I enjoyed this book mainly because it is about the lives of Indian women seen through the eyes of a foreigner - ie a western woman. I felt I could relate to this book very well as a 'western' woman myself, albeit with roots in India. I would recommend this book for those who know little about Indian society .

Growing up in the US with an American father and an Indian mother, I have always sought to really understand the culture that my mother came from. Although my mother was a catholic and not a hindu, Elizabeth Bumiller's book has given me an indepth and mesmorizing look at the women of India - the true pillars of that country. Once you start reading, you can't put the book down. Bumiller does a wonderful job at describing the Indian culture in general. My husband and I are adopting from India and this book has given me a greater appreciation for the unknown mother of my future child. A must read book if you have any interest in India, foreign cultures or women's issues.

This book is a collection of articles about various aspects of Indian women's lives. Bumiller lived and worked as a journalist in India for 3 years with her husband in the 1980s. She didn't intend to write about Indian women at the start of her stay, but found herself getting drawn into women's issues through her friends and activities. In the book, Bumiller describes and analyzes such topics as arranged marriage, bride burning, female infanticide, women in politics, women in Bollywood, women artists, housewives, and population control. Overall, I found Bumiller's descriptions quite accurate and interesting, but for my tastes, the range of topics seemed too broad. The book lacks the focus found in Bumiller's second book, "The Secrets of Mariko", which describes a year in the life of a Japanese housewife. Nevertheless, it provides a very readable introduction to Indian women's lives for Western readers.

When will the 'environmental movement' start to put energy into the real battle we have but do not want to fight? Chemicals in our food. The forest industry of Canada is working very hard to meet the publics insatiable demand for forest products. This same public wants 97 cent toilet paper but they don't want to cut a tree to get. The time to take responsibility for our actions is now. As long as we are able to blame an industry for our own greed we can sit back and feel good about ourselves as if we are not the problem. Wake up folks. If we were willing to pay the real value of forest products we would not have to cut as many trees. The 'save the forest battle' is not to be fought with the industry but with the real culprit, the public! One more thing. Canada's forest are growing. We have more forest today than we did one hundred years ago. Hats off to an industry doing it's best to meet public demand AND manage our forests.

Elizabeth May has written a who-dunit for Canada's forest industry -- a book filled with intrigue and suspense, villains and backroom deals, shady characters and conspiracy. "At the Cutting Edge" is a fierce critique of forestry management in Canada, of both the industry and government.

If you aren't an environmentalist already, "At the Cutting Edge" will certainly convert you. Written in a straight-to-the-heart style, this book is a page-turner, with an incredulous tale of industry greed and government duplicity.

But the book is also an unparalleled piece of journalism. May is an unrelenting journalist, dissecting forestry management across Canada and province-by-province with a surgeon's skill and attention to detail. Yet she always manages to keep readers focused on "the big picture" -- the upcoming shortage of Canadian wood.

She does this by focusing on how each province calculates its Annual Allowable Cut (AAC) and showing how governments include essentially unusable land to inflate the AAC for industry's benefit. May also makes sound economic arguments against the technique of clear-cutting, and shows how governments subsidize industry and undervalue forests through low stumpage rates.

"At the Cutting Edge" is essential reading for politicians, journalists, investors, environmentalists -- and every citizen who has ever thought that perhaps we may be cutting down too many trees.

Elizabeth May has done a much needed job of making sense of all the double-speak that surrounds the forest industry in Canada. When all is said and done, the facts that she uncovers stand as damning evidence regarding the unsustainability of logging in all of Canada's provinces. As such, this book will no doubt be unpopular with the Canadian timber industry and its spin doctors.

This book describes how the US mortgage and credit card industries approach modeling, from the industry standard practioners point of view. It is best read by those familiar with the industry. It ignores the potential of current thinking outside industry standard practices. However, everyone interested in the subect needs to know the way FICO does it; they are the standard.

I agree with everyone else, but they are comming from a different point of view than the person that would benefit from this book.

This book is very nicely done for the beginner who wants to read his first book on credit risk.

Even for me I found some information in it that was extremely beneficial; it will probbaly save our corporation a great deal of money.

The title says "Design and Application"; the book serves the title very well. Concise, loaded with different angles. Some writers' names are big in other fields. Surprisingly, a good economist's review is also included, Mark Z's. I once reviewed about 90 relevant publications in the credit scoring field for my thesis project. One impression was the literature was fragmented and heavily European oriented. This book clearly interests me more as it relates to American experience more.

