The percentage of people investing in the stock market is at an historical high, yet few people understand that the markets rise and fall in definite patterns. These patterns are explained by Dow Theory, devised by Charles H. Dow who was the founder of the still famous Dow averages. The leading Dow Theory practitioner of today is Richard Russell (...). Richard Russell wrote this little book in 1961 about the stock market from 1958-1960. His commentary about this period in stock market history is directly applicable to today's stock market situation. This book teaches the difference between a bull and bear market, proven over a century of stock market statistics.

If you are ready to make an investment in Native American pottery from the Hopi, this book is a "must have". Every gallery I've been at pulls this book out when I ask them something about who made a particular piece of pottery. The author provides information on every known Hopi potter. It includes complete family histories, who they learned from, and how much some of their art has sold for. Also included is an appendix on common signatures and hallmarks. If you're a new-comer to Native American pottery, this is not a good starting point -- try "Southwest Pottery: Anaszai to Zuni" by Hayes & Blom. Also, if you are looking for thousands of pretty color pictures, this is not the best book (even though there are some nice photos). But if you're going to spend money on pottery, check it out.

Kunreuther, et al have made a major leap forward in helping to educate and inform insurance and non-insurance people alike on the threats associated with natural hazards of all kinds, how insurance companies historically and are now reacting to how those hazards affect their business as they seek to help their insureds manage the risks they face, to demystify the complex world of insurance, and to offer some well reasoned suggestions for all who have a stake in managing the risk of damage from catastrophic natural hazards like hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, etc. Whether the reader is: an individual homeowner; a member of the scientific or academic community; an interested federal, state or community official; an insurance or reinsurance company employee; or one of the other parties who should be concerned about how catastrophes might impact their customers and constituents, this book is a must! Read it to understand the extent of the problem. Read it to understand how mitigation of future damage may be a key part of the solution for the risk that the individual homeowner whose home is located in harm's way (nature's fury) faces. Read it to understand what's been tried and what's suceeded or failed. But mostly read it to seriously consider how you can participate in the solution. The responsibility rests with the individual homeowner to make sure that his or her home is as safe and strong as it should be - for the sake of his or her loved ones (including the family pets), his or her irreplaceable or prized possessions, and that their psychological well-being and lifestyle are not significantly disturbed after a major catastrophic event. And he or she must see themselves as part of a safe and strong community that can similarly weather what Mother Nature can (and at some time certainly will, regardless of how small the probability) throw at them so that the goods and services it provides can be continued after such an event. This book provides a balanced approach to helping the reader understand the role insurance can, should, and does play. But it also helps place it into perspective and suggests some next steps. It explores the reasons for why the different stakeholders act the way they do. Why do people not react to the risk they face by demanding and then paying to make their homes stronger and safer? Why do insurance companies not offer premium incentives? How do various public policies and practices get in the way of efforts to invest significant tax dollars to promote stronger, safer homes and communities, when the original objective of that investment was to avoid spending significantly more tax dollars every year to bail out people and communities living in areas at risk to hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and other natural hazards (sometimes repeatedly) because they either didn't fully understand the risk or they simply chose not to act to avoid or reduce the subsequent damage? Read this book to learn. Read this book to capture a vision of what needs doing. Seek more information from the Federal Emergency Management Agency or from the Institute for Business and Home Safety on how to retrofit your own home or how to contribute to community based programs. Both have very good web sites that are mentioned in the book. And finally carefully evaluate your own risk to natural hazards and take action to protect your family (both physically and psychologically), your irreplaceable and prized possessions, and get involved with others in your community to do the same thing for the environment in which you live, work, and recreate. Thanks to Kunreuther, et al for giving us such a wonderful resource to get us thinking about the status and role of insurance against the adverse impacts of natural disasters in the United States, but also for helping awaken us to our own status and role in protecting our families, our homes, and our communities because it should now be clear that insurance is only part of the solution. Keeping it affordable and available requires us to begin seeing insurance as just one, albeit very important, part of our arsenal for managing our individual and corporate risk of loss from natural hazards that threaten us where we live. Respectfully submitted, Dennis Fasking

This is the first major comedy by Sheridan, a radical Irish actor and politician in George III's England. Not quite as complex and astute as his later She Stoops to Conquer, the Rivals remains a warm, unforgettable, and very, very funny play.

