Hercule Poirot was a short, fat, dapper detective who solved his cases by exercising his "little grey cells".

"The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" was Christie's fourth Poirot novel, while "Murder on the Links" was her second. In both Christie adopts the motif of narrating the story from the point of view of someone who undertakes to assist Poirot in the solution of the mystery. Christie introduces the cast of suspects, gives each of them a dark secret and a motive to lie, and piles up the circumstances in such a way that the flying fickle finger of suspicion points to every one of them at some time or another. She compounds the confusion by supplying false leads and deliberatly glossing over hot clues.

In each case Poirot holds his cards close to his vest, tantalizes the reader/listener with cryptic comments, and finds the most inconsequential-appearing facts to be highly significant. Eventually Poirot airs everyone's dirty laundry, explains his chain of deductive reasoning, reconstructs the crime in all its improbable complexity, and gets a confession. The stories are less mysteries than they are sliding block puzzles. Though extremely short on realism, they are long on entertainment value.

Although the BBC radio play had excellent production values, audio cassette may not be the best way to enjoy a Poirot mystery. I listen to radio plays as I drive on business, and I find the Poirot plays hard to follow because of the large cast of characters and the complexities of plotting. Poirot could probably be enjoyed more readily in print. You could then read, re-read, take time out to mull over the complexities, and follow the story much better. Probably the best way to enjoy Poirot would be to read the story first, and then listen to the radio play.

The mystery is beyond our imagination. The background and characters truly victorian, and above all the narrative very gripping! Oh! I am re-reading and every time I enjoy even though I know the mystery! Once again, Poirot at his best with his passion for order and method.

As a Christie addict, having read all of her Poirot and Marple stories many times over, I can only say that "Roger Ackroyd" stands out as the best of the best. Even now, knowing the ending, I enjoy rereading the book, with all the delicious and subtle (but misleading) hints to the grand conclusion. And to the first-time reader, the ending comes as quite a surprise. The fabled Miss Christie leads the reader down so many lovely garden paths before the perfectly logical denouement! Delicious! The audio version is beautifully performed, and does proper justice to the book.

I use this textbook and its previous edition to teach International Business to senior level students in cyberspace. I consider this the most readable text on the subject. This edition has been slimmed down from the previous edition, and it is an improvement to an excellent text. My students agree that this text is great.

Anyone who needs a comprehensive book on this field should purchase this text, it is worth every penny!

I am at present using textbook "International Business", by John D. Daniels, Lee H. Radebaugh. Eighth Edition. I would be very grateful if you could Fax me as soon as possible the necessary forms to order one copy each of the supplementary publications: -Instructor's Resource Manual. -Study Guide. -Test Bank

Your sincerely,

Saeed A Al Musbeh ( Personal Manager )

I just spent my weekend propped up in the wheelhouse reading this book. It's a big read too. I have always had lots of problems on my motorboat and already this has solved two problems since starting it. At this rate I should have my boat fixed by spring. Its not too technical that a doctor cannot understand it(I fix people not boats), but it does cover all the practical information well. Kudos to Payne for writing a practical manual style book, layed out well and easily accessible information. The context is great too, I know how to relate my electrics to my engine, (and there is great engine information in this book) as well as water and every other system. He is welcome on my boat anytime and I cannot recommend this book too highly to any motor and power boat owner.

John Payne has really got this right. His last book was great but this is just superb. Unlike the many self proclaimed and unqualified electrical guru's such as Calder and others around Payne is a genuine qualified professional marine electrical engineer, who knows power and motor boats and this book proves that. I have tried to find something on my boat that is not covered by this book and so far it's all there. It's written in true reference manual style and the information is easy to access, even my wife understands it, which is scary! It is also up to date, all the new technologies are covered, radio frequencies are up to date and it is above all very, very practical. Payne has thankfully refrained from delving into theory and stuck to the essentials we all need. A book, or should I call encylopedia, for motor and powerboat folk was long overdue, now we have something that is not based on sailboats. My recommendation is don't leave port without this book, it's definitely going to save you money and problems.

This book gives you is logical explantions of the nature of reality and it teaches you to be your own teacher. What this book offers is absolute freedom!

Whenever I feel down I open it and read a couple of pages and somehow it again puts me in touch with myself and everything around seems to be fine and much easier again. It helps me to realize that I am the one who creates my life and if I don't like it this way, it is up to me to create something else. The whole book is just so loving and very empowering in such a gentle way.
The only book I can compare it with is The Conversation With God. If you liked that one you will love this one.

A book worth reading to develop an insight on the principles that guide consumer information processing and selection of relevant decision strategies in various choice environments. The framework that is presented here is both intuitively appealing and useful in guiding marketing thought and practice. The book itself is written to appeal to multiple classes of readers, i.e., general interest readers, academics, and practicing professionals. The underlying notions of consumer decision making based on adaptive behavior; and information processing based on "bounded rationality" are presented within a well-researched framework. The book is developed to provide useful insights on decision behavior emerging from various disciplinary orientations like, the behavioral sciences, cognitive psychology, consumer studies, and marketing among others. The framework proposed is well applied in everyday decision situations that pertain to businesses and consumers. The authors themselves are renowned researchers in their fields and therefore provide invaluable insight on adaptive consumer behavior and the limitations of human information processing.

i am presently doing a project organised by the european school of business.the chairman was john payne and in this project we are asked to describe how the new generation of business entrepreneur can surpass and emulate the success of john payne as a business entrepreneur.

