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Book reviews for "Politella,_Joseph" sorted by average review score:

The Kosher Palette: Easy and Elegant Modern Kosher Cooking
Published in Paperback by Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy (1900)
Author: Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy
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A BOOK TO DROOL OVER!
This is a must-have cookbook, whether or not you keep a kosher home. The production values are fantastic (clearly written, full color pictures of many of the foods, informative sidebars) and all the recipes that my friends and I have tried were easy to follow and tasted delicious. If you are looking for kosher recipes that are elegant and a cut above the usual fare of kreplach and stuffed cabbage, then this is definitely the book for you. I also found the index to be very well organized. Your only problem will be finding the time to try everything out!

the BEST and most professional kosher cookbook I've seen
My mother gave me this book as a present two weeks ago and I LOVE it! The recipes are easy to follow and they taste great. (My husband keeps asking me to make him the chocolate chip sticks again.) The information and tips given in the sidebars are very helpful and really make this more than just a cookbook - it's a cooking lesson.

The color photographs in the book are beautiful and entice you to try out all the recipes.

I predict that this cookbook will become a must-have for any kosher cook.

The Best Kosher Cookbook I've ever used
Recipes are elegant and easy, there hasn't been one recipe that I've tried that wasn't good. Simply the best!!!!!


Live Better Longer: The Parcells Center 7-Step Plan for Health and Longevity
Published in Paperback by iUniverse.com (2001)
Authors: Joseph Dispenza and Ann Louise Gittleman
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Live This is a great book for self-healing!!!
I am a former student of Dr. Parcells. I believe her work is on the cutting edge of health and healing. She has changed the way I treat my patients. Her philosophy from Live Better Longer teaches people to take responsibility for their healing instead of living out the doctor's diagnosis.

This book changed the way I look at health.
I am a massage therapist -- and I thought I had read and learned just about everything important in the field of health and wellness. But this book opened my eyes! I particularly enjoyed the philosophy of healing that it espouses. We are not just physical beings, but we also have emotional, mental, and spiritual bodies -- and all of them (they are all one, of course) need to be healthy. This book taught me, through the example of Hazel Parcells, that we all have to take responsibility for our health. But the great thing is that we really can do it! This book should be sent to every health professional in the country. I've already sent it to a lot of fellow massage therapists. Great book!

Life altering reading providing spiritual & physical changes
This book has changed my life spiritually and physically! Even though the book is mostly about acquiring healthy eating and hygiene habits, I selected it to cling to as a tool and motivator to help me through the quit smoking process. I feel this nasty habit has miraculously been taken away from me due to Joseph Dispenza's wonderful book! Not only do I feel better physically, but I feel I have spiritually reached a higher level. I also have a better attitude and feel happier. This book has helped me to care more about my health and to carefully select what I put into my body. I hope to live a healthy life like Dr. Hazel Parcells did for 106 years!


Mr. Blue
Published in Hardcover by Richelieu Court Pubns (1991)
Authors: Myles Connolly and Joseph F. Girzone
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The Ideal
Blue is a modern saint. He is not afraid to fly kites, sleep on roof tops, and write letters to heaven. He is a poet, and artist, an idealist, and a noble soul. I have never been touched so deeply by any character before I met blue. Read this book, and look at life a whole new way. I laughed and then I cried my heart out. This is a book for the soul.

Ever new Mr. Blue still in circulation
I first read Mr. Blue in 1963. He changed my life. Myles Connolly's tale of one man who embraces life with a rare exuberance is so refreshing. Although written in 1928, this book refuses to die as successive generations pass on the story. Mr. J. Blue takes living what it means to be Christian seriously. Both funny and full of pathos, Mr.Blue is truly a Twentieth Century American classic.

My Kind of Guy
I was given this outstanding work as a gift by one of the most precious people that has ever touched my life. She told me that whenever we were together, Jay Blue kept popping into her head so she gave me my treasured copy. I've probably read the book 100 times and continually find peace, encouragement and delight. No author has ever had such a profound effect upon my life and those I love. Whatever the price - read it!


