I came across this book as required reading for my intro to ethics course. The first chapter was very interesting, but as time passed, I grew somewhat disinterested. While it is a very nice collection of ethics articles, it lacks TRUE diversity.

The readings are fairly diverse, though only within the realm of "common" ethics -- very little space is given to opposition philosophers such as Nietzsche, Crowley, Russell, etc.

Overall, the editors have done a grand job of presenting articles on the more prevalent issues in ethics, both past and present. It could have been more enjoyable (to me) with the inclusion of vastly opposing arguments, but I must say that it does serve the purpose quite well in that it makes you analyze your own beliefs. Highly recommended for those who desire varied readings in "compassionate" ethics; interesting, but not of utmost importance to those looking for more diversity.

this is a wonderful and enlightening book I recommended to all with an open mind.

This book on ethics is very well-written and its just delightful to read. Don't miss this book, it shou be high on everyone's reading list!

The book is vey informative and interesting, but it made me wonder how much effort was TRULY put into the writing of this book when I kept seeing so many typographical errors. That alone was enough to give me a heart attack. If the authors didn't care enough about their book to proof-read it properly, then maybe they didn't care enough to do more extensive research.

I purchased the original version of this book in 1996 after being diagnosed with a heart defect. The book gave me the opportunity to truly understand what my problem was and gave me invaluable advice on what to expect before and after having open-heart surgery. The book is written with the reader in mind-- they do not assume you speak "medicalease."

One of the best parts of this book is that it discusses various types of heart issues, not just heart attacks. The area of heart attacks does get quite a bit of attention in the book, but the authors also cover birth defects and other heart related illnesses. I also found it very useful that they discuss heart concerns in various stages of a women's life, such as pregnancy and menopause.

In addition to explaining heart conditions in a clear and concise manner the book also gives you tips on how to deal with related issues such as doctors and insurance companies.

Since my surgery I have continued to use the book as a reference, and I have recommended it to many friends as well as my primary phsyican and cardiologist. I was delighted to see that the book had been updated and purchased the new version as soon as I saw it. I would recommend this book to any woman and to men that care about the women in their lives.

I picked up The Women's Heart Book - and kept going right through to the glossery. The material is well organized and the information accessible and useful. Often I come away from a health related book feeling both guilty and worried. After reading The Women's Heart Book I am encouraged that I can make healthy lifestyle choices for myself and communicate intelligently with doctors if I or my sister has to confront a heart condition. The book addresses women in a personal yet professional manner - respectful of individual differences yet clear about how to apply conclusions from current research on women and heart-related diseases. I will keep this book on my reference shelf, and I thank the authors for giving me this excellent guide.

I enjoyed this title immensely. It came across my path at a time when I was low and needed a lift. The advice is rich and timeless. Each page causes one to think and reflect and feel inspired. A helpful work that can will help many people through both the difficult and the mundane times.

Wonderful little book. To keep by your bedside. And read one page a day. I especially like that it isn't overtly religious. Keeps me in touch with myself and the surrounding world. Highly recommended in this day and age (after Sept. 11)

The is aboslutely the best pastry and chocolate book I have seen, with incredible recipes and photographs. However, you need to be petty experienced to understand the recipes, which are a bit vague, temperatures given in Centigrade, sometimes not the best translation from French, etc. The book gets knocked down one star for being very unclear on how much each recipe makes, a real issue for the home cook, if not the professional.

it is one of the BEST pastry book in the world market now. As a proffesional point of view.

Between the Flowers is one of the best books I have ever read! I came across it in a library, thinking I would take it home, read a little bit, and see how I liked it. From the moment I got into it, I was hooked! I think that part of the reason I enjoyed it so much was that I could identify with the characters. I am a young woman asking some of the same questions about myself that Arnow sets forth in her book. Another strength is that the characters and situations are totally believable. I would definitely recommend it to anyone, especially those who are interested in Appalachian literature.

The main focus of this book is the conflict that exists between the appeal of a wandering life and the appeal of establishing roots. Delph and Marsh want different things from life, but they want each other, too. Delph wants to travel for once in her life and Marsh wants to settle down for once in his. As was typical of the time, the will of the husband wins out and Delph and Marsh settle down to a life of farming. I think one of the most heartbreaking aspects of this struggle between wandering and settling is how Delph and Marsh lose sight of each other. They throw themselves into the farming, Delph to forget what her life could have been and Marsh to make a success of himself. Between the Flowers is a story mixed with the triumps that Delph and Marsh have together, and it is also the story of how they fail each other. It is a wonderful study of everday life.

