I LOVED the poems in this book. They are heartwarming and sincere. A great book to read while curled up in front of a fire with a glass of wine and a special friend.

Absolutely wonderful! The author's words touched my heart. He has the ability to speak only to the reader. I think every woman's dream is to hear words like these spoken to her, if only once in a lifetime.

I would recommend this wonderful book to anyone that likes poetry at all. When I read it the first time, I was only going to scan it, but as I read...there was no way to put it down until I read the entire book. You can feel the warmth, love and also the hurt that this man has endured. I have personally met Mr. Carrington and he seems to be a fine man. I was so impressed with this book that I bought several and gave them to friends and even had one of the poems printed on the new menus for my restaurant chain. I placed copies of the book on the counters in my restaurants and printed several of the poems and displayed them. Everytime I read the book, I see something new in a poem. This book was written with feeling and depth. I have read these poems when I was happy, when I was sad, and just needed something to do, and I've enjoyed every time. I would be proud to give this book as a gift to anyone....it is just that I honestly enjoyed reading the poems.

This is an amazing docu-story which is as insightful as it is a fantastic story. Shaw descibes his innocent journey into one of americas fearsome suburbs. He tells how the wannabe rappers and gangstas of south central LA let this white reporter into their homes and lives. His experiences make for a fantastic story, but you also get to see how these young men live sometimes by hope alone. It is the history of the area, the music and the future of the young stars. Brilliant

West Side is the American release of a British book called Westsiders: Stories of Boys in the Hood. I picked this book up in London this Spring and it was a worthwhile find. Shaw's strength is his unflagging objectivity; he is truly multicultural. He does not pretend to excuse or to pander to any of his characters. He does an excellent job of reporting their successes and setbacks in a compassionate and respectful way.

The book is incredibly informative and really helps to dispel myths about South Central, gang culture, and West Coast rap. There's an extensive history of South Central neighborhoods that provides an unexpected perspective on the place. There's also a three page description of the drug sherm and its effects. In short, there's information here you won't find any place else if you really want some insight into Southern California urban culture.

This broad view could not have been achieved, I am convinced, if Shaw were a music critic or just another head looking to cash in on his hobby. This is a book for the anthropologist gangsta that lurks in so many rap fans, including me.

An intesting book about the story of the narrow minded puritans fighting back against the british army ,once a great powerful one. A great book espescilly when the army are made out to be fools. A well written book of life in 1777.

THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA is one of Shaw's most biting critical commentaries...this time on doctors. Shaw hated doctors, as a result of a botched operation on his foot, so here he portrays them as a group of ignorant, bull-headed windbags. All, that is, except for one doctor, who has actually found a cure for tuberculosis. The "dilemma" in the title is whether to use the cure on a talented young painter who is a moral and ethical sleazebag, or on an upstanding middle-aged physician who is a good soul, albeit a boring and relatively mundane one. All this is complicated by the fact that the doctor is in love with the painter's wife! The biggest problem with the play is that it has lost some of its impetus in the last century. Antibiotics can now cure tuberculosis, and the medical profession is far more restricted in its use of "experimental" treatments than it was then. However, Shaw's wit and invective is still poignant even at the end of the twentieth century. A must-read for Bernard Shaw enthusiasts....

I've checked out the third edition from the library, and found it is very well written. It is concise, without leaving important steps or information out.

Community Playhouse in Long Beach did the show this August. As it played, the plot didn't come through, but the wit of Shaw did. The playhouse didn't have the costumes of the military men, nor the actors to carry-off the pomp and bravado of these would-be heroes. In a time when G.W. Bush is fighting his own phantasmic enemies this play should have lapooned the whole spectre of military madness. George Bernard Shaw gave us the theme it will take some imagination and talent to make it contemporary and equal to the madness of our times. Anon

George Bernard Shaw takes the title for this play from the opening life of Virgil's epic poem the "Aeneid," which begins "Of arms and the man I sing." Virgil glorified war and the heroic feats of Aeneas on the battlefield. However, Shaw's purpose in this play is to attack the romantic notion of war by presenting a more realistic depiction of war, devoid of the idea that such death and destruction speaks to nobility. Still, "Arms and the Man" is not an anti-war drama, but rather a satirical assault on those who would glorify the horrors or war.

