As someone who has lived and worked in the Hunza and Baltistan region of northern Pakistan for a decade, it is important to first debunk the myth that the Burushushki, Wakhi and Shina people of the Hunza region are blessed with the lives of Methusula. This was actually a myth which gained momentum when it was written up by Dr. Alexander Leaf, in the January 1973 issue of National Geographic magazine. There is absolutely no scientific validity to his claim....

People of the Hunza suffer from malnutrition and nutrition deficiencies just as much as any other remote mountain region in SE Asia. Although the predominantly Ismaeli faith (branch of Shi-ite muslims) are progressive and relatively better off than most of their neighbours in nearby regions, they will all tell any visitor, that their life expectancy is around 50 - 60 years, just like any other region of northern Pakistan.

With that said, there certainly is valuable information in Jay Milton Hoffman and John Westerdahl's book about nutrition, stress reduction that would benefit millions in our obese western societies.

I was a little disappointed with this book. A fascinating people, however Dr. Hoffman's descriptions lacked depth, and did not go into the Hunzakut's lifestyle in any detail. A tale of the Hoffman's travels to Hunza was interesting, but not necessarily relevant to the title of the book; neither is Dr. Hoffman's own personal views on the human diet. However it is an interesting read, I am now looking for a book that can look at the Hunza people and their life habits in more detail.

I am just 15 years old. This book is the ultimate guide for anyone who wants to become stress free and healthy. It explores vegetarianism and other awsome ways to enhance your health. You will not be disapointed after reading this.

its long and boring. i would never reccomend this book. it has no eloquence or anything, just words. anyone could've written that book. its impossible to understand. what type of book would make it self so hard to understand, so slow to read. thats not a good book, in my opinion. i digress.

To be honest, I have never a big fan of poetry, but John Milton's epic changed that. I only decided to read this book after religion(and anti-religion) discussions started to heat up in my school. When I read Paradise Lost, I quickly stopped thinking of it as a poem, but as an epic of astronomical proportions that identifies many truths about humanity. The reading can be rather difficult at times, but with Alastair Fowler's wonderful annotations, it is possible for readers of any level to comprehend and enjoy Paradise Lost.

Milton's sympathetic view of Lucifer in his rebellion against heaven is very insightful and compelling. I loved this poem, but I would only recommend it to readers of a slightly older age, as you have to be able to understand his blank verse writing to fully enjoy this epic.

_Paradise Lost_ will of course continue to be reproduced, but the content will essentially stay the same. The question is which of the countless number of editions to purchase. Fowler's editing and copious yet useful annotations are first rate for any single edition of PL. Though most publishers treat epic poetry as though it were pulp-fiction, Longman has dignified this volume with paper that is acid-free and binding that is better than most hardcovers as it is stiched in signatures. It is simply beautiful, and it is simply the best edition if one wants to study Milton's epic carefully.

When I picked this up, I thought: hey, why not two bios for the effort of one? Why not indeed: you can't delve deeply enough into these two substantial and complex lives in this context. It is way way too ambitious to think you could. While you do get many of the factual basics, which were indeed interesting, neither of these past Presidents comes alive.

"John Milton Cooper...blends these contrasting and kindred elements into a masterful portrait of two of our most intriguing presidents," David Kennedy in the New York Times Book Review, November 20 1983. TR and Wilson are often considered to be the same, especially in the in the domestic realm. The New Freedom was simply an extension of New Nationalism. But Cooper espouses the differences through analysis of both important domestic debates and the politics of war and internationalism. For anyone interested in studying Roosevelt, Wilson, and the Progressive era this book is an important read.

This is a great work of scholarship dealing with two of the most important figures of the early 20th century. Cooper is able to bring out the differences in the approaches that both men had in setting the US political agenda in the early 20th century. Cooper is always a great treat to read. I must say that the title is somewhat interesting. When looking at Roosevelt or Wilson who is in fact the warrior and who the priest?

I find this edition impossible for classroom use and, after this semester, I will not use it again. I wish the venerable Hughes edition was available and affordable: somebody should reissue it if it is going out of print, as it remains the better textbook.

