chapter. This is a very enlightening discussion from the standpoint of the validation of the virus models.

The authors switch gears in the next chapter and talk about the dynamics of the Hepatitus B virus. Again, they do a good job of introducing the reader to the experimental evidence for the models of this virus.

In chapter 6, they bring in the contribution of the immune system to the basic equations. They assume that the reader is familiar with the concept of CTL responsiveness. The resulting equations are somewhat more complicated, and the authors show how the ubiquitous Lotka-Volterra equations arise with the virus being the prey, and the immune system the predator. No detailed phase space analysis is done however to study any of the equations in this chapter, which would have been useful to the reader.

The chapter on quasispecies is the most interesting one in the book, as the authors not only give a rudimentary definition of quasispecies, but they also give an indication of their complexity. Disappointingly, they mention the idea of mutation rates and their connection with chaos and self-organized criticality, but do not elaborate on this at all.

The Bonhoeffer's laws of anti-viral treatment are discussed in the next chapter and the authors show how to derive them using the basic model. The emergence of resistance during drug treatment is modeled by parameters which reflect the replication rates of the virus, but these parameters are again not connected with any underlying microscopic properties of the virus.

Some interesting dynamical behavior occurs for the case of multiple epitopes where the existence of quasiperiodic oscillations is shown to occur. They authors refer to this as "unpredictable" but they do not define this term in the book. The existence of quasiperiodic orbits in a dynamical system does not by itself make the system "unpredictable" or random of some sort.

This book is a very addition to the literature, and most importantly, it emphasizes the role of validating mathematical models experimentally, which takes on even greater importance given the medical ramifications of the topics in this book.

I found this book in a church Library and fell in love with it. the more I read the more I realize Short's Excelent perception on human nature and Christianity. I was especially fond of the titles of the chapters including: "The Wages of Sin is "Aaaughh"", and "Good Grief". These Titles and the titles of the book however are going to be offencive to some Fundimentalist Christians. That is a shame because if they read this book they would see how good of an evangelical tool it could be. I hope anyone struggling with their own faith could read this book. It really Pokes fun at human nature.

It is, surely, a matter of basic courtesy to an author to read his or her book before reviewing it. The pseudonymous "lexo-2" (see below, six reviews down) knows his Peanuts and his Preachers, and his verdict on Short is "Wrong, wrong, wrong." Well, six months after reading that review I have at last got around to finishing my used-bookstore copy of "The Gospel," and I find myself feeling so annoyed that I simply must respond.

"Whether or not Schulz is a devout Christian I could not say," writes lexo-2. If he had taken the trouble to actually read Short's book, however, he would have found numerous quotations from Schulz himself concerning his religious views. Speaking of a Bible-study group he attended shortly after his return from the Second World War, Schulz says, "The more I thought about it during those study times, the more I realized that I really loved God" (quoted on p. 70). Or again, "I don't even like the expression 'take communion.' You cannot 'take' communion. You are a part of the communion. You are communing with Christ; you are a part of the community of saints" (p. 80). The rhetoric, complete with its anti-Catholic bias against the notion of "taking" communion, is clearly that of a born-again evangelical (in Schulz's case, Church of God). And lest there be any doubt of Schulz's authorial intentions, he is quoted in the very first chapter as saying, "I have a message that I want to present, but I would rather bend a little to put over a point than to have the whole strip dropped because it is too obvious. As a result . . . all sorts of people in religious work have written to thank me for preaching in my own way through the strips. That is one of the things that keeps me going" (p. 20).

Schulz was worried about being too obvious. Clearly he wasn't obvious enough.

Short's book is cogent and well argued; it certainly is not a collection of "homilies." Contrary to what lexo-2 implies, Short does not ignore the darker side of the Peanuts world. Indeed, of lexo- 2's "three phrases," Short uses two or them in chapter titles: "The Wages of Sin Is 'Aaaugh!'" and "Good Grief!" Good grief! Read before you review!

Yes, lexo-2 is quite right that the world of Peanuts is a "sunlit hell, in which the characters never grow, never change, etc." Where he goes wrong is in assuming that Short--a Ph.D. in literature and theology, a man who had taken the trouble to study the cartoon in depth and even write a book about it--couldn't see that for himself. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Short's whole point is that we all live in a "sunlit hell," suffering "unimaginable fears" and "wreaking appalling cruelties on each other," and that we will never escape that hell unless we can find . . . (you guessed it!) the saving grace of Jesus Christ. The salvationist message does not come across too strongly in the cartoon (Schulz did not want to be "obvious") but it just as surely is there, between the lines, in the occasional epiphanies of love and reconciliation that illuminate the otherwise bleak moral landscape of Peanutopia.

You can agree or disagree with the Short-Schulz analysis of the human predicament. Personally, I disagree strongly. But in a world in which evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity have so much influence and power, it simply will not do to be idly dismissive. Indeed, I particularly recommend Short's book to freethinkers of every stripe, if only that they may remind themselves just how subtle and persuasive evangelical discourse can be. There is more, much more, to Short's little book than "pious ramblings" and that is precisely what makes it, depending on your point of view, so inspiring or so insidious.

This is the first book of theology that I ever read - and what a great introduction to theology! Short pulls out the theology of love and grace, the very human-ness of Christian faith (rightly understood), from the cartoon Peanuts, written by the unique Charles Schultz. This is actually the best introduction to real Christian theology that is available. Tillich, Kierkegaard, Niebuhr, Luther, Kafka, T. S. Eliot, and Karl Barth are only of the people you'll encounter in this splendid summary of essential Christian thought. I have valued this book for years, from when I first read it in high school to when I gave it as a gift to a lay minister in the diocese that I serve when I was consecrated as a bishop. Of all the dull and boring books of theology out there, this one is fun, and one of the best ever!

I am an undergraduate student taking a course in virology, and i find this book extremely difficult to learn from. As a reference source for a particular virus it may be of use, but use of this book as a learning tool is foolish. Yes, this book is written by experts concerning a particular field, but it seems that the authors target audience is also...experts. In introducing fundamental concepts of virology, the text constantly uses examples to a particular virus. From this particular virus, it then makes reference of a mechanism of this virus. How can one make a reference to a mechanism, when one has not yet even been exposed to the virus family themselves? Its almost like talking about the stats of a certain sports figure, and then as a foot note make reference upon how the game is played.

As an undergraduate taking a course in virology, I found this book the only book I ever needed. It has all the information that you need and more. I just hope that they will continue to come out with a newer edition since this book is out of date and the field of virology has grown since this edition.

I read the chapter on prions and i found it to be really good and up to date. of course it requires you to know a little background knowledge but if you're reading this book you probably already fill out that category. definitely not for the layman...

I am a student of health sciences in USA, and I picked this book for a comparison on US and Japan and germany health care system and policy. I was interested in the book, it was well written, but it provided me with no detail insight into the real mechanismas of health care policy abroad. I would only recommend this to people who do not have to analyse the topic for course work.