I started to hate Holden because he frustrated me so much. His constantly negative remarks about everyone, his lazyness and uncaring attitude,and his superiority all bothered me. As I read, I began to understand his character more and I liked him. As soon as it is accepted that there is a little Holden in all of us, the book is more enjoyable. It taught me many lessons about motivation, superficiality and understanding. Read it, it's very well written.

When I first read this book, I had no idea where it was heading, as the writer just jumped straight into the plot. As I continued through the story, I began to think that Holden was just as phony as the many people that he hates, though soon, I began to realise that his negative attitude is a result of being let down too many times, thereby, he seeing no point in making an effort himself. I find his protection of Phoebe incredibly sweet, considering the type of person he is, and the fact that he wants to protect her from the 'real world'shows that he is scared that she might one day become like those 'phonies'. This is an amazing book, which will captivate your mind. An extremely positive recommendation comes from this girl.

I absolutely loved this book. Holden Caulfield captures the essence of youth and all the troubles that the youth of any era must go through. A great book for anyone, from a high school student to someone in their 40's. This book will have you laughing, sympathizing and nearly in tears as you read about this troubled young man.

"Almayer's Folly" adequately introduces the theme of culture conflict, an angle that is expressed more fully in Conrad's later works. I would certainly recommend this to anyone familiar with Conrad's body of work, which is not to say that readers new to his work should avoid this novel.

This tale, set in the colonial-era East Indies, narrates the brief rise and slow descent of a man's search for fortune and adventure. Quite simply, the treasure never appears and Almayer is left to ponder what could have been. His woes are intensified by the departure of his daughter, one of his few links to "civilised Europe." Classic symbolism occurs late in the novel, as Almayer erases the footprints of his daughter the day of their parting. While "Almayer's Folly" doesn't reach the heights of Conrad's longer (read: better) works, this effort still captures the romantic essence of the Far East in the classic Conrad style.

Although not to be compared with his major works, this is nonetheless a most impressive first novel. Perhaps because he was already well into his thirties when he wrote and published it, the book contains all the major themes that one associates with Conrad. If one has not read any Conrad at all, I would recommend going to his great masterpieces first (VICTORY, NOSTROMO, THE SECRET AGENT, UNDER WESTERN EYES, HEART OF DARKNESS, THE NIGGER OF THE 'NARCISSUS', or LORD JIM). But for anyone who enjoys the work of Joseph Conrad, this book can hardly fail to fascinate.

This book is a good starting resource for anyone who's concerned with their time on the Internet, or sex addiction in general. There's only a couple of problems I've had with the book. Mostly, it's catagorizing of addiction seems exceptionally broad. I think any normal person could argue they had an addiction problem using the criteria listed within.

Also, the book is titled breaking free, but seems reluctant to assist in that endeavor. Instead, it throws out a few common sense ideas, and then recommends you seek professional help. Well, if that's what you're looking for, let me save you the cost of this book. "You, are in need of professional help. A book cannot help you." There, the overall morale of this title in one easy, free sentance.

The Internet is a fascinating place, but for too many people, it is also fraught with danger, as they are sex addicts, and the Internet can become a sex addict's paradise. This book was highly readable, not too complex but didn't talk down to the reader, and includes exercises to help the cybersex addict get started on his/her recovery. If it has a flaw, it is that the authors' definition of sobriety is a little murky. Still, this is a very helpful book, with plenty of examples from real-life addicts. Should be read by everyone who compulsively uses the Internet for sexual gratification.

Like 100s of 1000s of other internet junkies--it is a legitimate
heartbreaking problem for people and their partners. Carnes has this book and several other highly recommended books that you MUST buy and you must find a therapist or local SLAA [Sex & Love Addicts Anonymous] Group to help you deal with it. What is IT? Cyber-sex addiction. Internet addiction. Cyber-chat addiction. Or compulsion or pre-occupation. Excellent book my wife and I read as we worked out our problems and we cannot recommend it enough. Don't fool yourself, this [cyber-sex, internet addiction] is a horrible problem that will just get worse as the internet [pulls] more innocent people in. Our society is being changed by this cyber-sex junk and not changed for the better. Every week we hear of another news report of someone murdered or abused by someone they met in a chatroom, we hear of another friend or acquaintance whose marriage borke apart because of it...we see trust destroyed or people shattered by this plague and so far only a few religious, psychologists and/or sociologists have recognized this growing problem, Dr. Carnes has been on the cutting edge and opened up the truth about it. Do yourself a favor and get this book.

just a wonderful, new, look at Christ and his family. A subject almost never before dealt with from the angle this author has approached it. well worth the time it takes to read it.

a book for the jr. high to high school level. well written. very interesting in that it poses a new and refreshing angle to the subject at hand. a must for any christian to read--young or old

On March 24, 1989, the 987 foot oil tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef, spilling 11 million gallons of North Slope crude oil into the once pristine waters of Prince William Sound, creating the largest oil spill in U.S. history. David Lebedoff offers a detailed account of the spill and the legal wranglings surrounding the record $5 billion judgment against Exxon, a judgment that is still under appeal. Lebedoff attempts to provide an even-handed look at the spill and the development of the legal case that grew out of it, but is hampered by the fact that Exxon refused to provide comment. This is not the author's fault, but readers should be advised that this book gives more insight into the perspectives of the victims and their attorneys than it does into public relations strategies that Exxon may have employed and so on.