Salt of the Earth: Christianity and the Catholic Church at the End of the Millennium: An Interview With Peter Seewald
Published in Paperback by Ignatius Press (1997)
Authors: Joseph Ratzinger, Adrian Walker, Adrian W. Ignatius, and Peter Seewald
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An intelligent defense of the Church's everlasting verities.
This is a book length interview of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He is the Roman Church's sentinel on the frontiers of theological adventurism, there to keep watch that the Church's Deposit of Faith is preserved against impious attack. He has held this position since 1981, when Pope John Paul II called him to Rome from Munich, where he was archbishop.

He was born in Bavaria seventy-three years ago. As with Karol Wojtyla, he had a full life before going to Rome. As a young man and seminarian he was exposed to the rise of Nazism in Germany. He was a prominent theological advisor during the Second Vatican Council and taught theology at Germany's most prominent universities. He earned a reputation as one of the Church's brightest and most creative theologians.

In an age when Truth has come under unceasing brutal assault, he has become a target of attack worldwide. He is routinely caricatured in the worldwide media as the new Grand Inquisitor, unthinking and dictatorial. This book will discomfit his enemies. It shows a deeply learned man moving carefully and deliberately across all the issues of the "Canon of Criticism," forthrightly defending the Church. It shows a man with a keen understanding of our present age and the ideologies that animate it.

The Roman Church is contemptible to so many precisely because it stands in unabashed reproof of so much of what passes as wisdom today, including the central "truth" of our post-modern era: that only truth is that there is no Truth. This reminds us that the Church is now, as always, a scandal. But it is necessary, Cardinal Ratzinger reminds, us to distinguish between the "primary" scandal and the "secondary" scandal. "The secondary scandal consists in our actual mistakes, defects and over-institutionalizations . . .." (124) The Church is made up of men who are subject to all the frailties to which flesh is heir. But the Church aspires for more. That she occasionally fails should not surprise us. That she aspires for more should inspire new generations of saints. Yet the very idea that man is not naturally good and should aspire for more through self-abnegation is a deep offense to the modern mindset that man is good and is always, inexorably, getting better. This makes the Church an object of contempt and, in time, hatred.

"[T]he primary scandal consists precisely in the fact that we stand in opposition to the decline into the banal and the bourgeois and into false promises. It consists in the fact that we don't simply leave man alone in his self-made ideologies." (124) Substitution of transitory political ethics for Christian ethics leads to despotism, the exaltation of a mere man as God: Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Min. "We can say with a certainty backed up by empirical evidence that if the ethical power represented by Christianity were suddenly torn out of humanity, mankind would lurch to and fro like a ship rammed against an iceberg, and then the survival of humanity would be in greatest jeopardy." (227) "For this reason . . . the Catholic Church is a scandal, insofar as she sets herself in opposition to what appears to be a nascent global ideology and defends primordial values of humanity that can't be fit into this ideology . . .." (124)

"[I]f we give up the principle that every man as man is under God's protection, that as a man he is beyond the reach of arbitrary will, we really do forsake the foundation of human rights." (204) The sacred tradition of the Church is arrayed in defense of the dignity of mankind. Contrary to fashionable caricature, the Church is not an ossified tree, subject to being felled by the latest gale. It changes, but slowly, deliberately, organically. "[T]here are various degrees of importance in the tradition [of the Church] . . . not everything has the same weight . . . [but] there are . . . essentials, for example, the great conciliar decisions or what is stated in the Creed. These things are the Way and as such are vital to the Church's existence; they belong to her inner identity." (207-208) As to its essentials, its First Principles, or everlasting verities, the Church is powerless to change even in face of popular demand.

