Aside from the illustrations, I don't find much to recommend this book. There are no commentaries about the making of Wayne's films, no discussion of Wayne's working methods, no critical analysis, and nothing about the films' financial impact in the theaters. No character names are included in the cast lists, so they are basically useless in finding out who played who. Much of the information is inacturate. In the introduction the authors state that in his early days Wayne appeared in several Ham Hamilton comedies, but no such films appear in the main body of the book (in fact, I've never heard of a screen comedian named Ham Hamilton, although there was an animator by that name working for Walt Disney at the time). The plot synopis to many of the films are incorrect, listing wrong character names and describing incidents that don't happen in the film. And I'm still trying to figure out why Ward Bond is listed twice in the cast list of DAKOTA. There's a really great blooper in the write-up to CHISUM: The authors state that the true-life characters of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid are included in the story and that Garrett is gunned down by Billy! Say what? (No, this doesn't actually occur in the film.) Oh, yes, if this book is the "complete" films of John Wayne, then why isn't COLLEGE COACH (1933) included?

My final verdict: Skip this book and seek out a copy of Allen Eyles' far superior (and, unfortunately, now out-of-print) book JOHN WAYNE AND THE MOVIES (re-issued as simply JOHN WAYNE).

If you are looking for John Wayne films this is the book to have. It tells what the film is about, who also starred in and what year it was made. It also has plenty of photos to help you recognize what movie it is and if it is the one you are looking for. The book has some interesting facts about some of the movies.

The real testimony to the value of a resource is whether it occupies eternal space on your shelf, gathering dust, or if it becomes so worn out that it bears replacement. I have dogearred, destroyed, or otherwise "used up" two complete paperback copies of TCFOJW over the past twelve years since it first appeared. It was not until the last replacement that I finally relinquished and went to a hardback copy. This book is an indespensable (if not exhaustive) resource for any serious John Wayne film buff. My only complaints (and, subsequently, suggestions for future revisions) are that the cast and tech lists are not complete; and that Wayne's appearences on radio and television are not documented. Another helpful feature would be to show which films are available in video and letterbox formats. You need this book

This is not worth anything close to the price that I, unfortuneately paid for it. Unless, of course, you love reading the kind of thing academics love to write to impress other academics and relatives. I cannot begin to tell you how so far off the mark everything in this book is. Suffice it say, it is not an encyclopedia of creativity. It is a collection of accademic papers which rehash the same old things. One has to wonder if any of the contributors have ever read any of the classic books on creativity that are out there. They, I think, could learn a lot.

Wonderful work. Comprehensive and varied. It is "Academic," for the most part, but NOT highly technical. Best of all it has articles by everyone who is anyone in the field. All of the major figures in this field contributed. Not light reading, but if you want to know what the experts say, this is the book.

This is an essential set of books for people who are seriously interested in learning what is known about creativity today. The writers are academics who have spent many years investigating and writing about creativity. They carefully avoid "you can do it" cheerleader type material based on half-baked ideas and unproven notions.

That said, some of the entries could be clearer and better written. Nevertheless, I found many inspirational ideas and resources from both a personal and business perspective.

Against Design is the title of a thematic exhibition (February 4 - April 16, 2000) that brought together an international group of ten younger artists whose work consciously blurs the boundaries between art, architecture and design, environmental installation and interior décor. The artists were: Kevin Appel (Los Angeles); Angela Bulloch (Great Britain); Clay Ketter (Sweden); Roy McMakin (Los Angeles); Jorge Pardo (Los Angeles); Tobias Rehberger (Germany); Joe Scanlan (Chicago); Joep van Lieshout (the Netherlands); Pae White (Los Angeles); and Andrea Zittel (New York/Los Angeles). The "against" in the exhibition's title means alongside, not in opposition. The art, which includes an oversized vehicle, room-sized sets of furniture and large-scale images, draws from minimalism and formalism, along with industrial design from the 1920s to 1960s. Against Design took place at Institute of Contemporary Art (University of Pennsylvania) and at Museum of Contemporary Art - La Jolla.

Although not as scholarly and thorough as Steven Foster's book on Echinacea, this book is a good introduction to Echinacea.

This book covers a lot of territory and hikes, and it gives good directions on how to get to the hikes and how to follow the trail, but I was disappointed. Although it's 258 pages long, it does not provide a whole lot of background information on what you are going to see on the hike--just where to turn left or right, etc. How about what I'm going to see other that just say "there is an overlook?" What kind of overlook? What am I going to see? There are quick mentions of a few plants and animals that may be seen, but certainly no background on them to help me identify them or know about their natural history. Very little, if any, mention of human history is provided.

The contents shows 70 hikes, but as you look through the book you find multiple hikes in several areas that could have been identified as just one longer hike. In all it identifies 46 sites to take hikes in.