The late Robert O. Payne performed pioneering, seminal work on medieval rhetoric and poetics. The Rhetorical Poetics Of The Middle Ages: Reconstructive Polyphony is an outstanding collection of fourteen scholarly and impressive essays in his honor, and focuses on modernist and postmodernist approaches to the rhetorically inflected poetry of the middle ages. From Charles W. Owen's Chaucer: Beginnings, to Johanna C. Prins' Sandrine's Fable: Courtly Discourse and Courtly Behavior; to Anne Howland Schotter's The Role of the Feminine in Dante's Model of Literary Influence, The Rhetorical Poetics Of The Middle Ages offers informative, insightful, challenging, highly recommended, original contributions to a specialized field of literary criticism.

For a book to be even considered to a classic; then it, i.e., the book has to stand the test of time (and by so been read, pondered on and enjoy by several generations). The Decameron (Oxford World's Classics) by Giovanni Boccaccio, et al is one of these few books, e.g., The Odyssey, Thus Spoke Zarathustra et al. The story follows a plethora of storytellers whom all have gone to the countryside to escape the plague. The stories are filled with bravura, vigor, fortitude, a bit of sex and many other subjects (that are all written with an uncanny ability). If one considered oneself to be a scholar or a learned man then this book, i.e., The Decameron (Oxford World's Classics) by Giovanni Boccaccio, et al, is a must have; since not owning or having read it, then one as a person/scholar/learnedman must be considered less then civilized.

Any book defined as a true classic is likely to be thought of as stultifying and incomprehensible...at best. Yet, there are dozens and dozens of books that are true classics and still manage to speak to today's modern audience. Boccaccio's Decameron is one such book.

The Decameron was written around 1350 during an outbreak of plague in Florence. It is the fictional account of ten young people who flee the city to a country manor house and, in an effort to keep themselves occupied and diverted, begin telling stories.

Ten days pass in the pages of the Decameron (hence its name), and each person tells one story per day, making a total of one hundred stories. These are stories that explore a surprisingly wide range of moral, social and political issues whose wit and candor will probably surprise most modern readers. The topics explored include: problems of corruption in high political office, sexual jealousy and the class differences between the rich and the poor.

The titles themselves are both imaginative and fun. One story is titled, "Masetto da Lamporecchio Pretends to be Deaf and Dumb in Order to Become a Gardener to a Convent of Nuns, Where All the Women Eagerly Lie With Him." And, although the title, itself, is a pretty good summary of the story, even a title such as this cannot adequately convey Boccaccio's humor and wit.

Another story that seems surprisingly modern is, "Two Men are Close Friends, and One Lies With the Other's Wife. The Husband Finds it Out and Makes the Wife Shut Her Lover in a Chest, and While He is Inside, the Husband Lies With the Lover's Own Wife on the Chest." A bit long for today's modern world, perhaps, where popular books are dominated by titles such as John Grisham's The Firm, but the outcome of this story is as socially-relevant today as anything that happened in fourteenth-century Florence.

The Decameron, however, goes far beyond plain, bawdy fun and takes a close look at a society that is unraveling due to the devastating effects of the plague. The people in Boccaccio's time suffered terribly and the book's opening pages show this. The clergy was, at best, inept and, more often than not, corrupt. Those who had the misfortune to fall ill (and this includes just about everyone) were summarily abandoned by both their friends and family.

Those looking for something representative of the social ills of Boccaccio's day will find more than enough interesting tidbits and asides in these stories. Serious students of literature will find the ancestors of several great works of fiction in these pages and readers in general cannot fail to be entertained by the one hundred stories spun by these ten refugees on their ten lonely nights.

Giovanni Boccaccio THE DECAMERON. Second Edition. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by G. H. McWilliam. cli + 909 pages. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin Books, 1995. ISBN 0-14-044629-X (Pbk).

Second-hand opinions can do a lot of harm. Most of us have been given the impression that The Decameron is a lightweight collection of bawdy tales which, though it may appeal to the salacious, sober readers would do well to avoid. The more literate will probably be aware that the book is made up of one hundred stories told on ten consecutive days in 1348 by ten charming young Florentines who have fled to an amply stocked country villa to take refuge from the plague which is ravaging Florence.

Idle tales of love and adventure, then, told merely to pass the time by a group of pampered aristocrats, and written by an author who was quite without the technical equipment of a modern story-teller such as Flannery O'Connor. But how, one wonders, could it have survived for over six hundred years if that's all there were to it? And why has it so often been censored? Why have there always been those who don't want us to read it?

