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Book reviews for "McColgan,_John_Joseph" sorted by average review score:

Aesop's Fables
Published in Hardcover by Rizzoli (1991)
Authors: Joseph Jacobs, John Hejduk, and Aesop
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They teach children glorious values for a lifetime.
Aesop's fables show us how some lessons never change. They represent an important part of the way we live our lives and hope to live our lives. These fables will be passed on for the rest of our lives


The Autobiography of St. Ignatius Loyola: With Related Documents
Published in Paperback by Fordham University Press (1993)
Authors: Ignatius, John C. Olin, and Joseph F. O'Callaghan
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Good read, Great insight
The title itself is somewhat misleading. The text is not, per se, an autobiography as authored by St. Ignatius but rather, is a transcript written from memory of the results of several interviews with the Saint by a fellow Jesuit. However, the insight into the character of Ignatius through the report of the autobiography is remarkable. Further, the story of his life itself provides wonderful background for exploring the socio-historical context Spiritual Exercies of St. Ignatius.


Basic Health Physics: Problems and Solutions
Published in Hardcover by Wiley-Interscience (15 January, 1999)
Author: Joseph John Bevelacqua
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Great companion book for taking the CHP Part II exam!
I took the Part II CHP exam this year. One of the questions was copied directly from this book. If you're having trouble with any solutions this book will help. It's a great companion book to have with Cember's text. If you're looking for great study materials for CHP, don't pass on this!


Beyond Negative Thinking: Reclaiming Your Life Through Optimism
Published in Paperback by Avon (1995)
Authors: Joseph T. Martorano and John P. Kildahl
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A book that changed my life
The situations Dr. Martorano talks about in this book made me feel like it had been written about me. It's amazing how many people there are with my exact same problems and situation. I thought it was just great. Plus, The instructions he and Dr. Kildahl gave were easy to follow and have really made a difference


The Big Book of Fenton Glass: 1940-1970
Published in Hardcover by Schiffer Publishing, Ltd. (1998)
Authors: John Walk and Joseph Gates
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Wonderful, very informative; you'll love this great resource
Very pleased with this book. Page after page of pictures. Super resource for looking items up. Will use it year after year.


Biology and Medicine of Rabbits and Rodents
Published in Paperback by Lea & Febiger (1983)
Authors: John E. Harkness and Joseph E. Wagner
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The Biology and Medicine of Rabbits and Rodents
The purpose is to provide lab professionals with the advice on the maintenance of rabbits and rodents, concerning their care and health. It covers rabbit, guinea pig, hamster, gerbil, mouse and rat. Even though it is intended for *experts*, the book is relatively easy to read and is very thorough starting with the general husbandry and biology, followed by clinical procedures, sign of disease, diagnoses and listing specific diseases and conditions from A-Z. It lists the hosts for the disease, etiology, transmission, predisposing factors, clinical signs, necropsy signs, diagnosis, prevention, effect on research and public health significance. The last chapter has self test with case reports.

Even though this is not an *exotic pet rodent* book, it is a great reference book for any rabbit or rodent pet owner, since most diseases occur in pets as well as in laboratory animals. A nice middle ground between serious technical veterinary books and the common photo pet shop books.


