Allen's style is disarmingly simple, yet sophisticated. He makes his points (which are many and profound) with a few words as possible. He implies, he infers...and he leaves it to the reader to connect the dots.

When I was finished reading the book,I felt as if I had read a long, lyrical poem.

I have to admit I shed a couple of tears at various places in the book.

I recommend this book for holiday reading...and inspirational reading throughout the year.

I couldn't put the book down...I highly recommend it.

But when I was finsihed I had a greater appreciation for my family, for life, and for the blessings of service...Yeah...all from this little book.

I'm going to read this book every Christmas from now on. And I highly recommend it to one and all.

In the late 80s, I learned what once was on the site of the current MSG/Penn Station monstrosity and became appalled that people could let a beautiful work of art be dismantled and replaced with a horrible building. In the early 1990s, I learned about the 1950s and 1960s and how Americans were obsessed with all things modern and new, rejecting anything with a hint of age or ornament.

Moore & Moore take a pictorial look on how the McKim, Mead and White's neoclassical masterpiece was dismantled over a multi-year period in the mid-1960s. While they really don't go into detail on why the old Penn Station was demolished, the spooky, B & W photos tell more than how an architectural gem was demolished. On a deeper level, the photos tell the tale of how an entire city was becoming irrelevant to suburban America and was sinking into massive decline (the years of municipal bankrupcy and burning neighborhoods in the South Bronx are only a few years away).

It was a very sad book that gets more depressing with each turn of the page, as more and more of the beauty of the old Penn Station gets stripped away. I guess that was the power of the photographs working on me.

Pair this book up with Robert Caro's _The Power Broker_ to get a good picture of New York in the early Baby Boom era.

Photographer Peter Moore and his wife Barbara moved into the Penn Station neighborhood in the early sixties. They used the building every day, whether they were passing through to the subway or catching a bite in the cavernous coffee shop.

With the railroad's permission, they documented its slow dismantling over the four years from 1963-1967. This book is the first appearance of that work. The black and white pictures are arranged chronologically, showing the faded but still magnificent station from its last days of active use through to its ghostly presence as a metal shell. The photography is beautiful and lyrical and sad beyond words, like a mournful love song to a love lost. The picures of the rubble-filled waiting room, its shape still intact but its side walls gone, are especially hard to take.

One note: this is not an exhaustive review of the building and its various spaces. It is a chrono picture of the concourse and waiting room through through their destruction. For more pics of the station in use, try "The Late, Great, Pennsylvania Station."

There is no fluff, no hype, just pure information and facts. I can't wait to hear the rest. I will be ordering Drew Eric Whitman's next book as soon as I'm done with this one!

The sophistication of taste and presentation is the ultimate maxization of the fresh seafood.

One is impressed instantly upon perviewing the recipes and trying them of the intense experience this chef has had with the ingredients and prep techniques.

Four-star chefbooks are typically intimidating due to all the ingredients and steps, but here it's minimal, yet turns out utmost in culinary heights.

Try these, they'll be knockout dishes! Pan-Roasted Grouper with Wild Mushrooms and Artichokes (served with unbelievable pork jus); Roast Monkfish on Savoy Cabbage and Bacon-Butter Sauce; Black Bass in Cabbage Packages with Purple Mustard Sauce; Yellowtail Snapper with Garden Vegetables.

Accompaniments are worth paper as well, with monster dinner dessert of "Earl Grey Tea and Mint Soup with Assorted Fruit;Gruyere and Potato Cakes.

Tough one to match in my extensive collection!

Your book is an excellent guide. Thank you for inviting me to the field of nanotechnology.

Sincerely,

Kenneth L. Buckingham, Founder Tiny Technology, Inc.

Finally we may play with the "building blocks of matter" we've been hearing so much about. Here is an instruction manual, detailing the Elements, and their Interactions, while at the same time suggesting possible Design Models for construcion.

Curious about the subject?
Start with Drexler's Engines of Creation, instead. Maybe some other collections of theoretical applications to whet your appetite. Come back to this when you begin to see a bigger picture.

Know some, want to know more?
Definately read. But be warned, it is quite techincal when it is not being necessarily vague. This is a halmark. The basis of this book was Drexler's thesis for his doctorate in Molecular Nanotechnology, the first awarded (MIT 1991, I believe).

Serious about the topic?
You already have access to a copy...or should.