Bringing to mind Edmund Burke and G.K. Chesterton, Cardinal Ratzinger reminds us that "the Church lives not only synchronically but diachronically as well. This means that it is always all - even the dead - who live and are the whole Church, that it is always all who must be considered in any majority in the Church. . . . The Church lives her life precisely from the identity of all the generations, from their identity that overarches time, and her real majority is made up of the saints." (189) Our present age cannot cavalierly discard the wisdom of this great communion of the living and the dead, of one hundred human generations of the Church, confident that it has somehow achieved superceding wisdom. Instead, it must, as must all generations, submit to the essentials of the Church, to revelation and the Church's sacred tradition. "Every generation tries to join the ranks of the saints, and each makes its contribution. But it can do that only by accepting this great continuity and entering into it in a living way." (189) The Church does not need additional "reformers" of institutions. "What we really need are people who are inwardly seized by Christianity, who experience it as joy and hope, who have thus become lovers. And these we call saints." (269)

This is not easy for any generation. It places a break on volition. It posits that man's every impulse is not virtuous. Intrinsically, it asserts that man is not God, that man must prune his impulses, as he would an overgrown plant to prepare it to bear fruit. "[P]eople don't want to do without religion, but they want it only to give, not to make its own demands on man. People want to take the mysterious element in religion but spare themselves the effort of faith." (212) This is New Age faith, not the faith of the Church and her saints. "If the willingness to be bound is not there, and if, above all, submission to the truth is not there, then in the end all of this will simply remain a game." (235)

It is often heard today that if only the Church would make priestly celibacy optional, ordain women and "reform" its doctrine to accommodate other contemporary demands, that she would flourish as never before. These cavils ignore the central truth of any true church - that its communicants come to it and submit to the truth it professes, a truth beyond editing by plebiscite. It also reveals a stunning lack of critical intelligence. "These issues are resolved in Lutheran Christianity," Cardinal Ratzinger notes. "On these points, it has taken the other path, and it is quite plain that it hasn't thereby solved the problem of being a Christian in today's world and that the problem of Christianity, the effort of being a Christian, remains just as dramatic as before." (181) Why should the Roman Church make itself a clone of Lutheranism? "[B]eing a Christian does not stand or fall on these questions [and] . . . the resolution of these matters doesn't make the gospel more attractive or being Christian any easier. It does not even achieve the agreement that will better hold the Church together. I believe we should finally be clear on this point, that the Church is not suffering on account of these questions." (182)

Cardinal Ratzinger is forthright in his pessimistic assessment of the time ahead. "The danger of a dictatorship of opinion is growing, and anyone who doesn't share the prevailing opinion is excluded, so that even good people no longer dare to stand by such nonconformists [i.e. Christians]. Any future anti-Christian dictatorship would probably be much more subtle than anything we have known until now. It will appear to be friendly to religion, but on the condition that its own models of behavior and thinking not be called into question." (153) The Church must attorn to the zeitgeist in this scheme. These themes are explored in Michael D. O'Brien's "Children of the Last Day" novels.

It is time for the faithful, Cardinal Ratzinger says, to form "vital circles." [T]here are great, vibrant new beginnings and joyful forms of Christian life that don't figure much statistically but are humanly great and have the power to shape the future." (143). "Particularly when one has to resist evil it's important to not to fall into gloomy moralism that doesn't allow itself any joy but really to see how much beauty there is, too, and to draw from it the strength needed to resist what destroys joy." (69)

In his autobiography "The Sword of Imagination," the novelist and historian Russell Kirk writes, "Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by the threads of moral and intellectual belief. In the hands of the Fates are no thunderbolts: only threads and scissors." Throughout this book, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger demonstrates that he understands better than, perhaps, anyone e

An insightful view of the Church
A very readable, interresting book! Cardinal Ratzinger gives his views on a wide range of topics in the course of an extended interview with Peter Seewald, including his life and the state of the *world-wide* Church. This book offers valuable insights from a man who is uniquely positioned to "see" the workings of the Church as a whole.

In the more "liberal" circles, there's apparently a tendency to villify Cardinal Ratzinger as some kind of "right-wing", closed-minded fringe type. Having read this book, I find that claim hard to believe: whether one agrees with his views or not, it is hard to see the Cardinal as anything other than a thoughtful, intellegent and learned man.

my highlighter has gone dry
There are so many fabulous insights in this book, and such honesty that it should be required reading for high school religion classes. Cardinal Ratzinger has really hit the nail on the head, giving all of us an inside view of the issues that are important to the Church. "In today's whirl of instant bliss, religion, too, is socially respectable only as a dream of happiness without tears, as a mystical enchantment of the soul. Perhaps the Church comes under heavier fire because she talks about sin and suffering and rectitude of life....Just one curious example - when it comes to the state, as soon as crimes begin to multiply and society feels its safety threatened, there is an immediate demand for tougher laws. In relation to the Church, whose laws are moral in nature, the exact opposite happens - there is a demand for further relaxation."


