My mom bought this book for me, and (I'll admit) I thought it was such a waste. A whole book about buying one dress! I read it, and was alternately horrified by some of the practices in the bridal industry, and amused by their tongue-in-cheek style of writing. When I finally did visit bridal salons I felt well-informed and a lot less like a rube because of this book. Don't let the Fields and some of their truly horrifying tales scare you too much, however. Take their warnings as points of caution, and not as reasons to abandon the search entirely.

The book was very helpful with well researched information. However, if you bought Bridal Bargains by the Fields you would probably have all the information you'd need about dresses in that book. In addition to the great (albeit abbreviated compared to this entire book) section on dresses, their makers, fabric quality and sizing information, you receive TONS of valuable information for the rest of your wedding. If your dress is the most important part of your wedding, then this book might be a good addition to Bridal Bargains.

This book is great! It truly opens your eyes to the big scam the bridal industry really is! The fields are not sponsored by a discounter (as questioned by another reader), they just give truthful, honest information. The Bridal Industry is truly scarred of their consumers (Stary-Eyed Brides) knowing the truth! Go to the Full Service Salon, get pampered, try on all of the dresses and have them tell you what looks best on you, then use this book to help you get the dress for so much cheaper! The book is definitely worth the price! By the way, I used their number one on-line recommendation to order BM dresses (the Louisiana based Bridal Salon that sells over the internet), and my experience was great. I got my dresses in 1.5 months, they were $80 less than in the bridal salons, and everything turned out great!

If you are interested in buying antique clocks this is the book to find all the information. Finally not a book about museum-pieces but about clocks that are in reach for everyone. The book is divided in chapters about different sorts of clocks like bracket-clocks, alarm-clocks etc. A good book to find out more about your grandma's clock.

This book distinguishes itelf from other HRM introductory texts buy focusing on the integration of HR with the business and organization. Its breadth and depth are very impressive. The text has an international quality, providing insights into circumstances and issues in many countries. Be aware, however, that because it is written by an emeritus professor in the UK, sections relating to law, and many specific references, are limited in applicability; if this is a problem, it can be worked around for students of other nations. Overall, this is an excellent introduction to human resource management. Every chapter includes further reading, review questions and problems for discussion.

The Black-Scholes model for the pricing of derivatives whilst very effective is also known to be imperfect. A number of ways of generalizing the model to cope with these imperfections have been developed. One popular method is to allow the instantaneous volatility parameter to follow a stochastic process. This allows the possibility of observed volatilities in the market to evolve from day to day and also to produce market type "smiles" that is graphs of volatility against strike which are smile shaped rather than the horizontal line implied by the Black-Scholes model.

In this book, Lewis develops pricing formula for options under stochastic volatility models. This is mainly via the use of transform methods, that is a closed form solution is developed for the Fourier transform of the price as a function of log of the spot. The actual price is then obtained via a numerical inverse Fourier transform.

The strengths of this book are that it covers an important area that heretofore has been restricted to research papers and that it provides a large number of careful derivations and formulas.

The principal weakness is that the approach is too formula-based. The reader does not gain many conceptual insights from the author. Indeed one gains the impression that the author is technically strong but does not have a good conceptual understanding of the subject. The author does not really make a case for stochastic volatility models as opposed to other generalizations of the Black-Scholes model.

The book is restricted to vanilla options with no discussion of how using a stochastic volatility model impacts on the price of exotic options.

In conclusion, this book is not bad but it is also not great. If you are involved in studying or implementing stochastic volatility models you will certainly want to buy a copy. However the definitive book on stochastic volatility remains to be written.

The book introduces the reader to the whole new world of pricing derivatives under stochastic volatility , which had been restricted to the academics for some time now . For finance professionals not satisfied with the performance of the constant volatility Black Scholes models and it's other variants , this is a must read . The exposition is clear and the author makes a good attempt to keep the material intutive , inspite of the nature of the subject to get mathematically complex quite fast .

A worthwhile addition to the collection of books on derivative pricing .

Other reviewers discussed the virtues of this book as a first book devoted to option pricing under stochastic volatility. And, indeed, the book provides a detailed exposition of stochastic volatility models. What I want to add to the other reviews is that this book is more than just about stochastic volatility. The book gives a careful exposition of the application of the two important mathematical methods to contingent claim valuation: the method of integral transforms (Fourier and Laplace in particular) and the method of eigenfunction expansions. Long the core tools in mathematical physics, these important methods now find more and more applications in financial economics. They can be applied to option pricing, interest rate modeling, and, more generally, any problems in economics that involve calculations with diffusion processes. The author clearly demonstrates how to use these powerful tools for calculations in finance. Researchers working in the area of derivatives pricing, both in academia and on the Street, will not want to miss this point.

