This is an excellent book for pediatric residents and medical students in pediatric rotations. The book is organized by symptom e.g. abdominal pain, chronic cough, and it provides a comprehensive list of differential diagnosis, flow charts for diagnosis, as well as short discussions on most common diseases associated with that particular symptom. A must for pediatric rounds.

The book, though well written and easy to follow, does not begin to touch the power that the mind possesses through Placebo experimentation. None that I have read has. Maybe i should write my own. CHRIS FOY-GOLDSTEIN

This book is the perfect accompaniment to classroom instruction. The authors make the concepts clear and easy to understand through concise explanations of all the important cases and trends. Extremely handy when preparing for an exam!

Every major opinion of the greates court of america.

An Excellent Resource

Not sure how it is that I was sent this book, but I found it in my mailbox on a dreary Seattle afternoon. Instantly I was flooded with memories of dewy summer mornings that promise to become hot sticky days; the smell of earth and sweet grasses rising with the humidity; the sounds of grasshoppers hopping, crickets chirping, skippers fluttering, big blue stem, bur oak, gamma grass all rustling from a breeze that seems to tug at me to follow it to the horizon.
Having grown up in Illinois where 99% of the original prairie landscapes are gone, it is a THRILL to see a 352 page directory of North American prairies. I found myself scanning this book's pages for restoration sites I did volunteer work on years ago and places I've visited. It's encouraging to see how many have been designated as nature reserves and parks. Of course many of the entries are also for very small, inevitably threatened rements of prairies. Perhaps this text will help to validate the existence of these small treaures and promote human awareness and stewardship.
This directory is nicely organized by U.S. States and Canadian Providences. Introductions for each state provide varying amounts of backround information, such as the types of prairies, geological history, current environmental/restoration/preservation concerns, and key plant and animal species. A few states are included, which aren't really prairie states, such as Oregon. The all too brief justification for including this state and it's two listings are that these sites look like prairies. That's good enough for me, but then I have to ask why my current home state of Washington was not included with it's steppes, plateaus and mima mounds. Oh well. Entries for each state are then provide within alphabetical county listings. One improvement might be to include each site by name in the index. I spent a long time trying to find individual prairies I knew by name, but couldn't recall the county they are in.
There is one map of central North America, a lack luster, black and white, bare-basic outline of states and providences, on which, author, Bernard Schwartz, appears to have colored in the "pre-settlement prairie bio-regions" with dark and light crayon. A far better map, perhaps with color/texture coded sub-regions, would have been a nice addition and not too hard to come by. However, on the facing page is one of my favorite prairie related illustrations, a diagram of prairie plants and their root systems. Other illustrations are black and white sketches of prairie flora, drawn by author Charlette Adelman. Like her husband's map they are a bit more abstract and amateurish than botanical, but I like them anyway, being recognizable representations of key species and having a 'heartland' essence of earthiness, simplicity, and beauty.
One problem of restoration is the long term management and monitoring of human activities on on prairie sites. Since the book serves as a guide to visit these natural areas, I would have liked it to have a introductory chapter on appropriate human usage and negative impacts (eg. harvesting seeds, herbs, disturbing/feeding wild life, pets, off-road vehicles, staying on trails, littering, etc., etc). Additional emphasis on invasive weed species and land- use threats with perhaps an apendix of references for state and federal weed/rare plant directories and protection agencies might enhance future additions.
A great reference for birders, botanists, conservationists, scientists, travelers, and anyone who believes that America is, first and foremost, a beautiful chunk of land.

Collaboratively written by Charlotte Adelman and Bernard L. Schwartz, Prairie Directory Of North America is an information packed, accessible, reader friendly, straightforward, ecological reference book filled cover to cover with the names, one-paragraph descriptions, and geographical locations of prairies found throughout the United States and Canada. The prairie listings are organized first by state (or Canadian province), then by county for easy reference. Telephone numbers for each prairie area's associated conservation board or similar organization are included. The Prairie Directory Of North America is an excellent, indispensable, highly recommended desktop reference for academicians, professionals, environmental activists, and non-specialist general readers needing to look up a given prairie's location or basic facts quickly.

One is shocked at the frequency with which the same stories crop up over and over again in this book. If you read it over a weekend, you'll notice that many times the same sentences appear in different chapters. Some stories appear three and four times! In short, the author gravely needed an editor.

