Steven Brams and Alan Taylor accomplish something quite interesting and worth paying attention to. They move concepts traditionally treated in policy debate and law with simple hit-or-miss human judgment and discretion into concrete analyzable mathematical processes. In the more than ten years that I've worked on the mathematics of child support, I have not yet been so convincing that such a transformation from subjective into objective is possible. Let the games continue!

Roger F. Gay, Project Leader Project for the Improvement of Child Support Litigation Technology http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/5910/index.html

This was easily the book I referred to most in my Master's paper on fair division. It covers a lot of topics, including envy-free and equitable division, fair division by auctions, and fair division by elections. The authors devote a chapter to their favorite method, the so-called "combined procedure" that is equitable, envy-free, and Pareto-optimal for two players and would be invaluable to any divorce lawyer.

For those accustomed to reading mathematics or economics, this book is readable. For the layperson, it might be a little bit too technical in spots. While it has many practical examples, it isn't really a fair division manual for the do-it-yourselfer. But it's as close as you're going to get, for now.

I have just spent the last month revising for my medical exams and have found Bray et al an indespensible component of my study regime.The book presents complex topics in a simple understandable format. I would not hesitate to recommend it to any of my fellow students.It gets a double thumbs up from me!!

Bray et.al is the best physiology text avaliable today. This text clearly presents a range of physiological topics and is well written by the learned staff of the Otago University Physiology Dept. Prof. Bray is to be commended for his concise and accurate editorial style. I found the figures particularly understandable and loved thier minimalistic style. A MUST for every med student and those interested in how the body functions. I look forward to the next edition.

This is a must-have book for all professional hog farmers! It contains full detailed descriptions on anatomy, and very helpful step-by-step guides and checklists on swine care. Virtually all known pig diseases are comprehensively covered, including history, diagnosis and treatment. Pictures and diagrams make it easy to understand, especially for non-veterinarians.

Everything an ash conniseur could ask for and more. The authors have done a fabulous job of keeping the reader's interest throughout the book! Keep up the good work!

This is a 5 volume masterpiece which is definitely the quintessential guide for the very keen gardener and the horticultural professional and would also be an extremely good companion for the student in this industry. W. J. Bean takes us through many genera from A to Z and also includes some principals in the very first volume. A real gem. The books are fairly pricey which is not surprising due to the immense amount of work which went in to producing all the volumes. A true classic.

I found Jasper Milvain, the "alarmingly modern young man," to be the most interesting character in Gissing's New Grub Street for a number of reasons, the most significant of which is that he evinces what can only be considered a modernist's consciousness in his approach to writing. That is, while it soon becomes clear to the reader that Milvain represents the antithesis of what Edwin Reardon personifies-i.e., the work of literature as an emanation of author's native genius-and thus one of the intercalated plots of the novel involves the incremental success of Milvain as a modern man of letters, and the concomitant gradual abjection of Reardon. In a manner of speaking, then, Milvain and Reardon's fates emerge from a common source, namely some sea change in the reading public's (the consumer's) preferences and tendencies.

Milvain identifies as vulgar the most lucrative market for the product of the man of letter's labor. The vulgarians, or "quarter educated," drive the market (479), and since they have been determined to desire nothing more than chatty ephemera, they have successfully opened an insuperable gulf between material success in writing and artistic success. Reardon's psychologically penetrating novels just aren't in demand. Therefore, there emerges quite an interesting conceptual shift within the nascent hegemony of the quarter-educated as established by their purchasing power: what was once considered healthy artistic integrity has transmuted into a peculiar kind of petit bourgeois hubris, if, in the new paradigm, the writer is more an artisan than an artist. Therefore, Reardon's artistically-compromised and padded three-volume novel, written with no other end in mind than to pander to the vulgar reader, nonetheless achieves only modest success because, the fact that it is indistinguishable from countless other similar works glutting the market aside, his novel is infected from his irrepressible integrity, and thus his novel becomes a strange sort of counterfeit, a psychological narrative masquerading as a popular novel. Reardon thus becomes a sort of Coriolanus among writers.

Milvain, on the other hand, is a sort of Henry Ford among writers; he reveals his particular genius when offering advice to his sister Maud about how to write religious works for juveniles: "I tell you, writing is a business. Get together half-a-dozen fair specimens of the Sunday school prize; study them; discover the essential points of such a composition; hit upon new attractions; then go to work methodically, so many pages a day" (13). In other words, Jasper has managed to streamline and to mechanize the writing process. He studies previous works, abstracts formulae from them, isolates the elements of these formulae, and then deploys and rearranges these elements to give his own writing a patina of originality. By treating writing as an exercise in manipulating formulae, Jasper exchanges "authenticity" (whatever that word means anymore) for the convenience and efficiency of not having to grapple with his own potentially mutable and recalcitrant genius. Jasper did not invent writing, just as Ford did not invent the automobile. But like Ford did with automobile manufacture, Milvain discovers those aspects of writing that lend themselves to mechanical reproduction. Thus he is able to capitalize on his time and effort, and effectively becomes the very machine Reardon believes himself to be but never actually becomes because of his lingering notions of artistic integrity (352).

