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The "Working Papers" (a separate workbook) makes doing the assigned problems easy by providing a ready-made template for each problem. If you've had to draw your own T-accounts or your own journal in a notebook before, you will definitely appreciate this.
This text serves as a good introduction to the skills necessary to master financial accounting.
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The book is divided into chapters that cover each day from 2-8 October 1918, with events arranged chronologically. Edward M. Coffin, a modern-day historian at the University of Wisconsin who arranged for the work to be re-printed, provides a short effortless forward. There are several photographs and a few totally inadequate maps that supplement the text, but only weakly. Unfortunately, Mr. Coffman made little effort to update or augment the original narrative and while the story flows smoothly, a lazy and jingoistic style might annoy after awhile. The authors are comfortable with using non-words like "ploying," or "funk-hole" [i.e. foxhole] and attacks that "corkscrew (the soldiers twirl around while advancing?).
Readers expect a hero may be perplexed by Major Whittlesey. Initially, the Harvard-educated lawyer seems comparable to Joshua Chamberlain, the soldier-scholar who won the Medal of Honor at Little Round Top in 1863. Certainly this book paints Whittlesey as a man devoted to duty, who was the only battalion commander to reach his objective and then refused to be budged off by repeated German counterattacks. While Whittlesey demonstrated determination and obstinacy, his actual command abilities are less certain because there were few decisions for him to make after his initial un-opposed occupation of the objective. Thereafter, Whittlesey's role became rather passive - encouraging resistance and vigilance - but not making any critical decisions. Furthermore, Whittlesey's post-war suicide three years later compared poorly with Chamberlain who went on to live a long, productive post-war life. The author's allude to Whittlesey's post-war guilt, particularly sentiments he expressed that his unit's sacrifices served no useful purpose. If this was so, then why did Whittlesey not retreat before the German ring closed around his unit? Having been ordered not to give up ground without direct orders from the division commander, Whittlesey was content to await rescue, but he demonstrated little initiative or imagination. Certainly Whittlesey 's actions merited a Medal of Honor, but the accusations that the price of two virtually destroyed battalions was hardly worth the moral victory that was achieved bears consideration. Apparently Whittlesey himself doubted the value of this sacrifice. Given the inability of Whittlesey to live with the decisions he made and the losses his unit suffered, it is also possible that Whittlesey was fundamentally un-suited to making the kind of life-or-death decisions required of a combat leader. While some of these questions are addressed in the book, the reader should recognize that important questions about combat ethics and psychology have been given short-shrift in the interest of story-telling.
Certainly one of the most interesting aspects of the book is the perspective provided from the German side. The authors were able to obtain interviews with many of the Germans who fought against the Lost Battalion and their side of the story indicates that desperation was not unique to Whittlesey's intrepid band of doughboys. In fact, the German front was beginning to crumble and they never had sufficient reserves to crush Whittlesey. Indeed, while German attacks were constant, the worst damage to the Lost Battalion was done by friendly artillery fire and hunger. One odd omission in this account is that the author's fail to mention that Corporal Alvin C. York of the 82nd Division won his Medal of Honor in the attempt to relieve the Lost Battalion.
Modern readers should also recognize the subtle anti-military bias, common to America in the 1930s, which pervades these pages. The authors want to honor these men as heroes, but not as soldiers. In trying to put the Lost Battalion incident in perspective, the author's conclude, "that the men of the 77th Division lacked not for courage, intelligence, patriotism or any other fundamental quality, but simply that they were poorly trained and insufficiently experienced. Seen from this angle the ultimate responsibility rests on the Washington authorities who sent such soldiers to a major war, and the lesson is that democracies should not engage in mass wars, for when they seek a universal competence they tend to lose democracy." This pro-isolationist hogwash asserts that despite the heroism of soldiers such as Whittlesey, military effort and preparedness fundamentally threatens and debases democracy. In fact, the lesson of Whittlesey and Alvin C York should be that democracies can produce soldiers every bit as good as totalitarian states, but without the need for militarized cultures. Unfortunately, America's enemies also failed to note our ability to produce heroes such as Whittlesey and York and instead perceived the United States as soft and unwilling to sacrifice. Three years after the Lost Battalion was published, the Axis powers demonstrated what happens to democracies that eschew military preparedness.