It is a nice book to direct you to some good hikes in WV, but don't expect much more than that.

I like sci-fi, and I love time travel stories, but ...

With all the flaws tmm2112 noted, I can't believe he still gave 4 stars! I won't reiterate - check tmm's review! I will add that the digressions tmm cited were provided at the expense of key scenes of the story! He expounded on the theory of time travel, then skipped the whole experience!

Worst of all for me was the hideous overuse of the exclamation point! It was painful at first - now I'm afraid I am inured and that it will take several (edited) books before I will again notice the difference between a statement and an exclamatory!

And was that an ending, or was the author interrupted before completing this tale?!

It could have been, if it had an editor to hold the author's feet to the fire. The problem with self-published books like this one, there isn't anyone to tell the author to take this out or expand on the other bit. This could have been a great book, if someone had done so.

A time travel story in which the hero discovers the method to returning to the past, and does so in order to save his grandmother from a fatal genetic disorder. So far, so good.

Burgauer is an excellent writer, his dialog is crisp, his charecters are reasonably believable. But then, despite the superb writing, the whole book is dragged down by its flaws.

The story repeatedly screeches to a halt while Burgauer uses page after page to go off on a tangent, usally in the form of an essay plugged into the body of the story. First, when the hero finds the time travel technique, we have 12 pages of exposition, including charts, on how to do it. Just as dull as it sounds. Six pages about the science of poker, which didn't contribute anything to the story. It was followed by a couple of pages that basically just said "Using her telepathy, the women from the future made a killing in poker". Later, after the hero gets involved in the American Civil War, 18 pages about the Battle of Shiloh, including maps, with nary a mention of our fictional charecters. Now, I'm even a bit of a Civil War buff, but if I wanted this, I'd just go read Shelby Foote. No matter how well paced a book is otherwise, digressions like these just stop the narrative flow dead.

Other flaws. The depiction of Samuel Clemens, an important part of the last part of the book. The majority of Clemens' dialog seems to have been cut-and-pasted from his "Life on the Mississippi" and "Roughing It". Burgauer demonstrated in the rest of the book he could write good dialog, I do think he could have put something more original in the voice of Mark Twain for the story. A faintly ridiculous sex scene, basically beautiful female triplets who have never seen a male before our hero... Future villians drawn as the kind of bigoted buffoons you expect to find in the KKK.

If only a good editor had gotten ahold of this book, slashed the chaff away without mercy, browbeat Burgauer into expanding on the interplay between the two main charecters and everyone else, and maybe made the future bad guys a little less two dimensional. This book might have been a contender for an award.

A fun read
by tmm2112 Jul 28 '02 (Updated Jul 29 '02)

Pros: A fun time/space travel romp with dashes of American history thrown in
Cons: Too wordy in places, too little info in others

The Bottom Line: If you like light-hearted SF space travel and time travel stories, read it.

Recommended: Yes

This was my first time to read a book by Steven Burgauer, and it was not a disappointment. Long a fan of science fiction and historical fiction, I found this book to satisfy both desires. Steven clearly has a good grasp of space travel and time travel theories and puts them to good use as his protagonists traverse the galaxy and the time stream to reach their goals.

This is not a cyberpunk novel. You'll find no computer controlled society of people with cybernetic implants. No Matrix and no Terminators. It's more reminiscent of SF from the 60's and 70's, light-hearted with adventure and fun at its core.

The protagonist is Andu, a former Afghan freedom fighter and spaceship propulsion inventor who has a dark family secret; there's a defect in his DNA that has befuddled even modern (25th century) medical science. So his only hope is to travel back in time and retrieve a donor in his family line who does not have the defect. Would you believe he has to travel all the way back to the American Civil War? But wait a minute, even in the 25th century, time travel is only a theory. No one's ever actually done it. But the theory was developed by a rebellious religious faction who migrated away from earth long ago. Who were they? Why, the Mormons, of course. Only, they got lost in space and have never been heard from since, and the secret to time travel was lost with them.

The title is slightly misleading, if you are familiar with the term "the grandfather paradox" as it relates to time travel. It implies that the paradox plays a significant role in the story and it does not. It does not detract from this rousing tale, but I would have recommended a title emphasizing the role of the missing gene or the Tachyon Drive.

Andu is a survivor and encounters obstacles from crew members, aliens, nature and his own heart to complete his mission. We don't meet his main companion until almost halfway through the book, but once we do the chemistry is fantastic. The book strikes a nice balance between characterization and action. The surreal nature of the adventure itself and some of the creatures Andu encounters along the way give the book a feel not unlike the work of Piers Anthony in some of his older SF work (Macroscope, Cthon and Orn). But the detailed discussions of time travel theory and gravity wells (complete with graphs) better resemble the hard science fiction of Isaac Asimov. The juxtaposition of the two styles is curiously entertaining which gave me the feel of wild adventure and a physics lesson in the same book.

