Clare is a true poet, and strangely neglected currently it seems. Really he is one of the essential poets of the wonderful romantic era which includes Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake, Coleridge, and Keats. Why is this just about the only book of his work being published? I think you're lucky to find this one, and you can find many poems of his on the web to see yourself. Cheers

Luther and A Patriot for Me are excellent plays. The passion, drama and elements of surprise and the succint turning points testify to Osborne's talent. Even better than his landmark Look Back in Anger.

Playwriting at its best.

The book "Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye" by Kenneth O'Donnell and David Powers offers a wide variety of information about the life of John F. Kennedy. Focusing on his political life, with which they were deeply involved, the authors give a perspective on the life of President Kennedy that can't be matched by many others, for not many others knew him as well as they did. Unlike a normal, relatively boring biography, this collection of memories about their friend and president contains stories, personality, and detailed information as seen through the eyes of white house aides and friends. I highly recommend this book to learn more about Kennedy and to have a great time in the process.

I am fifteen years old. The reason that I read this book is because I hope one day to be involved in public life. I began this book knowing relatively nothing about Kennedy, except his assination and his line, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." This book gives me information to quench my thirst for knowledge as well as inspire and provide me with information that I will be able to use in the future, which I am only aboe to dream of now.

I love this book and feel that it is a shame that this is out of print. I feel that it is atrocious to think of a person not even attempting to find a copy of this book or not reading it if they have it. To conclude, I feel that this book is well worth the read, and so much more.

"Oct. 22nd, 1837. 'What are you doing now?' he asked, 'Do you keep a journal?'-- So I make my first entry today." Thus begins Thoreau's Journal, made up of more then two million words and covering about twenty-five years of his life. No other work of Thoreau's better exhibits his discipline as a writer and his devotion to the natural world. In the Journal can be found the fragmented foundations of masterpieces such as Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, The Maine Woods, and Cape Cod. But what is perhaps more interesting to a reader of Thoreau's Journal are his thoughts and insights on topics such as friendship, love, religion, nature, bravery, heroism, war, slavery, the art of writing, and, most important to Thoreau, the art of living. Anyone with any interest in Thoreau will find his Journal to be an invaluable aid in understanding and following the life of one of America's most profound prose writers

"Just the facts" Great quick review for emergency medicine in-training exams / boards exams. One could read this text in two weeks just before the exam and retain the most relevant information. Highly recommended.

"Early visitors to the moon did not expect to encounter entities such as a government, a budget, a paycheck, or a supervisor. Such public administration entities are not natural kinds; they are not givens" (p. 11), starts Farmer's book and captures interest of the reader immediately. This book presents an interesting comparative analysis of modern public administration with post-modern public administration that extends our horizons and makes us believe that something, we socially constructed, can be changed.

Farmer uses reflexive interpretation as his method. Reflexive interpretation is concerned with why we see (understand) what we are seeing (understanding) and with the possibilities for seeing (understanding) something differently by changing the lens (p. 13). That is, the leading concern is why we are seeing what we are seeing and whether we could see it differently; it is reflexive interpretation. Farmer pulls us to the enjoyable point at which we can relentlessly question our basic assumptions regarding reality of public administration so that we can be aware and change our socially constructed realities.

The book is grouped into mainly two parts, modernity and post-modernity. In modernity part, Farmer examines modern public administration's limits: limits of "Particularism", "Scientism", "Technologism", "Enterprise" and "Hermeneutics". In post-modernity part, as solutions to the limits of modern public administration, Farmer examines post-modernist concepts "Imagination", "Deconstruction", "Deterritorialization" and "Alterity".