The story is grand. It's filled with heroism, cowardice, triumph and tragedy.
Now, on to the history. While the story is a great read and very good supporting documentation comes with the book. Sometimes the story telling gets in the way of the history. Also, the author's didn't explain the physical location of the events well enough to visualize and the pictures provided are, while interesting, unhelpful. These are the only things preventing this from being a 5.
It's interesting that the sort "cauldron" battle that takes place is similar to the one that the Germans one on the Eastern Front, Tannenburg. It also brings into mind all the cauldron battles that were to take place during WWII. It's a shame these authors didn't write this book after that war, just to see if they compared and contrasted the different events.
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O'Boyle identifies some of the unpaid bills, including:
1) The human cost of GE's massive layoffs througout the 1980's. Welch embraced and greatly popularized the "layoff" approach to business: lay off bodies, save money, show more profit. But for every dollar the company profited, others lost. Much of the cost of the layoffs fell on individuals, families and communities that saw jobs at US-based GE operations vanish. This caused untold hardship to both families and governments, which had to rebuild shattered lives and communities. Not all survived, literally.
2) Welch took a rich and deep GE culture of research and development into technological fields, and utterly gutted it. GE's R&D abilities formerly covered a spectrum from steam turbines to appliances to jet engines to railway locomotives. Under Welch, GE's R&D arm became so weak and atrophied that the company's product lines lost the once commanding technological lead they formerly enjoyed. The company's future is betrayed. (Not satisfied with merely gutting GE's R&D, Welch purchased RCA and stripped its assets as well. Only NBC television remains in the GE fold as a major, former-RCA asset. Shockingly, NBC spends more each year to broadcast basketball games than GE spends on R&D. It is so sad, when you think that the only man-made object ever to leave the solar system, Voyager spacecraft, carries a camera that bears the RCA logo.)
3) GE's continuing failure to clean up the PCB's and radioactivity it has left behind in its numerous manufacturing operations; while at the same time making a business unit out of cleaning up PCB's and other pollution for other customers. The unpaid bills also do not include the people who remain afflicted with industrial illnesses from their exposure to chemicals in the GE workplaces over the years.
These are just a few of the topics. The book is profound, and will shock the unitiated. O'Boyle is a historian of American industrial history. He takes the reader on a trip through time, from the laboratories of Edison; to the early workshops of Ford; to the mills of Carnegie; to Tom Watson's IBM; to Rickover's nuclear navy; and so much more.
O'Boyle spent eleven years with the Wall Street Journal, and he knows how to dig out the story and tell it in the best journalistic style. Also, as the notes reveal, O'Boyle has met and talked with many of the luminaries and leaders of American and European industry of this era. O'Boyle has captured the essence of an American tragedy, which was GE's abandonment of its research-oriented, manufacturing legacy to satisfy the ego of one man.
Jack Welch started at GE selling plastics, and he has become his own product. It seems that Jack Welch, who came into control of one of the nation's greatest industrial enterprises, really wanted only to run a credit card company as his life's ambition. Today he has his wish, but the nation has lost.
Although O'Boyle closes his book speaking of Welch and GE in the past tense, I believe that his objective is to help. If O'Boyle and Welch haven't, I urge these Irish-Catholic gentlemen to read "The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism" by Michael Novak, a leading Catholic theologian. I am not a student of such matters, but Novak's and O'Boyle's books arrived on my bedstand almost simultaneously as result of absolutely unrelated activities. The possibility that this confluence of books was ordained prompts me to share my observations.
Very unhappy Customer
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