You might very well be able to download significant portions from Foresight's website (it's an org.anization, not a com.mercial); but I would suggest supporting them with at least the price of the book. They seem to be committed to developing this Potential responsibly.

Jeanne Segal PhD

Ms. Hately and Eric Harvey have put this whole business into a perspective very rarely achieved in books ten times the size. "Customer at the Crossroads" is fun to read and comes complete with the type of nuggets of information that B.J. Hately is best know for from her other publications.

We have all worked in organizations where people neglected to take ownership of their customers and consequently failed to "Walk the Talk". This book will help anyone who serves someone else for a living to gain new understanding on how to get, and keep, a customer for life.

I look forward to future publications from this duo.

One good feature of the book it is large collection of templates and worksheets on various security elements. .../

The book is not overly technical and is quite good for those who need to get their security group up and running in a short timeframe.

For those that are serious about security, they will find that Mission-Critical Security Planner is like a cookbook. They can use it to prepare their security as needed.

Overall, Mission-Critical Security Planner is a very readable and useful book. Those who have an imperative to get their security groups up and running will find huge value in the book immediately.

This visionary book proves the opposite: you can have a high-level security book, which is not just practical, but actionable. "Mission Critical Security Planner" delivers a portion of the security process, packed into one toolkit. Make no mistake - this book is about planning how to do security, not how to tweak your scanner or configure a firewall. However, planning is indeed a critical (and, as the author points out, often missing) piece of security conundrum, and the book delivers on that.

An awesome component of the book is a large collection of templates and worksheets on "selling" security measures, planning the implementations, organizing security team, dealing with various business people and many other occasions. The book has the printed versions while its companion website criticalsecurity.com has the download.

The main part of the book is organized around "security fundamentals", large domains of security (such as authentication, encryption, integrity, privacy, etc), which are used to structure the security planning process, described by the author. For each of the fundamentals, the content is organized in sections: summary, security stack (covering various aspects from physical to application level), life-cycle management (from technology selection to response), business (on dealing with various categories of business people, such as suppliers and customers) and selling security (to execs, managers and staff). All of the above contain various templates.

Among the more fun parts, the section on negotiating with hackers is just exclusive and of the never-seen-before kind. Section in hacker profiling is also of interest, since it seems to originate from author's experiences (and not in just reading about it on the news). The book also demystifies such elusive notions as "impact analysis", "security ROI". PKI also has a prominent role in the book. While PKI (as it is defined today) might or might not fly, the book gives a great example of large-scale production implementation, running for many years. Another great feature of the book is author's "future 10 attacks list" with his predictions on threat landscape.

Overall, the book seems indispensable to those responsible for securing networks. Security managers and CSOs will likely gain maximum benefits from using it (due to the book targeting), but other security professionals will benefit as well. Notice, that the benefits can be derived from "using" it as opposed to just "reading" it, although even the latter will prove highly enlightening. The "selling security" templates alone are likely worth their weigh in gold. The book is well-written and, while not possessing the lively style of some recent security books, will beat some of them hands down in real-world applicability. After all, even if you very well know that IDS is valuable, who will help you to "sell" it to the CIO? This book just might!

Anton Chuvakin, Ph.D., GCIA, GCIH is a Senior Security Analyst with a major information security company. His areas of infosec expertise include intrusion detection, UNIX security, forensics, honeypots, etc. In his spare time, he maintains his security portal info-secure.org

I read the book twice: once to get an idea of what all the worksheets were about and once to really read them with all the technical and practical details provided by Greenberg.

Greenberg identifies 28 security elements, including 15 fundamental elements, (six of which are core elements), and 13 wrap-up elements. Core elements include things like authorization and access control, authentication, encryption, integrity, nonrepudiation, and privacy. Those may seem obvious, but Greenberg has a lot of useful things to say about them that others haven't said.

Perhaps the most valuable part of the book is all the other elements, which we tend to forget, including addressing and routing (with tips on how to get those right from a security point of view), configuration management, directory services, time services, staff management, legal issues, and so on.

I'd be interested to see some projects get implemented with Greenberg's methods. I think it should work quite well, although due to entropy, laziness, over-worked engineers, and other such factors, I would guess that some of the numerous worksheets will fall by the wayside. But I think Greenberg would be OK with that as long as most of the worksheets are maintained and the company adopts security as a way of thinking.

In summary, this book is definitely worth reading, probably numerous times!