The title does not say "Theory and application". So I don't complain about its "lack of substance". I don't believe either it is for beginners. Design is related to science, but design is often more an art than science; I don't expect it to be a theoretic tome. It is more like a "programmer's pocket book". So certain level of prerequistion and experience will max out the benefits for the reader.

I look forward to seeing another update.

this book doesn't cover any theoretical aspect of credit scoring. for example, almost every authoer is still using K-S statistics, which is no better than just eye-balling the difference between any 2 curves. the book provides no useful information to someone who wants to learn how to do the scoring. this book has 1/3 of overlap with the editor's last book. are the editor and authors just lazy? or the articles are just too good?

As someone who is not familiar with how credit scoring models are built, I have found this book to be extremely helpful and informative. Our institution has hired a number of vendors to build scorecards in the past but none has explained how the point weights were derived or how it was determined which variables should enter the scorecard. This book provided a very insightful discussion of these issues. It also includes two chapters discussing things you need to keep in mind when implementing scorecards which is the area I work in. It has helped us tremendously in this area.

Chapter 10 of this book contains the best exposition I have found to date regarding contruction of an OAS model for MBS. On the downside, in the process of replicating the model I have not been able to reproduce the interest rate cap prices on page 171 nor the the output of the prepayment model aging function depicted graphically on page 184, figure 6.

On the cap price issue, all inputs to the cap pricing were reproduced exactly, so that the failure to reproduce the prices themselves is a mystery.

Regarding the prepayment aging function it does not appear that the function presented in equation (22) on page 183, using the GNSF model coefficients, produced the output contained in figure 6, on page 184.

I point out these two issues in order to indicate the extent to which replicating the results of this chapter are possible. Finally, I was dissapointed in the willingness of the author to respond to clarifying questions regarding the presented material. I was surprised when I did not receive a response because the author was eager to answer a prior inquiry from me asking about the appicability of his chapter to my MBS modeling interests.

In any event, the chapter provides the best documentation of OAS model construction I have found. For those practitioners wanting to learn how to construct a workable OAS model for MBS fixed rate pass throughs I highly recommend chapter 10 of this book.

This book is, I think, basically designed to be a college text on non-European music. If you're like me, you've been out of college quite a while, but I think you'll find this to be a useful reference volume if you're interested in alternative musical traditions. Perhaps it's my imagination or simply my idiosyncratic point of perspective, but I believe that there has been an increase of interest in non-western music over the last couple of decades. My perspective is that I'm too old for the top 40, not interested in listening to the music I grew up with (it was bad enough listening to some of that stuff the first time!) and find that the classical station gets more banal each day. This book will help you to understand the subtleties of non-Western traditions, whether it be types of Indian ragas to use at different times of day, the normal arrangement of pieces in a traditional Arab presentation or the significance of variations in musical style in Japanese court music as opposed to the Kabuki theatre.

Three stars, of course, is lukewarm praise, and there were various features of the book that I was not thrilled with, although some of them were unavoidable. The book is an edited collection of essays by various academics, and the quality is uneven. Some of them seem to almost be too thorough, and get bogged down in detail (Iranian, Japanese). Some are too sketchy (West African, Peruvian). Some just aren't there (other Native American). A couple seem to have provided an opportunity for the writer to air his or her pet projects (Chinese). Perhaps out of a jealousy to guard their preserves, most of the articles studiously avoided talking about cross-cultural influences (e.g., Arabic music on Iranian - or is it the other way round?), regarding which I would have appreciated some comment.

I also think that it would not have been out of place to discuss some of the lesser known traditions with links to the West, such as gypsy music. Also, in general most (but not all) of the articles avoid discussing modern trends. Well, I suppose that there are limitations to what you can include between the covers of one book. This book does cover a lot of turf, and it has an extensive bibliography if you want to look into any one subject in more depth. Recommended if like me you want to have this kind of information in one volume on your bookshelf.

Despite there being a plethora of books on the National Parks of the US, there are very few books available which focus on Canada. This book has a good editorial review, so I was very much looking forward to receiving it. However, I was quite disappointed when I received it. Although it is advertised as having "breath-taking" photographs, most of the photos are rather poor. The larger ones are mostly out of focus and look like they've been taken on a cheap compact camera (this may be due to poor printing and not poor photography). In this age of great photographic and printing technology, I can't understand why such poor quality photos are still published. The text is informative and well written, but rather brief. The park-maps are too small and devoid of any detail: they basically only show the location, the rough shape of the boundary, the roads, and sometimes a couple of lakes. After reading this book, I still feel that I do not have a real idea about what most of the National Parks of Canada are like.