Particularism, according to Farmer, creates blind spots that prevent us from seeing alternative ways of doing things. Based on "American" "Public" "Administration" he debunks particularism's paralyzing impact. "American" emphasis impedes looking at different societies to transfer some innovations; "Public" emphasis prevents public and business sectors from learning from each other and neglects the interrelationships between two sectors; "Administration" emphasis (based on functional and programmatic POSDCORB) creates competing paradigms that emphasize functions and programs more than their content and action. "Scientism" (think about fact-value dichotomy) gives no space for ethics in public administration (because ethical values are not open to hard positive measurement), and so "administrative ethics suffers from the difficulty of identifying a moral grip for core values" (p. 85). Viewing public administration as "technology" (applied vs. episteme) suggests recognizing that practitioners should assume more ownership for public administration theory (p. 91). However, as Farmer points out, such a viewing makes it impossible to integrate systems and management and ethical considerations. Seeing public administration from an "enterprise" (entrepreneurial) window, without the system of capitalist rationalization (missing in public service), according to Farmer, is doomed to failure.

"Imagination", a softly "oxymnoron" at best in modern public administration because of imagination's problem with rationalization, will provide many opportunities, according to Farmer, that are missing in modern "rational" rule-oriented bureaucracy. "Deconstruction" of texts (the post-modernist text connotes not only papers to be read, but also anything that can be interpreted such as events and living figures) is expected to enlarge our perspective. "Deterritorialization" connotes a radical change in the structure of our thinking. "Alterity" or "otherness" implies a new emphasis on oppressed, suppressed and excluded groups (i.e., see G. Frederickson).

Though Farmer, as an affirmative post-modern public administrationist, is very clear in handling such a complex subject, sometimes he forgets he is writing about bureaucracy and immersing himself in postmodern epistemology and neglects the main subject he tries to clarify. Second, I would not recommend you to think through the lenses of bureaucracy and would recommend to think more radically.

I highly recommend this book to readers who are interested in post-modern public administration (you cannot find hundreds of books written about post-modern public administration). I also recommend "Post Modern Public Administration" by Fox and Miller (1996) and "Post-modernism and the Social Sciences" by Rosenau (1992).

Donahoe and Palmer's book represents the Holy Grail of psychology, a rigorous and empirically sound explanation of how human behavior is shaped by experience and the actual neural processes that translate and shape that experience. Integrating the separate methodologies of operant and classical conditioning (behaviorism), cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and neuropsychology, D&P have created a synthetic explanation of how human behavior derives from the complex interplay of informative (i.e., environmental) and neuro-biological events. This bio-behavioral approach is behavioristic because it focuses on how information (or environmental contingencies) may be mapped to behavior, but it notably expands behavioristic doctrine by demonstrating that overt behavior is but one aspect of a bio-behavioral system that includes not just overt but covert (neural) behavior.

D&P's signal accomplishment is their unified principle of reinforcement. Common sense, as well as traditional behavioristic doctrine tells us that behavior occurs because it is either metaphorically pulled from (as in a conditioned reflex like salivation)or is 'glued' to us (as when we receive a monetary reward for a job well done). Similarly, humanistic and social psychology demarcate motivational processes into intrinsic and extrinsic components that are also ultimately derived from the premise that behavior is governed by two response systems. D&P demolish this well established conception, and demonstrate that all learning derives from unitary reinforcement processes that employ near identical neo-cortical and midbrain structures. Reinforcement according to D&P occus when the environmental control of behavior changes, or in other words, when we perceive some discrepancy in our behavior that demands a shifting of attention. On the neural level, this discrepancy is marked by the release of the neuromodulator dopamine that increases synaptic or neural efficacy. D&P's discrepancy model of reinforcement depicts reinforcement as a change in an environmental-behavior relationship that may or may not engage overt behavior. In other words, reinforcement occurs virtually when changes in environmental-behavior relationships are modeled in the brain. Put most simply, we are reinforced when we consider behavioral discrepancies that represent in turn the changing possibilities of existence. In a poetic sense, maxmimized reinforcement occurs when we maximize our hopes and dreams. If happiness is presumed to be maximizing the reinforcers in our lives, and if reinforcers are virtual, not real, then the role model for the happy life is not a bored Charles Foster Kane in his art filled Gothic mausoleum, but a penniless Shakespeare in Love. In an intellectual world increasingly challenged by the intellectual trendiness of selfish genes and conspicuous conception, it is refreshing that the implications of empirical psychology need not always be banal.

