This is a great book that describes the history, the physics, the theories, the requirements, and the current technology of customized ablation using wave front technology. At times the text can be confusing and requires rereading if not a physicist. However the book presents a very readable and detailed account of wave front analysis. I recommend this to anyone who wants to know the in's and out's of the the most current refractive surgical technique!

Everyone will acknowledge that to adapt a novel for the screen always amounts to a difficult - and in many cases a downright impossible - undertaking. This is not any different with "Snow Falling on Cedars", a novel that is remarkable for its use of different time levels as well as an array of characters complex enough to scare off most scriptwriters. Given the difficulties Ron Bass and Scott Hicks must have faced while adapting the novel, I am all the more pleased with the result of their work. All in all it is fair to say that they have succeeded in writing a script that never runs the risk of cutting the novel's central thread and that pays attention to a great many of the book's intricate details. One drop of bitterness, however, is exactly the use of the aforementioned time levels - or "time frames", as Hicks calls them in his commentary that closes the script - as their complex arrangement both threatens the smooth evolving of the story and tends to confuse those readers not familiar with the novel. But then this may have to do more with the general problems associated with bringing a novel to the screen than with Bass' and Hicks' qualities as scriptwriters, and I would still recommend this script to anyone interested in getting to know more about the filming of "Snow Falling on Cedars" and about adapting a novel for the screen in general.

The author skillfully blends the useful treatment approaches usually offerred through AA into a paradigm acceptable to the agnostic or athiest. The book is appropriate for recovering alcoholics and treatment professionals, alike. Well written and with good discussion of the AA model dynamics.

Me encanto el libro, me intereso sobre todo como relaciono el tema del contexto cultural con las practicas administrativas.

Jenkins is best known as the translator and friend of Dario Fo and Franca Rame, the Italian writer and actress who released a statement containing the following sentence immediately after the Sept. 11 WTC attacks, when the ruins were still smoldering and the ashes of the dead were still burning the eyes of the residents of New York:

"The great speculators wallow in an economy that every year kills tens of millions of people with poverty -- so what is 20,000 dead in New York?"

There is a huge difference between being a Communist, and vigorously opposing U.S. foreign policy, and thinking that the incineration of 20,000 people (or, as it turned out, 6,500) is inconsequential. How could you ever, ever pay for a book and send royalties to someone who supports such heartless people?

Ron Jenkins has written a fine book. It's wonderful, provocative titlealmost fulfills the promise it makes. It is beautifully illustrated.Jenkins selects an interesting collection of comic artists around which to explore his subject. Unfortunately the book suffers from one major flaw that I personally cannot get around. Jenkins is an academic - and infuses his book with the kind of politically correct, leftist politics that stifle the American academy in the late 20th century.

Jenkins makes well the point that fine clowning is subversive; attacking the oppressive elements of everyday life in America. But the book was written in 1988. It was still possible then to adhere to the kind of antiestablishmentarianism that characterized the American cultural revolution of the late 1960s; left-wing, collectivist, and crypto-racist.

Today however, the truly revolutionary, antiestablishment forces in America come from the Right; and are demonized to the point that many of Jenkins premises no longer make sense. Jenkin's descriptions of Spalding Gray's comedic political commentary about Viet Nam are irrelevant in modern-day America when war-mongering is of the Left. Somehow you just know that if the government today allowed legitimate protest against its war-mongering in the Middle East and the former Yugoslavia that Jenkins would follow the party line and find such commentary neither funny, nor radical - but racist, fascist and terroristic - so completely co-opted is the academy of which Jenkins is an inextricable part.

Still I found delightful his chapters on Bill Irvin, Penn and Teller, and Le Cirque Du Soleil. Jenkins left me with a burning desire to see Penn and Teller's show. I would like to see Bill Irvin today, for I am sure that he has grown far beyond the naive politics that so enraptured Jenkins a decade ago. And Cirque Du Soleil is a fast-paced have set the standard for modern clowning.

Despite my reservations, I recommend this book for those interested in any part of modern theater. The subject matter is interesting, the photographs are marvelous, and Jenkin's enthusiasm is quite infectious.

Perhaps before you write a review that publicly slanders the author and his subject, I think it best that one should back up their comment with proper research. In this case, A.L. Bell quoted a disturbing comment printed in the New York Times that depicted Dario Fo as a heartless human being. Before you wrote your misinformed review you may have discovered that there was a follow up to the article stating that Fo was mistranslated. The correct translation of Fo's comments which were made in the context of denouncing the tragedy as "a criminal act" from which speculators were attempting to earn profit is as follows:

"The great speculators wallow in an economy that every year kills tens of millions of people with poverty, so what is it TO THEM that 20,000 are dead in New York?"

Fo's intention was to call attention to the callousness of those who are attempting to profit from the tragedy. He was in no way diminishing the enormity of the catastrophe and the profound sadness and loss it has brought to so many people.

So read the book, read Fo's plays, attend theatres that produce them, and don't be quick to judge! Isn't that one of the biggest lessons we should have learned from all of this??