Black Jack: The Life and Times of John J. Pershing
Published in Hardcover by Texas A&M University Press (1977)
Author: Frank Everson, Vandiver
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Excellent biography of a great American general
I asked for this biography as a Christmas present 20 years ago. I finally got around to reading it, and I was not disappointed. Dr. Vandiver has written an first-rate biography which compares to Dumas Malone's sextet on Thomas Jefferson and Douglas S. Freeman's classic four-volume opus on Robert E. Lee. John Pershing probably has languished in obscurity in recent times because of the events which followed World War I (the Roaring Twenties, the Depression) and World War II, which resulted from, as Pershing himself warned, failing to fight World War I to a decisive finish. He is also denigrated by some as not being able to chase down Pancho Villa during the Punitive Expedition. Vandiver sets the record of history straight on Pershing, though, as nearly all biographers of great men are wont to do, he does lapse into hagiography and glosses too readily in many instances over his faults and weaknesses. Nevertheless he fairly portrays Pershing as the simple, direct, honest, energetic, efficient, and dedicated man and soldier who rose to the rank of General of the Armies, a rank attained only by George Washington before him. Vandiver traces Pershing from his youth, his sojourn as a teacher in a small school, and his cadet days at West Point, showing how his values and experiences moulded him well for the service and duty he would render his country for decades. From West Point, Pershing went west to become an Indian fighter, to Cuba in the Spanish-American War, and then to the Phillipines, where he conquered the wild Moro tribes of Mindanao. Pershing performed each of his assignments with excellence and bravery, always earning the highest praise from his superiors. He was a spit-and-polish martinet, insisting that his subordinates conform to the highest standards set at West Point. He never asked of his men anything he would not ask of himself, and he honestly believed that all that drill, efficiency, and discipline put his soldiers at the minimum risk when the tasks of campaigning and battle were at hand. He had no patience with slovenly subordinate officers who let their commands slide. Pershing did have a knack for selecting excellent subordinates, and rarely had problems getting his overall plans and objectives executed. The best part of Vandiver's work is that which describes Pershing's command of the AEF. The general did an incredible job of commanding the mobilization, buildup of troops and materiel in France, and ensuring the training of his Doughboys, all the time holding off repeated French and British attempts to siphon off and amalgamate the arriving American soldiers into their forces. Had the French and British succeeded, it is not inconceivable that they would have wasted thousands of American soldiers in the grinding, failing trench warfare the French and British were accustomed to on the Western Front. Pershing's dogged insistence on an American army angered the Allies, but proved decisive and effective in the last five months of the conflict. To their everlasting credit, both Secretary of War Newton Baker and President Wilson also never wavered from this course, and backed up Pershing fully whenever Lloyd George or Clemenceau tried to press their case over the general's head. Vandiver fully portrays the human side of General Pershing, including his marriage to Frances Warren, their brief 10 years together, and his grief at losing her and their three daughters in a fire at the Presidio in 1915. He also depicts Pershing's social circle as a young man, and the fortuitous friendships with men who became extremely influential and helpful to him later in life. Many of the subordinates he mentored and nurtured all either proved essential to the building and command of the AEF and/or became the pillars of America's armed forces in World War II (Marshall, Patton, and MacArthur, for example). This biography does have a few editorial flaws. Dr. Vandiver, who was a prodigy who never attended high school or undergraduate school, does some excellent writing for having had no formal coursework, but he does have a shocking weakness in writing subordinate clauses as separate sentences. Of which this is an example. A good editor would have caught the few dozen instances in this work and revised the grammar. Also Dr. Vandiver sometimes drops articles from a sentence, resulting in some clumsy passages. Again, good editing would have corrected these. At the end of the second volume, as Pershing's retirement approaches, Dr. Vandiver omits the necessary explanation that, in 1924, the mandatory retirement age in the armed forces was 64; the reader has to infer that from the narrative. Nevertheless Dr. Vandiver hit a home run with his biography of Pershing, and it deserved far more acclaim and exposure than it has enjoyed in the past 20 years. Reading about this genuine American hero was a breath of fresh air in these times of antiheroes. America today surely needs more men like General Pershing. Thanks to Dr. Vandiver, he will not be forgotten.


Chile's Free Market Miracle: A Second Look
Published in Paperback by Food First Books (1995)
Authors: Joseph Collins, John Lear, Walden Bello, and Stephanie Rosenfeld
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A devastating indictment of Chilean neoliberalism
This book contains an analysis of the economic and social effects of the Pinochet dictatorship by John Lear and Joseph Collins around 1990 and an epilogue by Stephanie Ronsenfeld from around 1994.

The authors show the effects of deregulation on all aspects of Chilean life. The public health system--which seventy percent of Chileans as of 1990 belonged to--has been rapidly defunded , farmed out to municipalities. Relatively few Chileans can afford the relatively new HMO-type companies whose primary focus is accomodating people who can pay the most i.e. the well-off. Thyphoid fever and Hepatitis rapidly expanded to epidemic proportions from the mid-70's until a decaded later--short term profit, absent government restraint, makes dumping industrial waste and chemicals into rivers into the water supply a reasonable cost-effective mean as does neglecting to ensure adequate sanitation standards in the food you sell. The government finally enacted some regulations in the mid-80's to try to roll back the epidemics. The authors point out the declining infant mortality rate, which neoliberal advocates point to with pride is, apart from the expanding birth rate in the upper classes, in large part due to "socialistic" government programs targeting new mothers and infants. The health of the infants and mothers after they conclude the program is, of course, another story. The authors show that Chile's privitization and municipilization of education has grossly skewed the benefits towards wealthy municipalities able to generate the resources and high-income students to be "self-financing."