Here are my complaints:

*The prose is riddled with what seem to me to be small typos--I'm not talking about orginal spelling, but about things like "buy" for "but" (p. 937) and so on. There is one of these every 2-3 pages on average, and this is just too many.

*Some of the notes seem designed not to assist undergraduate readers but to demonstrate the editor's grasp of secondary scholarship. Why else would a note to _Comus_ direct readers to Leah Marcus and NOT also offer succinct remarks about the controversy surrounding Sports and mirth? What good is a note like that to the average undergraduate reader?

*The notes are so frequently about minor textual issues--the kind of thing that can go in an appendix and that undergrads are unlikely to care about--that students after a while stop looking at them altogether. That does not help anybody.

*The notes--especially to the prose--do not supply anything like the kind of necessary information that any classroom text should provide. This text does not identify the scriptural passages Milton cites, etc. For example, when Milton refers to a "covnant" in Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and/or The Readie and Easie Way, students need a note about The Solemn League and Covenant, but there is no such thing.

This up-to-date edition of Milton's complete poetry and major prose fills the urgent need for a successor to the venerable student's edition Merritt Hughes prepared half a century ago (now, alas, out of print).

One outstanding virtue of the Riverside Milton is its editor, Roy Flannagan. Flannagan is remarkably responsive to readers' comments, which he promises to take into account in the preparation of future editions (the first of which is said to be in press as of this writing). Unfortunately, a revised edition of the book is instantly needed. In its first printing, the Riverside Milton is badly marred by the absence of a table of contents to the poems and of indices to titles and first lines. Without these helps, it is impossible to find the shorter pieces without a considerable amount of page-turning--and difficult to justify giving the book more than three stars.

Some will be delighted to find that Flannagan has mixed textual notes with substantive ones at the bottom of the page; others (including, I suspect, most undergraduates) will find the mixture irritating, and will resent all the extra head-bobbing between text and annotations. Unexceptionable, I believe, is Flannagan's decision to preserve Milton's 17th-century spelling and punctuation, which greatly facilitates scanning the lines and reading them aloud.

As for the substance of the substantive notes, I believe it generally to be sound, though a handful of glosses seem far fetched and little worth. For example, in commenting upon how "Smiles . . . love to live in dimple sleek" ("L'Allegro," lines 28-30), Flannagan tells us that "Smiles do live in dimples, and dimples live in smooth (youthful) or sleek and plump faces. Also, a personified Smile lives in a dimple the way that a fairy in Midsummer Night's Dream may live in a flower."

As it now stands, the Riverside Milton is a work more of promise than of perfection. Those interested in purchasing the text should wait until the second printing is available, since it will contain the table of contents needed for the book to be truly usable.

Flannagan's update of Hughes is a trailblazing piece of editorial history, one written, formatted, finalized, and agonized over almost exclusively by the author in his home study, and provided as camera-ready copy in short order to a publisher whose timelines were, to put it mildly, ambitious.

As such, it carries all of the idiosyncratic flaws of any new approach to an old methodology, but with a decidedly cutting-edge twist: Prof. Flannagan makes the first attempt I'm aware of in scholarly publication to engage the reader interactively in improvement of the product, in that the Introduction provides the editor's e-mail address, and asks the reader to submit questions/comments/suggestions directly to the source, as he or she sees fit.

Prof. Flannagan has as a result already made a number of positive changes to an edition whose aim is not to dazzle the accomplished Milton scholar with its editor's erudition (Fowler's achievement enjoys that reputation unchallenged), but to entice and intrigue and support and encourage the relative newcomer to Milton studies. I am aware that The Riverside Milton is evolving and growing and reaching an even greater level of refinement and usefulness even as I write this review, becoming, not all things to all people, but the teaching and learning tool of its audience's desire. I too have a 30-year old copy of Hughes (as do most competent Milton scholars "of a certain age"), well-worn and frequently consulted . . . with the Riverside Milton at its side.