Also of interest is the fact that Albert Yule is a sort of synthesis of Milvain and Reardon. Like Milvain, Yule attempts to streamline his own literary production by delegating some of the labor to his daughter Marian. However, like Reardon, Yule clings to the superannuated notion of the necessary individuality of writing: "[h]is failings, obvious enough, were the results of a strong and somewhat pedantic individuality ceaselessly at conflict with unpropitious circumstances" (38). In other words, Yule fails to recognize the obsolescence of the lone, learned genius within the realm of literary production. A market of vulgarians who demand occasional literary confections simply does not expect Works of individual genius. Moreover, even if they were in demand, works of individual genius are too ponderously inefficient to keep pace with the rate at which they are consumed. Therefore, Yule straddles the either/or proposition personified by Reardon and Milvain: One may preserve his artistic integrity and write "for the ages"--hence Yule, Biffen, and Reardon's fetishization of Shakespeare, Coleridge and authors of classical antiquity--and starve in the process, or one may write "for the moment" and actually turn a respectable profit.

The shadow of Charles Darwin indeed looms large over the events and characters of New Grub Street. The growth market brought about by the advent of the "quarter-educated" vulgar class, and their discretionary income coupled with their callow aesthetic sensibilities and truncated attention spans, represents a nascent economic, if not ecological niche, for certain social creatures to occupy. However, it's not simply a matter of being able to adapt one's skills to the tastes of these consumers. One must also be a prodigious enough writer to keep pace with an equally prodigious rate of consumption. Individuals like Milvain and Whelpdale are adequately adapted to this niche in that they satisfy the demands of this niche in terms of both content and output. Reardon panders to the vulgar taste only grudgingly and after long resistance and thereby cannot meet the production demands of this niche. Biffen absolutely refuses to pander at all. Alfred Yule does attempt to pander, but his mode of literary production is too inefficient to meet production demands, and he is also largely ignorant of vulgar literary taste. While more in touch with the vulgar reader than her father, Marian Yule is as inefficient in her literary production as her father. Therefore, each of the characters named above are equally maladaptive, albeit for various reasons, and thus their extinction by the novel's end strikes the reader as somehow inevitable. Whereas Milvain and Reardon's widow Amy are left to come together as the triumphant niche occupants and thus reproduce themselves in their offspring, should they decide to produce any.

George Gissing's 1891 novel, "New Grub Street," is likely one of the most depressing books I've ever read. Certainly, in its descriptions of literary life, be it in publishing, or in my own realm of graduate scholarship, the situations, truths, and lives Gissing portrays are still all too relevant. "New Grub Street" itself points to the timelessness of Gissing's portrayals - as Grub Street was synonymous, even in the eighteenth century with the disrepute of hack writing, and the ignominy of having to make a living by authorship. One of Gissing's primary laments throughout the novel is that the life of the mind is of necessity one which is socially isolating and potentially devastating to any kind of relationships, familial or otherwise. "New Grub Street" gives us a world where friendship is never far from enmity, where love is never far from the most bitter kinds of hatred.

The anti-heroes of "New Grub Street" are presented to us as the novel begins - Jasper Milvain is a young, if somewhat impoverished, but highly ambitious man, eager to be a figure of influence in literary society at whatever cost. His friend, Edwin Reardon, on the other hand, was brought up on the classics, and toils away in obscurity, determined to gain fame and reputation through meaningful, psychological, and strictly literary fiction. Family matters beset the two - Jasper has two younger sisters to look out for, and Edwin has a beautiful and intelligent wife, who has become expectant of Edwin's potential fame. Throw into the mix Miss Marian Yule, daughter of a declining author of criticism, whose own reputation was never fully realized, and who has indentured his daughter to literary servitude, and we have a pretty list of discontented and anxious people struggling in the cut-throat literary marketplace of London.

Money is of supreme importance in "New Grub Street," and it would be pointless to write a review without making note of it. As always, the literary life is one which is not remunerative for the mass of people who engage upon it, and this causes no end of strife in the novel. As Milvain points out, the paradox of making money in the literary world is that one must have a well-known reputation in order to make money from one's labours. At the same time, one must have money in order to move in circles where one's reputation may be made. This is the center of the novel's difficulties - should one or must one sacrifice principles of strictly literary fame and pander to a vulgar audience in order to simply survive? The question is one in which Reardon finds the greatest challenges to his marriage, his self-esteem, and even his very existence. For Jasper Milvain and his sisters, as well as for Alfred and Marian Yule, there is no question that the needs of subsistence outweigh most other considerations.

"New Grub Street" profoundly questions the relevance of classic literature and high culture to the great mass of people, and by proxy, to the nation itself. For England, which propagated its sense of international importance throughout the nineteenth century by encouraging the study of English literature in its colonial holdings, the matter becomes one of great significance. The careers of Miss Dora Milvain and Mr. Whelpdale, easily the novel's two most charming, endearing, and sympathetic characters, attempt to illustrate the ways in which modern literature may be profitable to both the individual who writes it and the audiences towards which they aim. They may be considered the moral centers of the novel, and redeem Gissing's work from being entirely fatalistic.