English 3200
Published in Paperback by HBJ College & School Division (1981)
Author: Joseph C. Blumenthal
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Our Native Tongue Preserved!
As a journalism student many moons ago, English 3200 saved me from the fate of sixty percent of my peers. Back then, the majority of prospective journalism majors washed out of the College of Communication at my university. The reason? Any paper submitted for a grade with a spelling error, incorrect grammar, punctuation error, or improper formatting earned an automatic "C" with half letter grade deductions for subsequent errors. This book beefed up my English language skills in a hurry and I was able to graduate from the program cum laude. Today, our language has been deconstructed by a pervasive popular culture and educational apathy in public schools as students are 'dumbed down' to the lowest common denominator. English 3200 fights back with a practical vengeance leaving its readers more articulate and fluent in our native tongue. As an adjunct college instructor, I am always distressed, but hardly surprised, to find many foreign-born students more fluent in English than native-born speakers and writers. This book, once completed from cover to cover, provides the proper guidance, as much as most of us will ever require, for expressing ourselves using our native tongue in correct and impressive form.

The Most Effective Grammar Book/English 3200
In high school, I was placed in "dumb" English, but while in the U.S.Army, a friend gave me this book. I read it over and over and this, along with a small pocket dictionary, qualified me for honors English in college. Subsequently, I earned a Medical Degree from UCLA, and I am now a medical writer as well. I recommend English 32000 to all writers and students.

Speak well on your way to Success!
A fun way of learning grammar. Immediate reinforcement of general principles breeds confidence. Recieved an "A" grade in college grammar(pre-English 101) mainly because of this book. Grammar that will stay with you and last throughout your life. Was able to do most of the book while commuting on the bus to and from school.


The projection of the astral body
Published in Unknown Binding by Rider ()
Author: Sylvan Joseph Muldoon
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Best Book on the Subject
I've had alot of conscious out-of-body experiences in my life and read many books on the subject. This book really hit the nail on the head! The most detailed and accurate book on the subject with lots of exercises that really work! I recommend it highly!

The classic OOB book
Anyone remotely interested in astral projection or out of the body phenomena has to familiarise themselves with this acknowledged classic on the topic. Muldoon inspired interest in this fascinating experience to a wide public audience when the first edition was published in 1929. There may be better books written with up to date materialbut this book is the first to gointo extensive detail . Highly recommended. It takes a lot of beating.

Best Book on the Subject!
This is certainly an interesting book. When I checked this book out of a library years ago, I was expecting a poorly written book with no good explainations. How wrong I was! This excellent book is the best of the best. The Projection of the Astral Body offers great information about OOBEs, and theroies on how they work. This book has been my favorite in all of my collection.

Meaning: It's damn good.


The Thousand Nights and One Night
Published in Hardcover by Routledge (1986)
Authors: Edward Powys Mathers and Joseph Charles Mardrus
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Wonderful translation
This is a complete English translation of the Thousand Nights and a Night. Before reading this, I started the Burton translation and never finished it. The language was very awkward, it seemed Burton purposely made it sound antiquated and in the passive voice. Instead of suiting the translation to the preconceptions Europeans had about both old and Eastern writings, Mardrus made a literal translation into French, and Mathers translated that into English. The result is not only a more acurate translation, but it's not the least bit awkward and is a joy to read. This is the only English translation of the book I recommend.

The Acme of Storytelling
Almost nothing can be said about the Thousand Nights and One Night, except what is obvious to anyone who understands its substance. It is one of the truly essential pieces of world culture, and probably the most extensive universe of stories in history.