_Cleaning Up_ is thorough and interesting. I have only two concerns about the book. First, while the author indicates that he gleaned information from thousands of pages of court documents, trial transcripts, and so on, these works are not cited in the text. As someone who is interested in research about the spill, I found the lack of a bibliography a bit frustrating. Second, as someone who resides in Alaska, I was put off by the misspelling of at least two locations in Alaska. The Robinson firm credited with providing the client base for the case should correctly be identified as located in Soldotna, Alaska, not "Soldatna." Moreover, the jurors identified as residing in the "Mar-Su Valley" should correctly be identified as living in the Mat-Su Valley, an abbreviation for Matanuska-Susitna, an area about an hour north of Anchorage. Whether the fault of the author or the editorial staff, these misspellings reflected a lack of attention to detail.

All in all, _Cleaning Up_ provides interesting insights into the legal dimensions of the Exxon Valdez spill. It should be of interest to those who want to learn more about corporate lawsuits and those with an interest in the spill itself. While Alaska Natives, those in commerical fishing, and others wait to receive money for damages caused by the spill, Exxon continues to earn interest on the money set aside to pay the judgment. In fact, the 8/4/1998 Anchorage Daily News (p. A1, A8) reported that the account is earning $9.40 per second in interest. At this rate, Exxon will have earned interest in the amount of the judgment long before they pay out a dime to the victims of the spill.

David Lebedoff is an excellent author. He goes to great lengths to portray factually and fairly the complicated story of the Exxon Valdez oil spill and ensuing trial. Despite the complex legal issues involved, Lebedoff skillfully makes the book read as though it were a novel. I would reccomend this book to anyone in need of a good read.

This is a truly unique book. In 1987, a cache of letters, albums and clippings was discovered in the attic of a house in Kingston, Ontario, the bits and pieces of an unknown woman's life. Among the overflowing boxes and stuffed sugar sacks was a collection of letters from the months immediately after the First World War, a one-way correspondence written in pencil on flimsy paper. From this careless jumble of papers, there emerged unforgettable characters and an extraordinary story: a convict, a village girl, a penitentiary, and the town that lived in its shadow. The Convict Lover is a dazzling blend of historical detective work and imaginative recreation. You'll be spellbound by the relationship that unfolds through the very secretive, unconventional contacts made between one Joseph Cleroux and his link to the outside world, Phyllis Halliday. Excellent read. This book is an extraordinary stroke of literary good fortune. A wonderful read.

This story combines all the finest elements of a good read - it is a true story of the incongruous love between a young girl and a convict in the nearby Kingston Penitentiary based on letters found in the author's attic. Merilyn has researched meticulously so that the story combines in a realistic fashion the daily life of both the young girl - who is a romantic schoolgirl, often home ill and living in a strictly religious family - and the convict - who is an American imprisoned in Canada and determined not to let his sentence interfere with the quality of his life.

Through their letters, a picture emerges of the young man and the daily ritual that is his life in one of the newest penal institutions. The young girl uses her imagination to find ways to supply him with ordinary things that have extraordinary meaning inside prison walls. She buys him tobacco, mails his sister letters and sends him presents on holidays. Their relationship serves to increase her self confidence as she is shy, private and somewhat poor in health.

This book is a powerful story touching upon prison life, life as a young girl and the strange ways fate can bring two disparate people together.

When I started training in Family practice I searched for a large reference book to study from. I choose this text because it was written so well. The Language is direct, the explanations are clear and the advice is well founded. Now that I am in training the book is not as helpful as I hoped. Most of the time I find the treatment on any given topic too shallow for what I have to learn. I belive this is the result of a compromise between size and completness. I now wish I had saved my money and bought three textbooks - Harrison, Williams and Nelson as opposed to trying to find one book to cover all of internal medicine, obstetrics, and pediatrics.

This book is designed in a practical and understandable approach to family practice. It is an excellent text and a comprehensive reference especially useful for a nurse practitioner/graduate student in family practice. Not only does it provide treatment and management of common medical conditions but also includes psychosocial aspects of caring for clients and their families.