Here we meet the chatty Mrs. Malaprop, who proudly tells us "if I reprehend anything in this world, it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs"; her niece Lydia, lost in the world of lurid half-bound romantic novels; Sir Anthony Absolute, often wrong but never in doubt; Sir Lucious O'Trigger, of BlunderBuss Hall; and the rest. The dialogue and plot devices are well-crafted and funny; the social commentary is perceptive and satisfyingly naughty; but what stays with you is the humanity of each of the characters. These are not the charicatures of Restoration comedy, but personalties the reader will remember; ridiculous like all humans, but engendering empathy as well as laughter.

This book is a great resource if you are looking for general descriptions of the hundreds of different types of sterling flatware pieces - it goes well beyond the standard place setting and serving pieces. However, it would be better if it had better photos of some details and the price guide is very general - it does not value specific patterns.

This is, in my opinion, Price's worst book. Price is an amazing writer -- "Freedomland" is one of my favorite books -- but this isn't him at his best. "The Wanderers" was his childhood and it had a clear-sighted verisimilitude. "Ladies' Man" reveals that the author knows his town (New York) like no one else, but reading it today it becomes mind-numbingly dated and the ending, as noted, shoots off the charts. Anyone who doesn't want to read about the "hideous, dirty, sick" ways homosexuals hung out back in the '70s will want to skip this book, too. The ending winds up in an underground gay club and Price really lays it on thick with people locked tightly into a room and groping freely. The homophobia and mixed messages here speaks, I guess, more so of the author than of his character.

I would only read this if you're a fan of Price and want to see how he rose from the lean-meat prose of "Wanderers" and ascended to the literary heaven of "Freedomland." Otherwise, I think you'll be hugely disappointed. Pick up "Land" or "Clockers" instead.

This is a minor misstep in the career of a monumentally talented man.

Kenny Becker, the protagonist of Richard Price's "Ladies' Man," will appeal to some readers and exasperate others. He had both effects on me, simultaneously.
As the novel traces one grueling week in this 30-year-old New Yorker's life, it becomes clear what his problem is: He seems to have a near-pathological aversion to any kind of commitment. His love life is a series of depressing affairs that invariably end badly; he's lost touch with his old school friends; his job is a bad joke; he practically has to have a gun to his head just to call his parents. This book contains one of the most heartbreaking paragraphs I've ever read: After reminiscing fondly about the bonding he did with his fraternity brothers back in college, Kenny concludes, "Of course, after three months I lost interest and dropped out of the fraternity, but that's just me, Cut-and-Run Becker."
We watch through Kenny's eyes as one life-changing event after another hits him during this week. As he gives voice to his restlessness, loneliness and longing, one thing keeps the story from becoming too whiny or self-involved: Price's nearly anthropological familiarity with the details of modern urban loneliness. It's all here -- the excruciating singles-bar scene, the daydreams about other paths one might take, even the feeling that when you come home at night the newspaper on the doormat is mocking your lack of plans for the evening.
One thing is for sure: If you have healthy, sustaining relationships with other people, you'll never take them for granted again after reading "Ladies' Man."

Although I'm a single woman in her 30s, I really related to this book about a guy who's just turned 30 and broken up with his girlfriend. I loved the raw realistic way Richard Price captured what it's like to be single and live in a big city (like him, I also lived in NYC when I turned 30). Being a heterosexual female, I never visited massage parlors or peep shows like this guy did, but the reason I found this book so refreshing was that I didn't find it preachy or self-pitying like so many other singles books. It just tells it like it is. I wouldn't be surprised if the creators of Sex and the City (which I also love) were inspired by this book.

In my review of last year's edition of this annual price guide, I was only willing to give it two stars. While that may seem brutal for what is clearly a lot of compiled information, keep in mind that most of this data has evolved over a twenty-year collection process, and each new year is now largely a product of editing and tweaking the previous volume. However, I have decided to raise my rating for this year's edition by one star because even a cursory overview reveals that the effort put in since the last volume was not nearly so minimal as the previous 2000 version.

There are not a lot of new additions in the way of specific models or grades, and this still remains a significant weakness of this guide. To the newcomer, it appears to cover a vast array of models and grades, but to the experienced collector, it is by no means near the definitive encyclopedia of watches. Even in its strongest area, American pocket watches, it continues to overlook a considerable number of grades, leaving the reader to make lump assumptions about prices of watches overlooked. The same comments apply to wristwatches, where it might have been better to leave well documented names completely out (such as Rolex or Patek) since they are better represented with great detail in other books. Does this matter? Just look at the number of "rare", "scarce", bogus and absurd claims on some Internet watch ads, and the answer should obvious: such claims would not survive the light of day were this guide truly complete.