Typically of Supreme Court historians, this one adopted a very "Whiggish" view of history: the Supreme Court's story was one of the advancement of goodness and truth, and any retrograde movement was only temporary. Didn't this Hegelian stuff go out with the fall of the Berlin Wall (if not with the opening of World War I)? Can anyone really believe this stuff?

Readers who do not share Schwartz's apparent conviction that bigger government is always better will have yet another reason to regret having read this book. How can one answer the assertions that the whole New Deal alphabet soup was worthwhile, especially now that most of that expensive mess has been abolished years ago? Just take his word for its goodness, I guess; it must have been constitutional, or else the Supreme Court (in its benificent omniscience) would never have held it constitutional! (never mind that it at first held it unconstitutional).

Charles Warren's old history remains superior, although its age obviously indicates that someone needs to write a new history of the Supreme Court. This is not it.

Schwatz's history is easily accesible and not bogged down with too much technical jargin. This book is best for non-students of the Court for it offers little more than an overview without a great deal of significant analysis. The exception being the fairly good case studies of Dred Scott, Lochner, Brown, and Roe. Though the book offers little to the historical debate concerning the Court, it wasn't really supposed to. Schwartz wanted to write a relatively short, accesible, single volume history of the Supreme Court. He succeded. I recomend it for anyone interested in the basics of the Court and it's history.

My interest is in American history in general, not the Supreme Court or American law in particular, and I found this book very good in its treatment of the issues, the personalities, and the times in which decisions were made. Although the first 50 pages were slow-going, once into the direction that Schwartz was leading me, I found the book moved nicely and quickly with a solid narrative. The four case studies, Dred Scott, Lochner, Brown vs. Board of Education, and Roe v. Wade, brought the larger times into view. I thoroughly enjoyed the small details of individual judges, such as Rehnquist having been a clerk at the court decades before he was a justice there, that help shape and explain seemingly contradictory actions by individual jurists. Emminently readable, it is excellent history.

Bernard Schwartz is a renowned constitutional scholar at the University of Tulsa. Mostly, he is known for his research on the Supreme Court, and he has produced a nice history of the Court.

This volume is a bit more lighthearted than the usual sort of fare that law professors put out. Basically, Schwartz has identified what in his view are the ten best Supreme Court decisions, the ten worst Supreme Court decisions, the ten best Supreme Court Justices, the ten worst Supreme Court Justices, and so on. For each entry, he has a short description of that case/justice/etc., along with explanations of why it/he made the list.

The cases will be familiar to any law student, and many of the cases will be familiar to non-lawyers -- i.e., Brown v. Board of Education, Dred Scott, and so on.

At a certain level, however, non-lawyers may find that much of the book is too arcane; Justice Cardozo, for example, is well-known to non-lawyers as having authored the definitive opinion in a bizarre case known as Palsgraf, but to non-lawyers, the reference will be missed.

Brennan acted with breathtaking intellectual arrogance and contempt for the American people. Most of his "achievements" have already been exposed as failures -- affirmative action (government-sponsored racial discrimination), supression of religous expression (I'm an agnostic, by the way, but I don't enjoy the Court's meddling with expressions of religious views) and the famous Roe vs. Wade decision which, by imposing a "solution" that should have been debated by society, created one of the most destructive and polarizing arguments of recent times and may ultimately lead to more restrictions on abortion than would have otherwise been imposed. As one who favors choice, I would have preferred to have had the opportunity to persuade my fellow Americans, rather than having the outcome dictated by an arrogant, Napoleonic pipsqueak who lingered among us far too long. Sincerely, Denis Arvay ARVAY@IBM.NET

I was greatly disappointed with the book. Schwartz didn't pay attention to who his audience is: we are not a general reading public but rather one with an interest in, and some level of sophistication of, the US Supreme Court. In other words, we expect sourcing and citing of ideas. With too many "a case did this" and "a book says that" without the sourcing, I gave up. Moreover, it was pretty clear that the stalwarts of the Warren Court: Warren, Black, Brennan could do no wrong. Although it may be semi-true for the latter two, Warren was a glad-handing arm-twisting politician who's most famous opinion (Brown) was as dull as dish water to read. But its easier to pick on Rehnquist because he couldn't convince a majority to follow him on one single issue -- albeit an important issue. Yes, that's the learned perspective we get from this book. Ultimately, I can see the general media wanting to read this book to help "educate" them, but as for political scientists, law professors, legal journalists and the like there is little value to this book other than that Schwartz had access to private communications of some of the Justices, but we know not whom and know not when he uses it (and whether he uses it correctly).