After having languished unpublished for over half a century, Harriette Simpson Arnow's magnificent "Between the Flowers" will rightfully restore her reputation as one of the twentieth-century's finest writers. Compared favorably with John Steinbeck at the onset of her literary career, Arnow's second novel, "Between the Flowers," failed to inspire publishers. The novel's dark naturalism and intricately detailed descriptions of the Cumberland River region of eastern Kentucky, now seen as extraordinarily rich qualities, appeared excessively regional and fatalistic to editors in Depression America. Fortunately, the Michigan State University Press has brought this book to a new generation of Americans, a generation which can appreciate the feminist slant to Arnow's characterization of Delph, the anguished and inarticulate conflicts in her husband Marsh and the exquisite detailing of a region of the United States either ignored or stereotyped by modern society.

Arnow's novel combines an overwhelming and frightening naturalism, two admirable, miserable characters who rage against their own flaws, social restrictions and elusive love and a sense of place that exalts the people who reside therein. Arnow's nature is not some beneficent prop; it is an indifferent overpowering force which mocks human attempts at control. Marsh and Delph's attempts to scratch out of a living in the midst of drought, heat and flooding appear small and futile in the face of the relentless battering factors of nature. One of the remarkable facets of this novel is the author's ability to make puny humans appear large in the face of overwhelming odds.

The greatest achievement of "Between the Flowers," however, is the creation of one of the most tormented and sympathetic couples in American literature. Bound to each other by hunger -- a deep and unfulfilled yearning for completion and self-respect, Delph and Marsh are ironically ill-suited for each other. Their passionate needs, which kindled their romance, ultimately cripple their possibilities for mutual happiness. Delph, the orphaned child of a family known for its rebelliousness, yearns for pesonal libeation, for travel, education and experience. Frustrated by the isolation of the Cumberland, she envisions an unbound future, kissed by urban experiences and inellectual growth. Rootless Marsh, a wandering oil-man, seeks place, solidity and permanence; he senses that land -- owning it, bending it to his will, husbanding it to produce -- will be his salvation. "Between the Flowers" is brilliant in its rendering of these two complicated, sympathetic people. The conflicts and tensions over "the having of things or the holding" advance both the narrative and the philosophical underpinnings of the novel.

Readers should not expect an easy time with this novel. Arnow's style is detailed, relishing in the opportunities to expound on the rugged beauty of the Cumberland, probing the consciousness and consciences of Delph and Marsh as they attempt to understand and live with their relationship. Arnow's themes of self understanding, family coherence, marital frustrations and disappointments, personal disappointment and self-hatred are given serious, thorough treatment. What publishers scorned as dense descriptive detail today appears as not only necessary, but enlightening. "Between the Flowers" deserves its belated praise.

Very good read! Excellent storytelling narrative by the author. Highly recommended.

Wonderful tale of Texas in the early days. Bean does a great job of capturing the period and the people of the time. Characters are fun to read about and the plot kept me involved throughout the novel. Super book!

Reading the early passages in Chopin's letters, one is almost heartbroken by the youth, the enthusiasm, the childlike good humor evident therein. Chopin at 17 was a wide-eyed kid from Warsaw with unparalleled musical talent and his whole life in front of him, the world apparently his oyster. To read his letters in subsequent years -- after the Russian invasion of Poland that stranded him in Paris; the abortive betrothal to Maria Wodzinska; the complex and finally tragic relationship with George Sand -- is to watch a man reach adulthood step by step. Though they contain only small, tantalizing glimpses of Chopin's opinions on music, the letters make for an effective counterpoint to his immortal compositions. The man who wrote the great Ballades and Scherzi was just a man like any other: he was annoyed at lazy servants, he unconsciously exploited his friends, he wanted to move in the circles of great aristocrats, he had provincial and prejudiced opinions. The lesson is banal, but true, and vividly made clear in these letters.

Reading Chopin's letters is a unique privilege we have today. No lover of Chopin should be without this book.

Legates and Stout do an excellent job of compiling and briefly explaining many seminal writings on cities. There is a lot to read here and I'm not yet finished. But this heavy book is full of informative, interesting and fun writings and provides an excellent introduction to the study of cities. This is essential reading for students of Urban Form, Architecture, and the Social Sciences. Includes Le Corbusier, Patrick Geddes, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, J.B. Jackson, Witold Rybczynski and many others.

As a first year Urban Planner, this book was on the required readings list for our course. This book gave me the edge to all my fellow students because it provided a detailed sample through a historical and progressive manner. It provides the fundamentals of the great thinkers in Urban Planning. It also covered and introduced me to further research on areas such as design and sociology, promoting further personal research.

