This text provides a quick, concise review of the pimary topics covered on emergency medicine exams. I found it to be a good way to prepare for inservice exams and the written boards.

The history of the Coca Cola Santa is wonderful and the pictures are of good quality. The Pictures are in most cases full page. If you are a Santa or Coca Cola collector this would be a good addition to your collection.

I bought this book after it was reviewed in "The New Scientist" and I certainly wasn't dissapointed. It's very well organised and even though quite thin, it covers everything in requisite depth. For e.g. he does a great job on explaining the origin of the currently used scales etc.

In late 1698, four ships sailed from France under the command of Pierre le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville.Aboard were some two hundred people destined to become the first settlers of a French post in the lower Mississippi River. Iberville landed first at Dauphin Island near modern Mobile, then moved further East to Ship Island. Sailing up to the great River Iberville visited with the bayou goula Indians on the west bank. Rene Robert cavalier Sieur de la Salle who were a wealthy important immigrant to Canada who heard of the voyage of Marqette and Joliet and comprehended the strategic significance of a fort at the mouth of Mississippi. During the winter of 1682, La Salle led an expedition of fifty-six persons, including ten indians women and three children down the Mississippi to its mouth.He reached salt water on April 6, placed a cross in the mud and claimed the Country for France. He gave the name of Louisiana, in honor of king Louis XIV. That's was the basis for France's claim to Louisiana,though the Spanish Explorer Hernando De Soto had discover the Mississippi and crossed it 140 years earlier. Louisiana was a French-Speaking Spanish colony when the nineteenth century began. Twelve years later Loisiana was one of the United States, successfully operating a system of goverment radically different from the autocracy tempered by ineffiency that had gone before.

This book came out in 1987, so it needn't explain why the Russians and Americans are still duking it out. The book follows form that would be done to death in Dale Brown novels - an American technological breakthrough coincides with some aggressive move by the Soviets.

In this case, the Soviets close off the arctic waters off Norway, turning it into a Russians bathtub. The yanks strike back with the "Imperator", a gigantic submarine the size of an aircraft carrier (and I don't think they meant the small fleet carriers of WWII, frequent models for the soviet Typhoon class). Big enough to carry a fairly sized infranty team and their attack helicopter, the Imperator is designed to break through the Russian blockade. The Russians respond by sending in their top submarine skipper, and a wolfpack of their top subs (the inner cover of the paperback ed. had a great picture of a raging sub-sea battle, with the titanic US sub firing torpedoes in every direction, burning the ocean with flaming Soviet submarines). Nevertheless, the Imperator pretty much outclasses anything the Russians throw at it. A revolutionary computer called "Ceasar" can knock Bear bombers out of the sky or pick off incoming torpedoes.

This was a great book for its time. The technological aspects of the story are pretty vague (we get little sense of what the sub can do before called upon to do it; it's like the author is making the sub a more powerful ship as the story progresses), and I'm not sure what the point is of sending a mammoth sub to carrya few troops into Norway - how big can the sub be and still carry a meanigful number of troops? The bigger problem of the story is how heavily it relies on its high-tech: the guidance of torpedoes and the nearly foolproof computer that runs Imperator. This is a problem because much of the book's action is driven by weaponry on automatic and thus independent of human control. Torpedoes are launched and track their targets or are spoofed by countermeaures. Ceasar detects a threat and lashed out with a blue-laser or something else. Weapons either do what they're designed to, or they fail. It's almost like the humans (or any characters) don't belong in the book at all.

That's actually odd considering how the story appears unusually sympathetic to its characters - American and Russian. The Russian submarine commander is actually the most sympathetic in the book, otherwise bereft of the fiercely dogmatic communists of similar late 1980's books. The characters would be great if Taylor could somehow make them both deep characters and warriors. Instead, the war runs on autopilot, giving the characters really little to do. If "Hunter" excels at anything, it's a reminder that thrillers about submarines should keep their settings in their submarines. Because submarines are scary mostly because you can't just step out of one, an authentic thriller must highlight that sense of being trapped inside. "Hunter" highlights this by keeping its settings confined to the submarines involved - and not losing its focus by tangenting back to some Pentagon situation room, complete with inter-service rivalry and liberal politicians. In short, if nothing in this yarn will exactly grab you, it at least holds you for a very long time.

When they read accounts of western near-death experience to the Dalai Lama all he had to say was that he didn't believe them because the people who experienced them reported being greeted by dead relatives and dead relatives "would have to have taken rebirth in some realm long before." He went on to say that this was "only barely possible." He didn't claim to have any firsthand knowledge of this whatsoever, and in fact when once asked if he could point to anyone he actually knew who had attained enlightenment all he could say was: "There MAY be someone in caves somewhere."

He also didn't buy that the light people see in near death experiences was the same as the "clear light of the void." He politely only said they could be considered "analagous" or something of that sort. And when asked in this book to point to even just very advanced meditators who could go into the "clear light" at will, he only said it would be very difficult because "they are all so scattered" and also that such people are uncooperative because they are "stubborn."

So, honestly, at this point one might as well be talking with the Pope or a methodist minister in the sense that here is someone with a belief system who never seriously questions it. In other words, his belief system is "gospel" which is of course a way of saying it's beyond question. Ok, everyone get angry at me, because I'm asking if we in the west haven't overrated the tibetans because of their huge reputation for esoteric knowledge bestowed on them by such questionable people as Madam Blavatsky and Gurdjieff. Thankyou and I apologize to those of you who are now angry because I have questioned the unquestionable.

Several moderm day researchers spend a week with the Dalia Lama and discuss the topics of the books title. The material delivered from the Dalai Lama himself is the best part of this book.