One of the two faults the novel has is the extraneous exposition Steven divulges at times. The appearance of a young Sam Clemens is charming, that is until he's told you one too many of his tall tales and expounded on the human condition a little too often. And their ultimate clash with the American Civil War was tastefully handled except for the vast amount of detail Steven indulges in. Most of this exposition was at a birds eye view to the reader and did not directly affect the protagonist. Though it was clear that Steven knows a little about the Civil War, perhaps a better place to demonstrate it would be in a true historical fiction tale based in that era. And I would be glad to give it a try.

Some plot details were strangely missing or glossed over with the wave of a hand. The characters get from point A to point B with the simple turning of a page. These missing plot steps would have been more interesting to read than the many pages of war maneuvers by Union and Rebel troops that I did read. I also found the ending to be particularly abrupt and unsatisfying. There should have been numerous questions raised by their sudden appearance

Overall I enjoyed the book and will probably read another work of his. It was a good SF romp through time and space in the tradition of Isaac Asimov and Piers Anthony.
Mark
Columbus, MS

I picked up a used set of Extreme Management (book and audio) at a flea market. I should have saved my dollar. The book was laborious reading, bordering on pontification, so I tried the tape. What a mistake. If the amateurish and combative writing style was bad in print, the voice used on the tape made things exponentially worse - a classic case of really bad writing getting worse.

Here's the quick scoop:
1. I checked with Harvard and they did NOT authorize this book.
2. The author did NOT attend the classes he wrote about.
3. The writing style is very reminiscent of pre-canned smoke-and-mirrors business-speak...much verbosity, little content.
4. The author sounds positively angry about something.
5. I was angry, too, only because I wasted a dollar on this junk.

I agree with the jist of almost every reviewer on this page, especially Publisher's Weekly and AudioFile. I should have read the reviews on this site first. Oh well, it was only a buck.

The title was a little over stated. As a business student myself, all of the enclosed information was positive reenforcemnet for what I had already learned and a little more! Some of the quotes in the text were reassuring to the reader of a point well explained. although some of the points explained in the text were over explained and it became "dry" reading after awhile. The author had good usage of business terms, but lacked other examples other then that from Harvard Business school.

The text was by far an ad for the Advanced Management Program and Harvard Business school. It also touched slightly on management from a global arena, when most would know that all businesses are likely to go global. So more information is needed for a non-AMP student to learn how to manage in a global market.

Overall the book was informational, but could not be used as the only form of education for potential managers. Not everyone can afford to go to Harvard, but any business school would be better then just reading this book. Because business school can explain these points better and with more content then the book did.

Poor ratings and skewed reviews by others prompted me to write this review to provide objective information for knowledge seekers.

In my view it is a good book considering the price i paid, reading time, breadth of topics, simplicity and few good examples of how high level concepts could be translated into actions. I felt like spending few hours in the company of professors and executives, what they shared made sense to me and made me collect their words as jewels. Where else could one find synthesized knowledge from people like Michael Porter, Fruhan and other renowned scholars within 190/200 pages? I liked the simple manner in which DuPont and other fundamental financial management concepts are explained. I wouldn't mind recommending it to anyone for casual reading during a 3hr flight. Indeed it is not a text book, should not be taken seriously and may not be permanent part of your collection. The book is NOT for technical person who likes to live in details, nor for one who tends to seek ready-made solutions, nor for one who is interested in structured learning or pursuing graduate degree in management. One finds elements of inspiration and motivation to act, hallmark of good books. The stuff about Harvard or text on cover is more of marketing gimmick but nowhere author claims school endorses his book. There is a clear statement to that fact so don't know what caused the confusion written in other reviews. What matters is that the interviews, wisdom and thought process shared by people is original and real.... writer did not make up those 7 OFP points or market competition strategies. Don't expect a book could make you good manager or reveal secrets of success - there is no formula book.

Bottomline, professors who are Harvard's brain and their executive students from Fortune500/Global2000, .....talk to you in this book. It does not matter whether the book is endorsed by the school or if the writer himself attended the AMP program.....knowledge shouldn't have strings attached to it.

This is a 114 page book that could've easily been written in a third of the space. It took only 20 minutes to read. It is badly edited, with several typos and bad internal references. A good deal of the information in it is out of date, and there is very little technical information at all. It seems to be a small expansion of a magazine article written for purchasing people. It is addressed to senior management, but I don't know of any senior management who would listen to the hype. It would be a good book to give a senior management person whom you don't like, but wants to know something about EDI.