A puritan has been described as someone who has an awful feeling that somebody somewhere may be enjoying themselves, and since The Decameron offers the reader many pleasures it becomes automatically suspect to such minds. In the first place it is a comic masterpiece, a collection of entertaining tales many of which are as genuinely funny as Chaucer's, and it offers us the pleasure of savoring the witty, ironic, and highly refined sensibility of a writer who was also a bit of a rogue. It also provides us with an engaging portrait of the Middle Ages, and one in which we are pleasantly surprised to find that the people of those days were every bit as human as we are, and in some ways considerably more delicate.

We are also given an ongoing hilarious and devastating portrayal of the corruption and hypocrisy of the medieval Church. Another target of Boccaccio's satire is human gullibility in matters religious, since, then as now, most folks could be trusted to believe whatever they were told by authority figures. And for those who have always found Dante to be a crushing bore, the sheer good fun of The Decameron, as Human Comedy, becomes, by implication (since Boccaccio was a personal friend of Dante), a powerful and compassionate counterblast to the solemn and cruel anti-life nonsense of The Divine Comedy.

There is a pagan exuberance to Boccaccio, a frank and wholesome celebration of the flesh; in contrast to medieval Christianity's loathing of woman we find in him what David Denby beautifully describes as "a tribute to the deep-down lovableness of women" (Denby, p.249). And today, when so many women are being taught by anti-sex radical feminists to deny their own bodies and feelings, Boccaccio's celebration of the sexual avidity of the natural woman should come as a very welcome antidote. For Denby, who has written a superb essay on The Decameron that can be strongly recommended, Boccaccio's is a scandalous book, a book that liberates, a book that returns us to "the paradise from which, long ago, we had been expelled" (Denby, p.248).

The present Penguin Classics edition, besides containing Boccaccio's complete text, also includes a 122-page Introduction, a Select Bibliography, 67 pages of Notes, four excellent Maps and two Indexes. McWilliam, who is a Boccaccio scholar, writes in a supple, refined, elegant and truly impressive English which successfully captures the highly sophisticated sensibility of Boccaccio himself. His translation reads not so much as a translation as an original work, though his Introduction (which seems to cover everything except what is most important) should definitely be supplemented by Denby's wonderfully insightful and stimulating essay, details of which follow:

Chapter 17 - 'Boccaccio,' in 'GREAT BOOKS - My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World'
by David Denby. pp.241-249. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. ISBN 0-684-83533-9 (Pbk).

I am looking for someone that knows something about old books like the home garden handbook published in 1927

I am a heavy duty user of Excel and I support users of the application too. This is one of the best books I have seen on Excel's most powerful features. The chapters on array formulas and range names are the best I have read on the subject. This book is outstanding. I am here writing this review because I was hoping to order a copy for work.

One of the excellent book of Excel. However it is out of stock. I lent it from the library and can't find it from any book store. I hope the publisher will re-printed it.

At least one other reviewer claims 'Micawber' is inappropriate for younger kids, based on the reaction of one 4-year old. I would just like to say that my 17-month old chooses both 'Micawber' and the other Lithgow/Payne collaboration, 'The Remarkable Farkle McBride', from the shelf for me to read to her, and listens all the way through to both books, laughing at and pointing to the illustrations along the way (especially Micawber's self-portraits). I believe she is responding not just to the pictures, but to the rhythm and lilt of the poetry as well. This is NOT just a book for grownups!

Kids ages 4-8 will find this an inviting story of a squirrel who loves the paintings he sees through the window of an art museum. One day he notices a street artist copying the masterpieces - and he decides to try his own hand at art, with some unexpected results. A CD of the author reading this story is included.

"One Sunday in springtime, Micawber arose/From his Central Park Carousel nest./He straightened his whiskers and polished his nose/And set off for the place he loved best..." The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where day in and day out, he gazes, lovingly, at the masters through the windows and skylights. One day he watches a student copy a painting. "He noted the stroke of each brush she'd extend,/The rare concentration and care she'd expend./She'd become his unwitting and unknowing friend/By the time the day started to fade..." So he stows away in her paint box, and that night as the young artist sleeps, Micawber begins to paint, discovering the wonders of color. "He returned thirty times by the following fall,/And the paintings poured forth like a geyser./He fastened them all to his living-room wall,/And the woman was never the wiser..." The dynamic team of John Lithgow and C.F. Payne, who brought us the joys of music-making in The Remarkable Farkle McBride, are back to introduce children to the wonders of art and creativity. Mr Lithgow's clever, exuberant text, is filled with rhyme, rhythm, energy, and wordplay, and just begs to be read aloud by an enthusiastic storyteller. Mr Payne's paint-splattered, engaging illustrations help bring this innovative story to life with rich color, marvelous facial expressions and eye-catching details. Together word and art open the world of art appreciation to youngsters 4-8, using an endearing and captivating little squirrel. "And if you should visit the old Carousel,/Look up at its uppermost part./Inside, although nobody ever could tell,/A talented squirrel continues to dwell./If you try, you can picture it, clear as a bell:/MICAWBER'S MUSEUM OF ART."