Can you imagine a conversation about the essence of art taking place between, oh, say, Picasso and art therapists who treat mental patients, and some chemists who concoct formulaes for oil paints? Something like that is taking place here. The title alone is enough to pique your interest, but the content is less than secret-divulging. If you're not a neurologist,or a specialist in a related area,then much of the material presented by the neurologist will be for all practical purposes useless. If you're not familiar with the basic assumptions of esoteric buddhist psychology, then much of what HH Dalai Lama has to say will sound like so much dogma or articles of faith. I know next to nothing about brain sciences, but am academically acquainted with the buddhist conception of reality, so I found what the Dalai Lama had to say both interesting and amusing. Interesting, because he speaks as plainly as he can about things that are usually wrapped in some hairy buddhist language. Amusing, becuase the Dalai Lama would show utmost courtesy in listening to all the dry academic presentations, which even I found somewhat tedious, and then offer his views about the matter at hand by often beginning with what sounds like a gentle correction rather than a positing of difference of perspective only. I paraphrase from memory: "Well, your numbers and theories are all very nice, but no, it's actually like this." Some of the discussions on REM, and animal responses to dream states are interesting, but just merely interesting. Better on the Discovery channel. Much of the philosopher Charles Taylor's presentations concerning the Western/Christian conception of the Self is reliable but elementary. And dealing with the subject matter at hand, even an eminent philosopher can do only so much with Ratio alone. The book is of some value if one is willing to be open to the possibility that the Dalai Lama may be speaking of things that are real but not measurable, at least not with knobs and dials. Not yet. He never mentions it specifically in the book, but the idea of rebirth and the attendant conditions are indirectly there, for example when he questions the authenticity of the phenomenon of seeing one's departed ones in a near-death experience. He says, "Maybe the person is hallucinating at that point or projecting a wish. They (the loved ones who departed long ago) would have found new bodies by then." Taken as an record of an encounter with the Dalai Lama, this book sheds some light into that aspect of the man that won't show up when he is on Larry King or speaking of compassion to the multitude in Central Park. The guy is a professional in his own field, after all, and he knows his chops. Here, refreshingly enough, he sheds some of his avuncular "hey, be cool, people!" image and divulges some of his professional knowledge at a speed and intensity of delivery considerably higher than the mass media have shown him to be capable.

For the beginner this is a decent INTRODUCTION to water gardens but it is loaded with inconsistencies, lacks definitions (a glossary), is illogical in many places and left me frustrated many times trying to understand the basic stuff. Again a decent introduction to water gardening but the serious "gardener" would be well advised to look to other sources.

lots of great tips in here for a beginner. this helped me out a lot

Excellent guide that I highly recommend. This is well organized, clear, complete and is very well illustrated. This is an excellent book on water gardening that will be particularly helpful to beginners, but also contains interesting and creative ideas for the more experienced water gardener.

Seeking enlightenment? Seek somewhere else? This "update" to the classic is a classic waste of time. Unlike the original, you will give it to your library to write it off on your taxes.

This book is a collection of a series of lectures Charles Taylor gave reflecting on the legacy of William James. In thinking about James' work, Taylor reflects on the tensions between private religous experience and public religious expression; the problem of belief and unbelief; and the implications our religious beliefs have for our political organization. It is almost impossible to do justice to the richness of Taylor's thought in a short review.

Taylor's first task is to situate James within his own religious context. James inherited the strand of religious belief that was quintessentially Protestant -- with an emphasis on private feeling as against public expression. For James, the ultimate religious experience is private and fundamentally individual. This precludes James from fully grasping the types of religious expression that are more communally-based.

Taylor's second task is to reflect on James personal struggle with the question of belief and unbelief. In James' day a strong argument was being made that religious belief is intellectually dishonest. Taylor offers a good summary of James' defense of belief as a viable choice.

Finally, Taylor integrates James' thought with the question of how our religious belief interacts with our political structures. Taylor offers an invaluable historical narrative of the variety of relationships between religion and state that we have seen in the past. In doing so, he makes our current dilemmas much clearer. We are moving from a country that has a broad consensus in some sort of belief, but which allows individuals to join whatever church best gives expression to that experience, to a country in which there is no such broad consensus. If there is no shared understanding of the sacred, we are forced to ground our political structures in the purely human. It is not yet clear whether the new project will succeed, but in his reflections on the tensions between belief and unbelief and their relationship to our political organization, Taylor can only enhance our discussions as we move forward into this virgin territory.

Taylor's book does presume that the reader has a fairly sophisticated historical sense. And he often makes reference to the situation in France, which can be a bit opaque to those who lack a basic familiarity with French culture. Indeed, he often quotes from French writers without offering a translation. Still, the book offers valuable insights, even to those without the background to fully grasp everything he writes.

A real strength of this book is its broad scope; both in range of species, and in wide range geographically. Within a few pages there will pictures of the vulturine guinea fowl, the white-breasted nuthatch, and a red-throated diver (loon). The pictures are spectacular, whether it is wandering albatross courtship, an upside-down emperor bird-of-paradise, or a common bee-eater offering his mate a dragonfly. A minor annoyance is that the location of the species pictured is not usually listed. The text covers a wide range of species, and focuses on describing the behavior, but not allot of deeper evolutionary discussion. Some researcher names are mentioned, but there are no citations or sources for further reading. I think the book might be considered an informative, coffee-table book.

This book is 238 pages and includes many black and white photographs. A chronology of the Second World War is also included for reference. The regiments included are The King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, The East Riding Yeomanry, The York and Lancaster Regiment, The Duke of Wellingtons Regiment, The East Yorkshire Regiment, The Green Howards and The West Yorkshire Regiment. This is a great book if you are interested in all of the Yorkshire regiments, but of course, there is not a lot of space to provide complete records for each one.