But for the many grades that are in the book, both pocket and wrist, it appears the authors have awakened to the reality of the market: a booming economy has been driving prices ever upward, particularly for collectibles. And whether the marketplace is cable TV, Internet auctions, or watch marts, the reality of any market is constant: prices are set by a willing seller and ready buyer who agree on money. To deny the prices that are have been paid with repetition on Internet auctions is naive at best. A sale is a sale, and a collection of sales is the marketplace. Pretending that the majority of sales (which today is clearly Internet auctions) does not represent the market is absolutely ludicrous.

So with the 2001 edition, a review of item after item in comparison to the 2000 version shows almost unilateral increases, which indeed reflects today's expanded market: no increase in supply, a significant increase in demand, and an enhanced marketplace to help keep things from simply skyrocketing. Revel in the price growth -- your collection should be worth more as time goes by, particularly in a strong economy. And price guides should reflect this rise. Finally, with this edition, I can say the guide is catching up. And it appears to have done so without defaulting to some simple formula. Important and popular watches show the greater increases, and this is reality.

Will this publication ever be perfect? Perhaps one day. In Ehrhardt & Meggers American Pocket Watches Identification and Price Guide, an extensive cataloging of grades and variations far beyond the Shugart, et al guide is presented. But it was in some ways its own undoing. It is nearly impossible to keep tabs on every watch sale down to the fine details and thus produce a truly definitive price guide each and every year. The labor would be staggering. But as sales continue to occur on the Web in far greater proportion to any other venue, and web crawling software becomes more sophisticated, it seems that a combination of Ehrhardt's grade and variant detail with Shugart's annual pricing may yet come. When it does with real time price, a veritable commodities market ticker for watches, I am ready to award all five stars. This should, after all, be the ultimate goal even if it seems a bit unrealistic at the moment.

Until then, I confess this is a book you really can't survive without in this hobby. It is the standard price reference when in doubt, and a particularly valuable asset to newcomers who are not yet familiar with prices for most watches. It is wise to be aware of its shortcomings, yet for all the missing grades, at least the prices are now more realistic. And should the market fall, I would hope the guide keeps track with the whole of the marketplace and reflect the ongoing reality, subject to the unfortunate constraints of annual updates and publications delays.

I've used Cooksey Shugart's books for nearly a dozen editions now, and this book is the best all-in-one price guide, identification guide and basic watch book around. I use it for American Pocket Watches (because that is what I collect) although I read it cover-to-cover. Prices may be slightly out of date because of the one-year update cycle. In reply to the reader who complained that the prices don't take into account the high values being sought on Ebay and other auctions, I suggest that most of the actual sales results I've seen on American wrist watches on Ebay are in line with the Guide's prices. The asking and reserve prices are inflated, and - most telling - the quality is usually overstated. "Mint" means much less online than it does to the experts writing this book.

This giant latest edition (19th) contains over 1,100 pages and covers over 10,000 watches. 7,500 are illustrated. It provides a wealth of information useful to the novice or professional collector or dealer. Not only is it a price guide, but it has a huge amount of information, including grading, how a watch works, how to date a watch, history, coding and much, much more. It has so much data, one wonders how they were able to assemble it all. The volume is really a bargain at its price. Wonderful reference !!

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).

This book is a poor, almost fictional attempt to chronicle the life of the infamous Orrin Porter Rockwell. While I'm sure Dewey's intentions were good, he did a bad job of presenting History.
His subject was a difficult one, Rockwell having left no diary. In addition, there are a few undetailed accounts of him in the official History of the Church to which he belonged. Most of the rest is speculation. Despite this lack of evidence, Dewey assumes that he knows Porter's mind and emotions on all occasions. How could he know that something "turned Porter's stomach" or "hit close to home" if Rockwell never left a journal?
Most of his biography is speculation. The bulk of the work is actually a brief overview of the history of the Mormon church, and Dewey just inserts Rockwell wherever he wants to. For example, he tells the story of a group of Mormons who, in 1838, went out to defend their Missouri homes. Dewey just assumes Porter was there, and says he was "probably riding at their head."
Toward the end of Rockwell's life, firsthand accounts of him become few and far between. In order to deal with this, Dewey simply lumps together all accounts and legends of Rockwell with no consistency or continuity whatsoever. The stories jump around, and each paragraph is an entirely new subject. This is very difficult to read, and does little besides give a collection of myths.
This book gets two stars because of Dewey's obvious sincerity. He is not a historian by trade, and it shows. His subject is a difficult one to write about, and Dewey managed to chronicle his life with some accuracy (despite all the speculation). If you want to read an interesting tale/legend about one of the most heroic Western lawmen, read this book. Just don't expect much in the way of historical accuracy.