Something must be said, however, for those who are NOT aware of the extent of this work. This is not the simple batch of a dozen or so stories -- Aladdin, Ali Baba, Sinbad, and the like -- that most people think it is. This is over 2400 pages of narrative, comprising close on 100 stories -- some of which are themselves as long as novels, and many of which contain smaller stories within themselves. The stories range from the profoundly epic to the delightfully whimsical, and there is variation in mood and length throughout the series that it not only serves as a collection of discrete stories but functions as a unified whole.

As such, the attempt to read the Thousand Nights and One Night in its entirety can not be a halfhearted one. The reader must be prepared to invest considerable time in the reading. The rewards, however, are incalculable. The complete experience has few parallels in fiction, because few works of such volume possess such unity. Reading moves from the hasty and immediate to the comfortable and regular. The difference is akin to that between listening to a 3-minute pop song and listening to a 30-minute symphony. The individual stories fade into memory, retaining their own identities but also falling into place within the whole.

I will not attempt to address the individual stories themselves in any detail. Suffice it to say that they narrate love, lust, sex, war, peace, contemplation, action, commerce, politics, art, science, and many other things, in the spheres of the supernatural and the mundane. The Thousand Nights and One Night is a virtually complete panorama of human existence, with each story a component scene.

I will, though, address the issue of translation. I have perused other editions of the tales in varying degrees (although this is the only one I have read completely). In the first place, any translation which omits some stories is not worth consideration. Although there is some controversy over whether Richard Burton (the first to translate the tales into English) corrupted the original text and inserted spurious parts, there is nothing to be gained by being persnickety in this regard. This edition contains more tales than most others I have seen, and therefore is more likely to contain the "right" tales somewhere inside. On a less abstract level, this text is simply more fun to read than most others, and, as mentioned, there is more of that fun text to be read.

Also, it can be plausibly speculated that this translation is particularly likely to have fewer Burton-induced inaccuracies, since it is not in fact a direct translation from Arabic to English. This 4-volume edition is a translation into English, by Powys Mathers, of a French translation, by J. C. Mardrus, of the original Arabic. It is somewhat surprising that an indirect translation such as this should be of such high quality, but I have found it to be so. In particular, this Mardrus & Mathers version includes substantial verse passages (which in other translations are often rendered as prose) and is refreshingly frank in its translation of the more ribald passages (which are numerous).

The Thousand Nights and One Night is not merely a book that can be read; it is a world which can be experienced, and the memories of that experience can mingle almost indistinguishably with memories of reality. Only a work of this size can work on large and small levels, with many intricate details but also many large thematic components. As an added benefit, by the time you have finished reading the fourth volume, your memories of the first will be fading, so you can begin a new reading immediately, and experience the joys of the Thousand Nights and One Night all over again.

A book to savor
The stories contained within are truly wonderful. They oftentimes read with such beauty and vividness that I almost believed I was there! If there's such a thing as a darn-near perfect translation, these books are it imho. Why not introduce your children to the tales of the Arabian nights via these books? I'm no historian, but these tales have a much more authentic feel than others that I encountered as a child. Read a few stories each night, and enjoy the whole series over a period of time! Or dive in and don't surface until you're done!


Baseball Prospectus 2002
Published in Paperback by Brasseys, Inc. (10 February, 2002)
Authors: Joseph S. Sheehan, Chris Kahrl, and Clay Davenport
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Both pedantic and funny
If you are a trained statistician, you will probably love this book. For each major leaguer, it takes his actual numbers and washes out park effects. Then it compares the value (in runs) of the player's production to the league average. There are fielding and pitching "stuff" statistics invented by Baseball Prospectus that attempt to account for all the variables that contribute to performance. For minor leaguers, it calculated "major league equivalencies"--i.e., what numbers the player would have put up if he had played in the majors.

The problem is that the bewildering array of new terms and statistical explanations will mean little to the casual fan. Even an experienced roto player who has a healthy respect for such methods, such as myself, will have an extremely difficult time putting it all together.

Fortunately, the player write-ups are as compelling a reason to buy the book as the statistical analysis. They are hilarious--inventive, creative, and full of oddball references. Baseball Prospectus can be a little too opinionated at times, and a little subjective for a group of people that professes to believe only in the data, but that's part of what makes them so funny. It's unbelievable how many different ways Joe Sheehan & Co. can find to say that a player is worthless.