Shaw develops an ironic contrast between two central characters. The play begins with accounts of the glorious exploits of Major Sergius Saranoff, a handsome young Bulgarian officer, in a daring cavalry raid, which turned the war in favor of the Bulgarians over the Serbs. In contrast, Captain Bluntschil, a professional soldier from Switzerland, acts like a coward. He climbs up to a balcony to escape capture, he threatens a woman with a gun, and he carries chocolates rather than cartridges because he claims the sweets are more useful on the battlefield.

In the eyes of Raina Petkoff, the young romantic idealist who has bought into the stories of battlefield heroism, Saranoff is her ideal hero. However, as the play proceeds, we learn more about this raid and that despite its success, it was a suicidal gesture that should have failed. Eventually Saranoff is going to end up dead if he continues to engage in such ridiculous heroics. Meanwhile, we realize that Bluntshcil has no misconceptions about the stupidity of war and that his actions have kept him alive.

"Arms and the Man" is an early play by Shaw, first performed in 1894, the same year he wrote "Mrs. Warren's Profession." The ending is rather tradition for comedies of the time, with all the confusion between the lovers finally getting cleared up and everybody paired up to live happily ever after. The choice of a young woman as the main character, who ultimately rejects her romantic ideals to live in the real world, is perhaps significant because serving in the army and going to war is not going to happen. Consequently, her views are not going to be colored by questions of courage in terms of going to war herself. I also find it interesting that this play understands the horrors of war given that it was the horrors of World War I that generally killed the romantic notion of war in Britain.

A starving, exhausted soldier running for his life bursts into a young woman's room, finds outrage, criticism, solace, chocolate creams, and unexpected love -and that's just the opening scene. This clever, witty, subtle, and surprising treat from the author of Pygmalion still holds up well more than 100 years after its writing. Shaw fashions the subjects of false ideals, heroism, romanticism, and the fake glories of war into a well-constructed farce which sustains through the very last line. Can't wait to see a new production of the play, and a great read meanwhile....

I borrowed this book from the library hoping it would be one of two things: a good book about derivatives or a useful book about programming in Mathematica. It fails as both.

As derivative securities are the apparent "hip thing in finance" every publisher seems to want part of this market. Instead of offering anything of value, there is this mentality of "Wow, here is something new. "Derivatives and xxxx" and they rush to publish. This is where this book fits in, rather like most of the books on C programming.

The first chapter is simply an advertisement for Wolfram's Mathematica. Entirely useless. The second chapter gives you an introduction to Mathematica. Oh boy, it teaches you how to plot a sine curve! It is nothing more than a watered down version of chpt 1 of the mathematica book. The remaining chapters are covered better and in more detail in other books. As far as Mathematica Programming, the author writes "... the use of 'Evaluate' is not strictly necessary; however, it is a good habit to get into using it..." (pg. 154), bad grammar, but more importantly he never gives a good reason as to why 'Evaluate' should be used. But who cares? He showed us how to plot a sine curve.

If you have any type of a marginally sophisticated knowledge of derivative securities this book is an utter bore. It will tell you nothing more than you know already. Really, half the book is just redundant nonsense. Writing the code for a call OR a put in the book is nice. Doing it for both is stupid. Print one and just throw the other on the CD. What does Shaw do? He prints not only both, but also the code for ALL of the Greeks of BOTH calls and puts. Was someone trying to reach a page quota?

The author has a poor command of the written word. There are countless paragraphs that are one sentence long. He refers to himself in both the singular and plural. His programming style is disastrous, the author uses (at least) four different variable names for volatility: the greek letter sigma, sd, v, and sigma (limiting the book's value as a reference text). Also the author switches between conventions in naming functions/variables: there is, i.e., BlackScholesCall[x,z,y...] and done[x,z,y,...], the latter would be better named d1[x,z,y,...] (I am getting at the on-again, off-again use of Caps or '_' and 'done' looks like the English word not d_one).

Finally (and I am nit-picking now), the book is just a printed version of a Mathematica notebook. This means it is hard to read. Displayed equations are not centered and italic offset is not present. Just look at the space between the "d" and the "x" in the "dx". You could fit a truck in-between them. It is very tiresome on the eyes. Anyone use to TeX will get an immediate headache.

In short, be careful with this book. Make sure you preserve the right to return it. Varian's book, "Economic and Financial Modeling..." is better, more interesting, and not nearly as expensive.

