This book is very well organized and easy to read. It is full of useful alternatives to the standard treatment alternatives taught in school. Clear drawings, cited resources and abundant numerical data make utilizing the material in this book very straight forward.

I enjoyed all four books in the series. It was very informative in my research to understand what happened in Sweden in the 1800's, and why people left there to come to America.

This book is a good staring point for decision making process advocating System Thinking rather than modeling a few of its subsystems.

Among the tools discussed with good applications are:

- Double-Q Diagram: Similar to Fishbone diagrams

- Behavior Over Time Diagram

- Causal Loop Diagrams

- System Archetypes

- Graphical Function Diagram

- Structure Behavior Pairs

- Policy Structure Diagram

- Computer Model

- Management Flight Simulator

- Learning Laboratory.

Clearly, depending on the system under study one must have enough experience on selecting one or some combination of the above tools to be effective in systems analysis, design, and control.

While reading this booklet, one can only chuckle with the memories of "the night we've waited for" all our high school lives. Stein and Mailliard also took the liberty of compiling samples of proms as shown through the film and television. (What a great touch)

I will be bringing my copy of "Tales of the Prom" to my next High School reunion.

It's an unfortunate fact of our educational system that students are often required to write original poetry without ever being taught what poetry is all about. This book is an excellent introduction to the art of reading and writing poems. The author begins by introducing four basic components of poetry: sound, imagery, structure, and meaning. He then devotes a chapter to each of these four elements, using well-chosen examples from poets both famous and not-so-famous. Readers are encouraged to "talk back" to the poems by writing original poetry that reflects one or more of the techniques--rhyme scheme, structure, imagery, etc.--demonstrated by the examples in the chapter. A sizable glossary is provided for readers who wish further to enhance their understanding of the poetic devices described in the text. The author states that this book is meant to function as a classroom: It is a classroom well worth visiting.

While I am just an amateur scientist at best, and Poenar is writing to a professional audience, I still found the book very exciting. Poenar presents a cogent overview of the basic science and then a well-reasoned argument for the adoption of his invention. This was his PhD disssertation in 1996, and I am surprised to see relatively little attention to his ideas since.

(By the way the American reader might have some slight difficulties with his idiosyncratic European notation.)

The author has take a simple, self-evident concept and reshaped it with refreshing insight and clarity. If adopted and embraced by business and political leaders, Tagliere's views potentially could result in far more progress than we've seen in solving the world's problems. He has a verbal knack for converting the mundane into philosophical wisdom. The book is rife with strategies and processes that can be applied with relative ease and success. A useful primer for anyone in management or organizational leadership.

Daniel Kemmis, the author of this thoughtful boook, is the director of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana and formerly served as the mayor of Missoula Montana. He describes himself early in the book as a democrat with a capital "D". However he makes proposals for local control of management decisions on Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management Lands in the Western States that are ordinarily associated with Republican or conservative positions.

The focus of the book is the "interior west" consisting of the states of Arizona, Colorado, Idaho,Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming. These states are charcterized by rugged terrain, a lack of water, sparse population, an abundance of timber and extractive resources and a high percentage of Federally owned land. Kemmis argues that it is no longer good policy for these lands to be managed under the current confusing Federal statutory regime. He argues for collaboration among westerners and involved users to determine the best ways for the West to manage its lands.

Much the best part of this book, for me, was the historical perspective Kemmis brings to his study. He writes perceptively and well about Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Rossevelt's important but conflicting visions about the American West. Jefferson, an expansionist in spite of himself, was fascinated with nature but viewd the West as a buffer for National security and as a component of his vision of an America consisting of small yeomen. Roosevelt too was an expansionist but saw the need of tight Federal control of the West and its resources to protect them for future generations. Current policy is an uneasy mix of Jeffersonian and Rooseveltian ideas.

There is also a good, if brief, discussion of the Lincoln-Douglas debates and how the different visions of these two men played out over time on issues of local versus national control. I found it creative.

Kemmis arguues that the West has attained a great deal of sopistication (maturation) since Theodore Roosevelt's days and should be allowed a greater voice in the management of its (the United States') resources. He maintains that the Federal govenment is increasingly distant from the concerns of the West, and that the current Federal management regime is inconsistent with basic Jeffersonian democracy -- the people managing the resources of concern to them and thus taking a greater control of their own lives. He argues that Federal statutes and administrative officials are almost uniformly well-intentioned but that the West is too caught in the politics of Washington D.C., resulting in dissatisfaction by those in the region regardless of their other political commitments.

In advocating for "collaborationism", Kemmis is aware of the policy (and law) requring public participation in land use decisions. He argues that people are reluctant to collaborate when they know that decisionmakers in Washington D.C. will have the ultimate say over the management of their lands.

This is a costructive book with many interesing things to say. As I noted, its strength is that it is historically well-informed. The weakness of the book is that it is short, overly anectdotal, and not entirely convincing in its claim that the Federal government is an intruder in the management of these lands. They are Federally owned, after all, to be used for the benefit of the American people. Less philosophically, I don't think Kemmis is convincing in showing the local control would result in more satisfactory and communally acceptable decision making. It would simply put the issues back on a local level where they are now in large part anyway.

Even though the conclusions are debatable, Kemmis's book is a valuable study of public lands management in the American West and how lands management ties in with our Nation's democratic (small "d") vision.

Thats a very nice book, made by people that really understand what they are showing in this book. If you are interessed in Thoracoscopic Spine Surgery, thats the book you need. It is a broad view of a new topic, with good text and nice pictures and drawings; the video is also essential.

Daniel Ellis was a Unionist East Tennessean during the Civil War. An exiled fugitive for participating in bridge burning, he took to guiding escaped prisoners, southern deserters, slaves, and all manner of refugees through the mountains to the Union lines. He eventually became captain of Company A in the 13th Regiment, Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry, U.S.A.

"Thrilling Adventures" is Ellis' memoir, recounting the brutal hardships he had to endure during his years on the run. Written shortly after the war, it is tainted by his still-burning fury toward the Confederacy. The book has been criticized for perceived exaggerations, but its true excesses are in its narrative style, full of classical allusions and long-winded melodrama -- elements long since gone out of fashion.

Given its faults in narrative and Ellis' understandable lack of objectivity, the book is an accurate account of life in southern Appalachia during the Civil War. The region in that era is receiving increasing attention, most notably in Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain (which acknowledges Ellis' Thrilling Adventures) and Cameron Judd's Mountain War trilogy...