As a second year student, this book can always be seen in my bibliography, and is always the first thing I head towards for a brief history on any concepts that are raised in my lecturers.

This book can be seen as THE general summary of Urban Planning.

This work could well have been titled the "Capitalist Manifesto," such was influence it and its author had on contemporary Europe. Unlike their communist counterparts, sadly, Bastiat and his "Economic Fallacies" have faded from the public eye. Nevertheless, Bastiat stands among the great advocates for free-trade that the West has ever known. Even though the battle against tariffs is largely won in principle, the war against protectionism goes on. His arguments are clear, simple, usually water-tight, and entirely relevant in the twenty-first century. His wit is exceptional and memorable, especially his classic "Candlemaker's Petition," which could very well have inspired an episode of "The Simpsons." Bastiat gets a five-star rating, but it's the translation that's on trial here.

It's important to note that Deachman translated this work in Canada during the early Depression, so his English is occasionally a little odd to the eyes of this American. Where footnotes would suffice, Deachman takes some dubious liberties in excising portions of the original French that he deems irrelevant. His prose, while good on its own, is a little too clunky at points, whereas Bastiat's is usually very light and crisp. My biggest nit to pick is the inconsistency in his use of currency units: sometimes using francs, sometimes pounds, and other times dollars. But still, it's a good translation of a great work.

Buy it. Read it. Love it.

Frederic Bastiat was a fine economist, but also one of the most lucid and concise writers in any field ever. He explains his views with an impressive combination of iron-clad logic, excellent prose style, humour, clarity and brevity. Important economic concepts that a Samuelson might spend 2 pages of obscuritan econo-speak labouring to explain, Bastiat makes crystal clear in a 2 line pun or paragraph-long satirical swipe. The man is a joy to read - one of the few economists whose writings will make you laugh out loud.

The stylistic concision and simplicity is also matched by the quality and rigour of the arguments made. Namely, perhaps the most robust defense of free trade, and complete and utter assassination of fallacious economic reason ever put to print. The entire career of protectionists like Pat Buchanan is rendered obsolete by a few sentences from this book. One chapter more and you will never be able to take industry subsidies seriously again. Continue reading, and you will quickly be convinced by Bastiat that today's debates about the trade deficit are simply the modern equivalent of medieval alchemy (i.e. complete nonsense).

For anyone knowledgeable in economics, this is the perfect work from which to draw brilliant refutations of standard fallacies. Bastiat's quipping one-liners go down well with non-economists, demonstrating that good economics is anything but a dismal science. For those less familiar with the subject, it is one of the most enjoyable and informative crash-courses in economic common sense. Read and understand this book, and you will be highly unlikely to make the economic howlers that our politicians have been repeating for centuries.

Frederic Wakeman Jr.'s book, "The Fall of Imperial China" is the first of a series of of books on China which were published in 1974. This series has served as a standard survey text in a number of college undergraduate and graduate level classes on China.

"The Fall of Imperial China" will provide some sketchy background on China before the Ch'ing (Manchu) Dynasty (1644-1911), but will deal mainly with with decline of China under the Ch'ing Dynasty. The book carries the story of Chinese history right up to the 1911 Chinese Revolution.

Although "The Fall of Imperial China" is a scholarly book, Wakefield's writing style is such that even a person without much education in Chinese history can pick up this book and read it with ease. This is an enjoyable book to have in a personal library because it is so well indexed.

This is an excellent introduction to politics and structural change during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). In accessible and engaging prose, Wakeman concentrates on how power was organized and what led the most prosperous and perhaps most powerful country in the world to collapse into rebellion and foreign domination before finally breaking apart under warlord rule.

Wakeman begins with a useful survey of the class structure of imperial Chinese society: peasants, gentry, merchants, and state. He then briefly describes the rise of the Manchus, their inauguration of the Qing dynasty, and the increasing power of the state under the early emperors. Wakeman devotes the second half of the book to Western imperialism, internal rebellion, and the ultimately futile efforts made by the central government to maintain its control. Woven into this narrative is a description of how the changing institutional basis of the state eventually gave rise to independent local centers of political and military power, dooming the Qing dynasty.

If you are looking for a quick, coherent, and well-written survey of Qing politics, this is your book. What the book does not cover is social or (for the most part) economic history. The lives of women and the poor are almost totally absent, and the momentous changes in traditional Chinese culture are rarely explored. While this leaves important gaps in the narrative, Wakeman's approach is far preferable to those textbook writers who seek to include everything but succeed only in sucking the life from their subject. Yet neither does Wakeman stray too far into the realm of personalities: he is able to keep his material lively even while laying out an argument based primarily on structural explanations. This is a service to both the reader and the history.