The last review (below) made a peculiar point about the manner of treating PDE solutions. I very deliberately wrote low-level code so that people could see exactly how each algorithm performed (e.g. explicit vs CN vs Douglas etc.) This part of the theory is not remotely mature, particularly for the non-smooth data boundary data that arise in derivatives, so that blind use of a high-level PDE solver function is totally inappropriate, and you really have to tear things apart. In contrast the use of built-in functions for analytic solutions make sense, but one has to tear apart numerical solutions for both PDEs and Monte Carlo to see how things work. Perhaps a simpler example will make the point. If you want to just solve a non-linear equation, sure you can use FindRoot, but if you want to understand how solvers work, you have to write lower-level code. The book was trying to make this same point in the context of PDE/Monte Carlo solutions, and Mathematica is an ideal tool for exploring these issues. The treatments of numerical PDEs by most other mainstream authors are generally somewhat naive, though Wilmott has at least made a passing reference to more suitable schemes in his more recent texts. I also do not agree with Gray - better to question and check everything. (Ignore the number of stars I give myself - Amazon does not let you post a comment unless you rate the book!)

If you use Mathematica to analyze options and derivatives, this book and the accompanying CD belongs on your bookshelf. The price is somewhat deceptive because the book includes what is essentially a complete set of option and derivative pricing models implemented in Mathematica. Comparable models implemented in C++ or as Excel DLL's would cost several thousand dollars. I particularly recommend using this book and Dr. Shaw's models to benchmark the results from the models you are currently using, especially if you developed them yourself. Dr. Shaw clearly documents many of the implementation flaws of different numerical implementations of derivative models and has provided an extremely useful reference.

The book was poorly writen, often repeating the same idea multiple times within a paragraph, making the material harder to understand due to sentice structure and unrelated tangents. While this book is required for some classes, if you can get by without it, do so. Perhaps they will write a better one soon.

A new edition will appear in summer 1999. The book has a new publisher, Kendall/Hunt.

the author

It is my good fortune to be in a college program aimed at the adult learner. I had heard much about today's college atmosphere molding many of our young people into politically correct animals and was glad that type of teaching was not reaching me. Unfortunately it found me in a Business Ethics course which uses this book. Messrs Shaw and Barry, in a writing style that is very familiar to me, do a rather unethical job in an attempt to bring you around to their point of view. In the book they cite single sources with assurances that others must feel the same, use the famed, 'many have said' frame of mind, and introduce each chapter with one of societies ills, the entire purpose of which seems only to be to cast a negative light preparing the reader to dislike something that follows. In a specific example, a section on the natural right to property (p 146, 2nd paragraph) in a part of the chapter that is supposed to show the moral justifications of capitalism has a sentence that reads as follows: "Although we are no longer permitted to own other people, we are certainly free to own a variety of other things, from livestock to stock certificates, from our own home to a whole block of apartment buildings." I was so bothered by this one sentence that I had to put the book down for an hour. There were no statements on slavery in the beginning of the chapter and after looking there was nothing that would indicate a disclaimer about not being able to own people in the entire book. Yet here was a statement in a section that was supposed to show the morality of capitalism that gets shot down in the second sentence. If this were the only example of questionable writing in the book I would not have written this review. Another section that was supposed to define capitalism spent more that half the section discussing socialism. Much of this book seems to be designed to incite a person's emotions. As an adult learner it seems silly to me to attempt to coerce my viewpoint in such a manner. My open mind is better reached through logical discussion of facts and views rather than this unethical attempt to work at my underbelly. I'm insulted and disappointed by the attempt. What bothers me more is that other students not my age (33) are being influenced or coerced by material of this type in advanced learning institutions. I'm concerned that these are the types of texts and the professors that teach from them that drive children to throw tofu pies and yell 'shame on you' at officials just for eating meat.

Well, I happen to disagree with previous comment. Not only did I like the course, I also liked the book. It wasn't an easy reading, I got to tell you. Sometimes it took more than one reading and several minutes or reflecting to figure out what the authors were talking about. But in the end it all made sense. And as a bonus the book went into great detail on philosophy, psychology, political science, and economics which I found quite helpful, since as a business major I didn't have a chance to take courses in first three subjects mentioned. The best thing, however, was, that almost a year later in packed Helsinki bar, I was able for about 15 minutes to talk about greatest German and French philosophers - all about them I learned from this book.