They show that the privitized social security accounts are of scant benefit for a large number of Chileans who cannot generate enough income to meet their stringent minimum requirements. This great mass of people inevitably have to fall back on the scant package offered by the government which, combined with required government payments to those who retired before the early 80's when privitization was implemented, promises to bring severe fiscal probolems for Chile in the next few decades. They show that wages have stagnated or declined relative to pre-1973 levels--per capita income did not return to its 1970 level until 1989. They show that the monumental economic crises in the early 80's which admirers of Pinochet's economic policies like to forget, was very much due to the extreme neoliberal policies of the junta. In the late 70's Chile's economy took off. Tarrifs were eliminated, restrictions on foreign investment lifted and the Peso was pegged at 39 to the dollar, considerably overvalued. The result was a flood of ultra-cheap imports, mostly luxury items and little productive inbestment. The banks, freed from regulation, recklessly loaned out. Then at the end of 1981 all of the suddent there was recession in the U.S. and thus restriction of its market, capital flight, corporations and banks under enormous debt went under and the economy was on the verge of collapse. Pinochet took over the bankrupt banks and corporations using the resources provided by Chile's immensely profitable government owned companies to get back into shape and then sold them to his friends and foreign corporations at grossly undervalued prices. During this process some unkind critics labeled it--"the Chicago road to socialism"--government ownership was as high as it ever was during Allende's term--after the proteges of University of Chicago free market gurus like Milton Friedman who took over Chile's economic policy after 1975. The immensely profitable public companies then followed into the private sector, again grossly low prices.

The show that working conditions, wages and living conditions have largely gone down hill, helped enormously by Pinochet's extreme anti-labor policies. The rapid elimination of native forests and fisheries protends serious problems. Miss Rosenfeld points out that the democratic governments since 1990 have eliminated some of the harder edges of Pinochet's policies by increasing spending considerably for housing and other social services and increasing the minimum wage and have shown more success in narrow statistical indicators than he ever did. But the structure of his society is still more or less intact; Chile is still primarily an export-oriented economy, largely by exploiting non-renewable resources. Its over-reliance, for instance, of grape exports, the workers in whose industry are mostly temporary laboring under bad conditions and low wages, makes it very vulnerable to new competitors who are discovering more cheaper ways of production and can pay even lower wages. Government funding for research and development and funding of infrastructure before 1973 laid the basis for the industry's prosperity but since that time it has been eliminated.

The book is a little bit dated and I didn't understand one or two points but it is a very important book and, for an economics book, lucidly written.


Collaborative Social Studies Classroom, The: A Resource for Teachers, Grades 7-12
Published in Paperback by Allyn & Bacon (13 July, 1995)
Authors: Joseph John Nowicki and Kerry F. Meehan
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Excellent Educational Material
The Collaorative Social Studies Classroom is an excellent book for any one who is starting off as a teacher. This book explains step by step and in depth information on how to do different activities in the classroom. I have had the opportunity to take classes taught by Dr. Nowicki and use some of the books curriculum first hand, and I must say that it has been a great learning experinece. This book really helps to make learning fun, and it really helps people to understand the information. The Collaborative Social Studies Classroom is an excellent book for any social studies teacher, and can brighten up any classroom.


Complementary Alternative Medicine: An Evidence-Based Approach
Published in Paperback by Mosby (15 January, 1999)
Authors: John W. Spencer and Joseph J. Jacobs
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Complementary/Alternative medicine
The authors present the topic of complementary and alternative medicine in a manner that is logical and orderly. They start with basic information regarding this type of medicine and progress through this emerging practice type. An excellent resource for anyone starting the inquiry into this area of practice and wants research based evidence to guide their investigation.


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