Dewey does a defensive history of Rockwell, and does a good job of dispelling many of the myths. But like so many historians, he seems to be a frustrated lawyer, and seems to have an image of himself as Rockwell's latter-day defense council. Dewey is definitely from the faith-promoting school of history, and obviously writes as if "the Brethern" are looking over his shoulder. Because of this he has omitted significant discomfiture, and we are deprived of aspects more rounded. But then many authors are guilty of being frustrated prosecuting attorneys...

There isn't much currently in print about good old Porter Rockwell, the "Avenging Angel." Like many frontier characters, the myth is a little more exciting than the publishable reality. OK, maybe he didn't execute innocent non-believers, but he was still on-site for many of the memorable events of early Utah-Mormon history. For a little more edgy interpretation, order the movie, "Avenging Angel."

I consider myself a Richard Price fan and have read all his novels, but this one was shockingly disappointing. Overlong by at least a fourth, with a plot that moves as quickly as the wait in a Driver's Licene office, it is also filled with blandly drawn or downright annoying characters, with the worst offenders unfortunately found in the two main protagonists, the Susan Smith-like Brenda Martin and detective Lorenzo Council. And while Price can effectively weave in pop culture references into his work, having Brenda incessantly name-check '60s & '70s soul artists and songs feels like a smarmy history lesson from a smug professor. In his best work ("The Wanderers," "The Ladies' Man," "Clockers") Price has given us unforgettable characters who face unpredictable and exciting situations that literally force us to turn the page. In "Freedomland," he takes the skeletal narrative outline of a real-life crime, but fails to put any meat on its bones. A sad downturn for a talented scribe. Let's hope the next book is far better.

I bought the mass market PB version of this novel. You know, the one with the excerpted reviews on the cover: "GRIPPING!" or, as the NYT book reviewer wrote: it has many "unforseeable turnarounds". I was intrigued by these raves and love crime genre that moves quickly along.

Well, about 100 pages into this 721 page novel, I decided to re-read the reviews. I was enjoying the novel, and it WAS actually quite compelling, but the book seems to be selling itself as a thriller, when it is a much more serious look at this all too familiar racial divide we are forever trying to bridge. Once I knew how to take it, I enjoyed it all that much more. It does drag a bit in the middle, but I was always eager to turn the page, even when I realized that there was no mystery in Brenda Martin. But, I kept hoping, I suppose.

Most of all, the characters are stunningly human, some strangly creepy, like the Kenters, Ben, and Billy.

As far as the comparisons to "Bonfire of the Vanities", Price avoids cartoon-characterization and gives a truly tragic story an all-too human face. Great Job!

Hmmmm....with all due respect, I think some of the other reviewers here are missing the point. You don't pick up a 700+ page novel and not gear up for a long read, and if you know Price at all, you know he's not your standard thriller writer (which is a good thing, believe me). I'm a little mystified by the Price fan that didn't like it though--seems like we were reading two different books. And why see the titles of soul music songs in the book as a tired racial comment rather than the product of a character's completely deranged mind? At any rate, I found Freedomland to be an astounding achievement, with beautifully drawn fully human characters, pitch-perfect dialogue, plenty of action and tension, and a bone-deep sadness beneath it that's miles away from the prickly optimism of Clockers. Unlike Price's recent excellent Samaritan, it's not emotionally claustrophic either--Freedomland is in fact a modern urban epic, rich in character, depth, and texture. This is a book I continually recommend to people who believe that commercial fiction can't stir the soul. I will grant that reading Freedomland can ultimately be an emotionally exhausting experience, but that is what I look for in books--to paraphrase Kafka (at least I think it was Kafka), a book should be the axe that breaks the frozen lake inside us. And Freedomland is a great big axe.