Is sport really to blame for the suffering of black people in the West? Of course the special success of black athletes has a lot to do with the negative realities of racist society. But it also has something to do with the strength of people who have faced adversity and not given up, or at least have the drive to try to secure for themselves a future. Society depends on such people, so is it really a bad thing that they become role models? The "Black Cause", insofar as it does or should exist, is not retarded each time a black athlete crosses the finish line. But it is retarded every time a teacher expects less from a black kid, or a rich black superstar suddenly becomes content with the status quo, or a writer makes money by replacing a false biological stereotype (and it is false, I've done the research Jon Entine failed to do) with an equally false social one.

This is a provocative text that explores the fetishizing of the Black athletic body but don't let the title fool you. This book does more to chastize Black ntellectuals for not delving into the topic as he has, while maintaining that to elevate athletic achievement as "artistic" is ridiculous and only is evidence of Black inability to critically interrogate the mechanisms that commidifiy and objectify the Black body in sports. Hoberman provides a detailed history of the scientific construction of race, and his historical detail is actually very helpful. But the reader should know that Hoberman spends more time putting blame on Black intellectuals AND the Black community for romanticizing the Black athlete, not pushing for the youth to achieve intellectually (which to him is more superior than athletic ability), and for being blinded by our faith to big-money ballers than to the sports industry who help to construct the myth of the Black athlete and make both a fetish and a profit zone of his or her body. The more I read it I began to notice that his tone was actually self-congratulory: in accusing the Black community, intellectuals in particular, he sets himself on a pedestal. His statements have somewhat of a judgemental, superior tone, that's condescending and at times implicitly racist regardless of whether that's what he intended. This book provoked a reaction out of me and I can only conclude that he's blaming the wrong people here.

It appears that many reviewers have missed what I perceive as Hoberman's point - that the emphasis of the black body as the locus of black identity necessarily de-emphasizes the intellectual capabilities and development of black people. The advertising, media, and sports industries all thrive on the perpetuation of black physical stereotypes that have existed since the first contacts between European and African. Just compare the press treatment of Larry Bird - as a careful, analytical, intelligent, under-control white man - with Shaq - as a biological freak whose sheer size makes up for his lack of gray matter. Such stereotypes of blacks as physical machines meant to entertain us are extremely damaging to black culture.

Intellectualism has been sacrificed to the sportive element in black culture, where academic success (unless in tandem with athletic excellence) is considered traitorous to black authenticity. The acceptable spheres of black self-expression - namely sport, negro music, and dance - are considered the only authentically black talents by both white and black culture. Such a stifling limitation should not be placed upon black culture, yet this is perpetuated everyday in our sporting culture and in our advertising media.

After you read this book, you will not be able to watch a sporting event without thinking about the exploitation of black athletes. Watch the commercials, read the ads, and you will realize that blacks are, more often than not, presented as mere physical beings whose animality precludes a deeper humanity.

The information is there, but this is more a text book to teach the names and location of anatomy than a reference book for an experienced clinician. The illustrations are pencil and not very detailed. To look up specific anatomical items requires going to several pages. Not a quick reference work.

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The reason I bought this Max Notes is the same for my (probable) frequent mispelling in the text that follows: I'm not a native English speaker. I wanted to know Milton's work, without having to fight my way through a poetry that's difficult even to well educated, native English speakers. I suspected that the difficulties of the style would hinder my appreciation of the work (which I still think would be the case).

This is a good summary of Milton's work: engaging, informed and synthetic, at the same time. Each "book" (actualy chapters) of Paradise Lost is presented separately, in five sections: the new characters (who make their debut in that chapter; a good idea), the summary of the chapter/book, an analysis of the chapter, study questions along with their answers, and suggested essay topics.

Two things, though, compromise the quality of the book.
First, the quality of the "analysis" of each chapter is very, very poor. Most of the time it basicaly re-summarizes the text, in the very same way a laisy student -- who's unwilling to stop and think -- does in an test. This, plus the fact that the study questions and answers are also very superficial and poor, give the impression that the book is specifically geared toward less-than-bright students. Is this the case? We might think so, once this is the general pre-conceivement about "notes" and "summaries" of great classics. But I really guess it didn't have to be this way.