Insightful Commentary
I stumbled upon the Baseball Prospectus website about a year and a half ago and after reading the articles they frequently publish there, my view of baseball has totally changed. Basically, the BP team laughs in the face of traditional yet very lacking statistics such as batting average, RBIs, saves, wins and losses. They include several mathematicians who have created very comprehensive systems to evaluate batters (equivalent average), starters (Support-Neutral Wins Above Average), and relievers (Adjusted Runs Prevented). While they value the sabermetric approach to baseball, they also provide commentaries on less quantifyable aspects of the game.

While BP is occasionally prone to making sweeping exaggerations regarding a subject, they provide generally objective analysis of baseball in a very entertaining manner. BP 2002 is well-written and contains paragraphs on about 50 players per organization, organization reviews and assorted other articles along with each players translated (meaning adjusted for AAA, AA, etc or parks) statistics. I highly recommend it.

The book is also pretty funny sometimes ...
I forgot to mention in my lengthy review below that one of the best properties of Baseball Prospectus 2002 is the humor ... it adds to the readability a lot knowing that some funny and off-the-wall statements crop up in the player comments. I inadvertantly found myself up way past my bedtime recently reading about minor-leagues for the Tigers when I hit this note on Brandon Inge: he "does less damage at the plate than Lara Flynn Boyle". Good stuff. Keep it up, boys.


JOSHUA AND THE SHEPHERD
Published in Paperback by Scribner Paperback Fiction (20 May, 1996)
Author: Joseph Girzone
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Strong ecumenical message
Like all of Joseph Girzone's books, Joshua and the Shepherd is extremely well written. It is easy to read (excellent prose), and Girzone weaves such a detailed story that it is hard not to get swept up in the flow of the story. This book is definitely a story about the universal love of Jesus (Joshua) for all of His creation. The book is definitely idealistic in its ecumenical storyline (different denominations establishing a strong single community), but Girzone does leave one with the impression that there is definitely hope for such a possibility if people truly listen to the Word. Overall, I liked the book. Being an advocate of ecumenism myself (though I must state that I would not want unity by sacrificing Truth) I could relate to this book and thougth the message was truly inspiring. My one problem with the book however was that at times, Girzone writes so simply, you feel as if the book was actually written for grade schoolers. Then again, perhaps it wouldn't be such a bad idea to expose children to this message (the one of ecumenism) anyways.

Another Great Book in the Joshua Series
I have read a few of these books and they never cease to surprise me! This book goes a little deeper into the social aspects of Catholicism, but still delivers it's message quite clearly! Joseph Girzone tells a wonderful story of a priest whose life is forever changed upon meeting Joshua. Perhaps the conclusion is a bit far-fetched and somewhat guessable, it is still a good read!

My favorite "Joshua" book!
This was the first of Girzone's "Joshua" series I read, and it is still my favorite. Whenever I re-read it I have to clear about four hours on my calendar, because I plow right through from beginning to end. It's that good!

This is the story of a "good" priest who is made bishop of his diocese. He is seen as one who applies church law consistently and without favoritism. Unfortunately for his parishioners, that means that he has often acted more like a Pharisee than like a disciple of Jesus. What a profound change he will make when he encounters Joshua, a simple wanderer who seems strangely in tune with the will of God.

Without naming names, Girzone rebukes those who follow man's rules rather than God's, and gives us a modern interpretation of what Jesus might say if he showed up at your door tomorrow. I wish all clergy and faithful would read it; I *really* wish all clergy and faithful would examine their beliefs and practices, as Girzone's main character does.

It is an inspirational, hopeful book -- corny as it sounds, I still get a shiver down my spine when I read the last few pages. I give it my highest recommendation!