It is incredible how they trust blindly in EVERY aspect of General Relativity. Space-time warpages and singularities happens ONLY in mathematics! There is no way out. It is funny how Scientific American gives credibility to such a kind of science-fiction. It is time to stop lying to the public!

Hawking and Thorne, grasp it: Time-travel is physically IMPOSSIBLE.

Time travel appears pretty impractical based on this book. Maybe it's mathematically possible to fold time and punch wormholes in it in theory, but I don't think NASA or Greyhound is going to be offering trips back and forth through our lives. However, it's always intriguing to read what really smart people come up with, because they make a lot of it seem so obvious, even though I could never come up with it on my own.

I'm usually wary of books that are collections of essays, especially essays by several different people. Like many such books, The Future of Spacetime is something of a hodgepodge. Still, when I saw that the authors included Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, Timothy Ferris, Alan Lightman and Igor Novikov, it seemed to be worth taking a look. That decision was very well rewarded.

The five essays in The Future of Spacetime were first presented as talks for a celebration of the 60th birthday of Kip Thorne, a leading theoretical physicist. Three of them, plus a brief introduction by physicist Richard Price, deal with relativity, and especially with the possibility and implications of "closed timelike curves" in spacetime--time travel for short. In addition, Tim Ferris writes insightfully about why it is so important for scientists and science writers to do a better job of informing people about scientific theories and discoveries, but even more importantly clueing them in about how science works. He points out that it may take 1,000 years for a concept to penetrate to the core of society. Since modern science is at best 500 years old, there's lots left to be accomplished. Alan Lightman, who is both a physicist and a novelist, beautifully describes the creative process that lies at the heart of both science and creative writing. Scientists and novelists, he argues, are simply seeking different kinds of truths.

The three physics essays are gems. Each sheds at least some light on the nature of spacetime, on the possibility (or impossibility, or improbability) of time machines and time travel, and on intimately related issues such as causality and free will. Novikov, for example, concludes that the future can influence the past, but not in such a way as to erase or change an event that has already happened. Hawking argues that time travel is happening all the time at the quantum level, but that nature would protect against an attempt to use a time machine to send a macroscopic object, such as a human being, back in time. I was particularly impressed by Kip Thorne's essay, in which he makes a series of predictions concerning what physicists and cosmologists will discover in the next thirty years. He explains the importance of the gravity-wave detectors that are now starting to come on line. They promise to let us read the gravitational signals of such primordal events as the collision of black holes and even the big bang itself. It is as fascinating to get to piggyback on how these great minds think as it is to read their conclusions.

In short, The Future of Spacetime is a bit of a salad, but an extremely delicious and satisfying one.

Robert E. Adler, author of Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation (Wiley & Sons, 2002).

Sure, this book covers the Fenders and Gibsons adequately, but its coverage of some lesser know brands like Godin and Ibanez is a joke. For instance: Godin, who has manufactured at least 15-20 models since 1987, gets exactly one entry. Pathetic. Don't waste your money on this one. Hopefully they'll wake up and put out a much more comprehensive guide in the future. Until then just go to ebay and click on Search then Completed Items to find out how much a guitar is worth.

This is a great book for any guitar lover, or even someone who's just starting out. I found it very usefull. Another thing that I liked about this book was that it had many rare guitars that aren't in other books.

The Porter book is good, but it centers MOSTLY on the comics. Our family prefers the Batman Toy and Collectibles Price Guide by John L. Mack which has much better coverage of Batman collectibles, is up-to-date and has NEW Batman toys in it with MODERN pricing. The publisher of Porter's book should do John Macks'! E-mail him at: batboy@azstarnet.com I'm sure he'd love to hear from you

I didn't care for this book for a few reasons. First, this really isn't a price book. Sure it gives very general prices but nothing really pinned down. Second, this book is very hard to just look up a specific coin. The book is not very well aranged. This would be a good book if you just wanted to know the different varieties and how they were made. So if that's what you want then that's what you will get. As far as a price guide forget it doesn't tell me much about the value of a coin, especially with no specific year of coin or denomination.