But do D&B reach this rather evident conclusion? Unfortunately, they derive no practical or philosophical conclusions whatsoever from their thesis. Despite the revolutionary implications of D&P's analysis, their perspective stays rooted in just the facts. The book is dryly academic in tone(understandable, for this is a textbook), and in spite of a liberal inclusion of 'Far Side' cartoons, it is not an easy book to read. The biggest problem however is their neglect of the 'qualia' or subjective aspects of experience. Reading 'Learning and Complex Behavior' is like reading a medical text explaining in great detail the processes that underlie human biology, but neglecting to say that biological processes often feel good or bad. That is, we can explain a head cold through an analysis of cellular fuctions, but a head cold only becomes meaningful to people because it hurts. In particular, D&P's anchoring of reinforcement processes to the activity of dopaminergic midbrain systems does not include even a cursory mention of the fact that the relative presence of the neuromodulator dopamine is associated with hedonic feelings ranging from elation to depression. Because D&P do not address the obvious fact that reinforcement is inherently hedonic, their analysis does not have the immediate applicability to theoretical concepts (e.g. intrinsic motivation, peak experience, play) in social and humanistic psychology that are based on the subjective interpretations of people. Related to this neglect of the importance of subjective qualia is D&P's complete neglect of emotion, or how somatic events nonconsciously inform behavior. Ironically, contemporary interpretations of emotion (see Antonio Damasio excellent book 'Descartes Error, Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain') follow very much in line with D&P's own analysis, which makes it even more inexplicable why D&P do not mention them in their book.

Overall, 'Learning and Complex Behavior' is an empirical foray par excellence into the mysteries of learning and motivation, but obscures its philosophical implications in the muted tones of academic science. Donahoe and Palmer are refreshingly more interested in scientific rigor and in the integrity of their findings than in mounting a soap box, and do not seem as eager to pull behavioristic psychology out of the laboratory into the world of cultural affairs as their intellectual predecessor B. F. Skinner did. But perhaps the future will see a new B. F. Skinner who take the important implications of Donahoe and Palmer's work into the light of day.

...if you gift someone with this delightful little quotations book. It amuses, it informs...with fun illustrations to boot! What more can one ask for in a book that is also a perfect size for stocking-stuffing? Includes many little-known and sometimes quirky entries too, all arranged by the number of "things" the wise or witty person mentioned when they opened their mouth. Five, six, seven, eight: I can't wait for the sequel!

A very readable book detailing the life of David Brainerd, a 18th century Missionary to American Indians living in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. His remarkable work was cut short by a frail body that led him to an early grave. His devotion to God should serve as inspiration and an example to be emulated in modern day evangelism. This book should be on all Christians' reading list as to reinforce their commitment in spreading the Word.

Title: The Little Negotiator Author: David John

Publisher: Information Australia Usefulness: 5 Stars Readability: 5 Stars

The Little Negotiator offers pertinent tips on how to negotiate almost anything in your life. In a simple, easy-to-read (and pocket-sized!) book, John lays out the basic rules all negotiators should remember: Everything from beating a supplier's prices down to getting the pay rise you deserve.

For people who aren't used to the push and pull of negotiating this book can make your life a lot easier. When having that quarterly budget or salary review meeting with the boss, remember, "Don't be intimidated by fancy qualifications or titles," says John.

Similarly, "Never yield to time pressure," says John. "The majority of concessions occur in the last 25 per cent of time allocated for negotiation." Not a lot of people know this, which is often what makes it so hard for them to negotiate with others.

Antonia Malchik MIS magazine, Australia.