7 Minute Rotator Cuff Solution
Published in Paperback by Health for Life (1990)
Authors: Jerry Robinson and Joseph Horrigan
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The Solution, and It Is...
Last August I noticed a very slight pain in my upper right shoulder. It didn't seem like a structural injury, so I continued to train normally. One day, after about twenty minutes of crawl laps in an Olympic size pool, the pain in my shoulder increased suddenly and dramatically. I iced it and took some non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and resolved to rest a few months. A few months later, I was no better, and I went to the University medical center. The range of motion tests I underwent actually worsened my condition, and I nearly went to the hospital emergency room two days later. After the typical rigmarole with hospital administration, I finally got to see a sports medicine specialist and then received a referral to physical therapy. A month later, I had spot numbness in my arm, and was still unable to jog, swim, lift...anything.
So my mom bought me this book. I didn't pick it up right away, and I regret it. After only three days following the rehabilitation exercises in this book, I am back to almost full strength and mobility, and have taken up Brazilian Jiujitsu, and returned to regular weight-lifting.
At first, I was leery about the book because one of the authors is a chiropractor. But none of the material in the book is controversial or esoteric. It's extremely common sensical, and includes very helpful information about exercises you may be performing which could permanently damage the health of your shoulders. Further, it presents anatomical information in a manner that is clear and approachable. The doctors I saw didn't bother to inform me of the distinction between internal and external rotators, and all the exercises they gave me were for the internal rotators.
As a young man, I frequently took my health for granted until this shoulder injury. Anyone who is suffering similar problems, and the same confusion and ambiguity that I did, should give this book a chance. At the very least, it presents a wholly scientific and reasonable alternative to surgery and debilitating steroid treatments. Good luck...

A Must Read For Anyone Who is Serious About Training...
This book is really well done. It is written in a language anyone can understand and perfectly illustrated. For each passage the author talks about, there is a small illustration showing exactly what is being described. It makes the information very easy to understand and utilize. I have never had any rotator cuff problems but I am a personal trainer and I have many clients who have had problems with this area. This book outlines routines for rehabilitation, and also for injury prevention. It also includes some fabulous stretches for the chest, shoulders, and biceps, as well as the rotator cuff muscles. This book is a great resource to have in your library of training texts and I highly recommend it.I wish that all books on injury prevention and rehabilition were done as well as this one.

prehabilitation AND rehabilitation
Some of the other reviews have mentioned how this book has helped overcome an injury. I recommended this to a tennis playing friend with a rotator cuff injury and he was able to return to his former level and then some. That's my anectdote.

The shoulder tries to be a ball-and-socket joint and to some extent it is. Two common analogies are that it is like a baseball on a golf tee or like a large beach ball on a saucer -- a very shallow ball-and-socket joint. The shoulder joint also has a large range of motion, but the price for this range of motion is instability. The book's diagrams show how various muscles act to keep the joint stable. But the degree of stability depends on how well all the muscles are developed. Unfortunately, many exercises and sports act to create an imbalance by developing the internal rotator muscles and not the external rotators. Add to this some commonly performed exercises that can cause injury either through impingement or stressing an unstable shoulder and it is no wonder that injuries occur even without a direct blow to the shoulder. This book shows how many injuries occur in addition to showing how to strengthen the shoulder joint to make it more stable and less susceptible to injury.

More and more weight training books (i.e, THE POLIQUIN PRINCIPLES and MUSCLE MECHANICS) are including exercises for the rotator cuff. Everett Aaberg, the author of MUSCLE MECHANICS lists 15 references and, sure enough, THE 7-MINUTE ROTATOR CUFF SOLUTION is one of them. Horrigan and Robinson's book may have started or at least contributed mightily to the trend. Injuries alone are not the reason for this. Including rotator cuff exercises often produces a sudden increase in bench pressing poundages. In fact, the WestSide Barbell Club bench press workout videos include exercises specifically for the rotator cuff.

The book also includes a lot of material applicable to other aspects of shoulder health. Page 54 illustrates Lying Flyes which I have found to be a most effective exercise for the rear deltoid -- for me better than bentover laterals or bentover cable laterals. And if you're fond of doing weighted parallel bar dips be sure to read what this this book has to say about them before you suffer some degree of shoulder separation.

In short, if your sport involves the shoulder at all you'll find THE 7-MINUTE ROTATOR CUFF SOLUTION an excellent investment. Plenty of text, plenty of diagrams and routines for both rehabilitation and prehabilitation.


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