The second weakness in this Max Noter is the horrendous, despisable, quality of its illustrations. Once again, we can't help but think that they were "commissioned" to resemble the drawings teenagers usually make in their notebooks. Then again, what's the use of that? Do teenager readers find the book "cooler" because of these cheesy, ridiculous illustrations. I seriously doubt.

All in all this is not a complete waste of time and money, but I do get the sensation that there might be a better summary among the many other similar series available.

I was a little disappointed by this book. I had expected both descriptions and some practical help with methods to solve (or "resolve", as the author prefers to say) Fredholm integral equations of the first kind (IFK). Instead, the author devotes nearly 100% of his efforts to describing IFK's, why they are difficult to deal with, and why they can't be solved by any "naive" methods. I already knew that IFK's are problematic long before I purchased this book, which is why I bought it!

This book is better suited for people who do not yet understand anything about IFK's or why they are difficult to solve. It is most definitely NOT a book that will help you with practical methods/strategies to solve IFK's. If you are looking for help with ways to code a reasonable solution in software (which was my objective), you will definitely need yo buy something else.

Milton deserves better than this. Orgel and Goldberg boast that they have produced a radical Milton, but all they really offer is rehashed Alastair Fowler, without Fowler's erudition or eloquence. Many of the notes are just plain ignorant. There are better editions out there.

This is an excellent edition of John Milton's works; it includes all the major works (Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes) and several of his sonnets, other poems, and prose tracts. The notes are thourough, although they are arranged at the back rather than footnoted. This cleans up the body of the text, but also requires constant flipping of pages. And the pages do not hold together well. After a few weeks of use, mine were beginning to fall out! It is a good, affordable volume; but if you are planning a serious study, expect it to fall apart sooner or later.

This collection is a travesty indeed. Great poems no doubt, but abysmally read. Furthermore they should have put all the introductions together separate and apart from the poems. It's nice to hear intros the first time around. But who wants to hear the intros everytime you listen to the poems? Sometimes I want to hear just a stream of poetry without any interuptions and this format makes that impossible. It's incredible that such a great concept could be so terribly executed.

I could not get this back to the store for a refund quickly enough. While the poem selection is great and the poem introductions are narrated well, the choice to use "modern poets" as the readers made this compilation utterly unlistenable. The only one that I found acceptable was Anthony Hect--the others were notably bad. In particular, I found Jorie Graham's "readings" to be abysmal. She reads each poem as if it were simply a string of unconnected words, giving equal stress to each, with halting pauses between them, never breaking out of a drowsy monotone. Other readers were not much better.

There are three major flaws in the readings:

1) The readers are no better than the average untrained person, and often much worse. (You've just got to hear them for yourself to appreciate how bad they are.)

2) Successive poems by the same poet are read by different "readers." It's jarring to hear 3 or 4 poems from Poet X, each in a wildly different voice.

3) No regard is given to matching the sex of the poet and reader. In general, it is really annoying to hear your favorite poet read by the wrong sex. In particular, making this mistake on "gender specific" poems (like having a woman read Poe's "Annabel Lee") is unforgivable.

Why is this all so upsetting? Because it is practically impossible to find poetry collections on CD, making this a serious waste of limited resources. If you are looking for a good collection on CD, buy "81 Famous Poems CD" by Audio Partners (ISBN 0-945353-82-0). It's a good collection on two CDs and is read by professionals: Alexander Scourby, Bramwell Fletcher, and Nancy Wickwire. In the meantime, we can only hope that the producers of this collection will eventually come to their senses and re-record the poems with the services of trained professionals.

If you are prepping for the GRE in literature or are trying to gain a basic understanding of literary periods and poets, this audio-collection is a must. It features a brief introduction about each poet's life. It also includes a brief introduction about the theme of each poem. The fact that you have to listen to these introductions before listening to the poem inculcate the poem and aids retention. If literature has turned into a cumbersome and overwhelming task, this collection will not only provide you with a sense of direction but will also make literature far more pleasurable.