This is the central question explored by Conrad in Lord Jim. Jim is ultimately a character who inspires our sympathy due to his inability to find reconcilliation for his one tragic moment of weakness. In him we find a person of tremendous potential that remains unrealized as the tragic circumstances of his abandoning his post aboard the Patna continually haunt him and the associated guilt drives him to isolation.
Conrad successfully explores the concepts of bravery, cowardice,guilt and the alternative destinies that an individual may be driven to by these qualities.
The narrative can be a bit confusing at times as Marlowe relates the tale by recalling his encounters with Jim. The book reminded very much of Somerset Maugham's THE RAZOR"S EDGE" in style. However I believe that Maugham did a much better job of incorporating the narrator into the flow of the story. Overall LORD JIM is a wonderful classic novel that I highly recommend.

This is the fifth book I have read by Conrad, and through these readings I have come to deeply appreciate his literary power and the perfection of his stories. Conrad has the skill to border about several similar subjects, without repeating himself. "Lord Jim" is truly a Shakespearean tragedy, mainly because of the Shakespearean nature of the main character. Jim is a young naval officer with high hopes of heroism and moral superiority, but when he faces his first test of courage, he miserably fails. While 800 Muslim pilgrims are asleep aboard the ship "Patna", Jim discovers that the boat is about to sink. There are not sufficient lifeboats for everybody. Should he wake them up or not? He gets paralyzed with fear and then sudenly jumps into a boat being set up by the rest of the officers. He is taken to trial and disposessed of his working licence.

Ashamed and humiliated, Jim dedicates the rest of his life to two things: escape the memory of that fateful night, and redeem himself. This agonizing quest to recover his dignity in front of his own eyes leads him to hide in a very remote point in the Malayan peninsula, where he will become the hero, the strong man, the wise protector of underdeveloped, humble and ignorant people. Jim finds not only the love of his people, but also the love of a woman who admires him and fears the day when he might leave for good. The narrator, Captain Marlow (the same of "Heart of Darkness") talks to Jim for the last time in his remote refuge, and then Jim tells him that he has redeemed himself by becoming the people's protector. Oh, but these things are never easy and Jim will face again the specter of failure.

Conrad has achieved a great thing by transforming the "novel of adventures" into the setting for profound and interesting reflections on the moral stature of Man, on courage, guilt, responsibility, and redemption.

Just as in "Heart of Darkness" the question is what kinds of beings we are stripped of cultural, moral and religious conventions; just as in "Nostromo" the trustworthiness of a supposedly honest man is tested by temptation, in "Lord Jim" the central subject is dignity and redemption after failure.

A great book by one of the best writers.

After reading this book (along with several other of Conrad's books) I am under the impression that Joseph Conrad may very well be my favorite author. Here is another masterpiece, a deeply incisive study of character of the motivation and the ultimate failure of all high-minded ideals. Granted my own personal world view falls directly in line with this realization and therefore prejudices me towards anything the man might write, but, when considering such a lofty title as 'favorite author' one must regard other aspects of the novelist's creation. As with the others, Conrad wins by the power of his stories.

Lord Jim is my least favorite of the the four books I have read by Conrad. The story is rather scattered: a righteous young man does something wrong that he holds himself far too accountable for and the public shame the action brought him exaggerates the reality of his failure and makes him believe the rumors swirling around about his so-called cowardice. He spends the remainder of his life trying to reclaim his self-regard, mostly exaggerating his own importance in matters he hardly understands. His goal is to liberate the primitive people of the jungle paradise he inadvertantly finds himself in (due to an effort to escape every particle of the world he once inhabited) and his once high-minded ideals and regard for himself lead him to allow those people to consider him almost a God.

Jim likes being a God and considers himself a just and fair one. He treats everyone equally and gives to his people the knowledge of modern science and medicine as well as the everyday archetecture and understanding of trade that those primitive folks would otherwise be years from comprehending.

Of course everything ends in failure and misery and of course Jim's restored name will be returned to its demonic status, but the whole point of the novel seems to me that one can not escape their past. Jim, for all his courage in the line of fire has tried to avoid all memory of the once shameful act of his former life and by doing so becomes destined to repeat his mistakes.

Lord Jim is far more expansive than the story it sets out to tell, ultimately giving a warning on the nature of history and general humanity that only a writer of Conrad's statue could hope to help us understand.

If there is a flaw it is not one to be taken literally. Conrad was a master of structural experimentation and with Lord Jim he starts with a standard third person narrative to relate the background and personalities of his characters and then somehow merges this into a second person narrative of a man, years from the events he is relating, telling of the legend of Jim. It is a brilliant innovation that starts off a little awkward and might lead to confusion in spots as the story verges into its most important parts under the uncertain guidence of a narrator who, for all his insight into others, seems unwilling to relate his personal relevence to the story he is relating.

Nevertheless (with a heartfelt refrain), one of the best books I have ever read.

To a certain degree I can enjoy zany antics just as much as the next guy. And I am glad that Wambaugh at least tries to put some humor into his novels. But sometimes one has to wonder if he is trying to model his humor on (or is it after?) the Three Stooges. I enjoyed reading this novel, but I am not about to take it seriously. I wonder what would happen if Wambaugh ever co-authored a mystery novel with Patricia Cornwell in which one of his versions of a cop worked closely with Kate Scarpetta (in her current paranoid, very near nervious, and very mental, breakdown condition) in trying to solve an intriguing and highly invoved case.

Wambaugh has a flair for scriptwriting equal to Quinton Tarantino at his best. He's brutal, sly, topical, sharp, intense and outrageous all at the same time. This novel can be a bit silly at times, but never does it become stale. "Finnegan's Week" should appeal to readers of a wide variety of tastes, and I'm surprised that Wambaugh doesn't have a larger following than he has. His plots weave in and out, and he always finds a unique way to bring it all together at the end. His razor-sharp wit sets him apart from the rest of the thriller writers out there. A great, fun read with a superior style.

Wambaugh delivers as usual in this funny, exciting tale of an cop who's an aspiring actor (and who's facing midlife crises as only an actor wannabe can) while in the middle of investigating a truck theft that turns out to also involve a theft from a Naval warehouse as well as a load of missing toxic waste. His case brings him into contact with two tough and sexy Policewomen, each with her own private and professional agenda. Will Fin Finnegan (the cop-actor-hopeful) get the part he's trying out for? Will he survive a week filled with too much booze, a murderous sociopath business owner, a druggy biker turned trucker, and two beautiful women who both seem as interested in him as they are in the case at hand? This is typical Wambaugh in that the horrors and sadness of the crimes and victims are not treated lightly, yet (like the good cops who frequent his novels) our only salvation from evil is to laugh at his sometimes mordant humor and wit. One of Wambaugh's strengths is his ability to gradually make his characters sympathetic and likeable, sometimes even when they're not the good guys. I rate this as one of Wambaugh's best novels, and that's saying something, since in my opinion he's never written a bad one. I wish he would recover his muse and write some more fiction in the vein of this novel and FUGITIVE NIGHTS. It's been a while since he's come out with any novels. A shame, because no one else writes about police life in quite the same way.

A five star rating for the humor, characters, and the suspense.

If you're interested in supply chain management issues or e-business, you won't find much here. It's mostly a rehash of the other Mercer Consulting Book, The Profit Zone. Very general in nature, there's not much new material here. Read The Profit Zone and leave this one in the bin.

Merits: A systematic framework to understand how digital supply chain can apply to businesses. Good comparison with traditional supply chain (systematic vs. sequential). A few cases are detailed and insightful. For a fan of Mercer's Business Designs, it will be delightful to see how the authors fit the two together.

This book will be more readable if contents are cut by half. Many contents are repetitive. "The Profit Zone" is full of new ideas, "Value Nets" is filled with consultants' empty statements. Some cases only talk about what happened, but not why it happened and how.

I gave "The Profit Zone" five stars, "Value Nets" deserves only three.

Value Nets is an intriguing look at businesses that have revolutionized the way the do business by revolutionizing their supply chain. What is a Value Net? According to the author a value net "is a business design that uses digital supply chain concepts to achieve both superior customer satisfaction and company profitability". One of the main concepts of a value net is that it operates in parallel manner rather then a rigid sequential chain.

Value Nets have the following five main characteristics:

Customer-alignment
Collaborative and systemic
Agile and scalable
Fast flow
Digital

Value Nets builds on the work of The Profit Zone, which define five elements of a value-creating business design. These five elements are defined as follows:

Value proposition - a company's value proposition consists of products and services that add value to customers.
Scope - what activities are required to deliver the company's value proposition and who delivers them (internal or partner).
Profit capture - mechanisms that capture profit from the value proposition
Strategic control - elements that protect profits over time
Execution - operational excellence

Value Nets take the five characteristics of the value net and show case studies of how companies implemented value nets within the context of the five elements of business design listed above.

The models that this book lays out are quite useful for considering how a product or service is delivered. The case studies and example in this book are quite useful and cover several industries. Most of the examples relate to product companies, but the concepts can be applied to services companies as well.

This book is a interesting and useful read for business consider how to interact with partners, competitors, suppliers and customers in the digital age. I would recommend reading the Appendix Value Net Self-Diagnostic first because is a great intro to the book. If this book resonates well with you might also like How Digital Is Your Business and The Profit Zone (also from Mercer Consulting).