"New Grub Street" is a novel that will haunt me for quite some time. As a "man of letters" myself, I can only hope that the novel will serve as an object lesson, and one to which I may turn in hope and despair. The novel is well written, its characters and situations drawn in a very realistic and often sympathetic way. Like the ill-fated "ignobly decent" novel of Mr. Biffen's, "Mr. Bailey, Grocer," "New Grub Street" may seem less like a novel, and more like a series of rambling biographical sketches, but they are indelible and lasting sketches of literary lives as they were in the original Grub Street, still yet in Gissing's time, and as they continue to-day. Very highly recommended.

"New Grub Street," published in three volumes in 1891, is George Gissing's grimly realistic exploration of literary life in 1880s London. While it is a remarkably vivid novel, it is also an accurate and detailed depiction of what it was like to be a struggling author in late nineteenth century England, "a society where," as Professor Bernard Bergonzi points out in his introduction, "literature has become a commodity, and where the writing of fiction does not differ radically from any other form of commercial or industrial production."

"New Grub Street" is the contrapuntal narrative of two literary figures, Edwin Reardon, a struggling novelist who aspires to write great literature without regard to its popular appeal, and Jasper Milvain, a self-centered, materialistic striver whose only concern is with achieving financial success and social position by publishing what the mass public wants to read. As Milvain relates early in the novel, succinctly adumbrating the theme that winds through the entirety of "New Grub Street":

"Understand the difference between a man like Reardon and a man like me. He is the old type of unpractical artist; I am the literary man of 1882. He won't make concessions, or rather, he can't make them; he can't supply the market. I-well, you may say that at present I do nothing; but that's a great mistake, I am learning my business. Literature nowadays is a trade. Putting aside men of genius, who may succeed by mere cosmic force, your successful man of letters is your skillful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets. . . . Reardon can't do that kind of thing, he's behind his age; he sells a manuscript as if he lives in Sam Johnson's Grub Street. But our Grub Street of today is quite a different place: it is supplied with telegraphic communication, it knows what literary fare is in demand in every part of the world, its inhabitants are men of business, however seedy."

Gissing brilliantly explores this theme through the lives of his characters, each drawn with stunning depth and verisimilitude. There is, of course, Reardon, whose failure as a novelist and neurasthenic decline destroys his marriage and his life. There is also Reardon's wife, Amy, a woman whose love for Reardon withers with the exsanguination of her husband's creative abilities. While the manipulative and seemingly unfeeling Milvain pursues his crass aspirations, he also encourages his two sisters, Dora and Maud, to seek commercial success as writers of children's books. And intertwining all of their lives are the myriad connections each of the characters has with the Yule family, in particular with the nearly impoverished Alfred Yule, a serious writer and literary critic, and his daughter and literary amanuensis, Marian.

It is Marian--struggling to reconcile the literary demands and expectations of her father with the desire to lead her own life, struggling to escape the claustrophobic world of the literary life--who ultimately, pessimistically challenges the verities of that life while sitting in its physical embodiment, the prison-like British Museum library:

"It was gloomy, and one could scarcely see to read; a taste of fog grew perceptible in the warm, headachy air. . . . She kept asking herself what was the use and purpose of such a life as she was condemned to lead. When already there was more good literature in the world than any individual could cope with in his lifetime, here she was exhausting herself in the manufacture of printed stuff which no one even pretended to be any more than a commodity for the day's market. What unspeakable folly! . . . She herself would throw away her pen with joy but for the need of earning money. . . . This huge library, growing into unwieldiness, threatening to become a trackless desert of print-how intolerably it weighed upon the spirit."

It is Marian, too, who ultimately becomes the romantic victim of Milvain's aspirations, the powerful language of Gissing's anti-romantic subplot twisting into almost gothic excess as he extends the metaphor of London's fog to Marian's sleepless depression:

"The thick black fog penetrated every corner of the house. It could be smelt and tasted. Such an atmosphere produces low spirited languor even in the vigorous and hopeful; to those wasted by suffering it is the very reek of the bottomless pit, poisoning the soul. Her face colorless as the pillow, Marian lay neither sleeping nor awake in blank extremity of woe; tears now and then ran down her cheeks, and at times her body was shaken with a throe such as might result from anguish of the torture chamber."

"New Grub Street" is deservedly regarded not only as Gissing's finest novel, but also as one of the finest novels of late nineteenth century English literature. Grimly realistic in its depiction of what it was like to be a struggling writer in late nineteenth century London, it is also remarkable for its historical accuracy and its literary craftsmanship. If you like the realism of writers like Harding and Zola, then "New Grub Street" is a book you must read!

In this book the Logan children experience a lot of things that get them ready for the real world. At the beginning, life is going pretty well. Life changes when Cassie's big brother, Stacey buys a new car that is very nice for an African American. It all starts in Strawberry when some white boys are making fun of Moe. They say things that really make him mad. He explodes and hits them with a crow bar. He then jumps into a truck that belongs to Jeremy Simms, a long time friend of the Logans. Jeremy is related to the people Moe just beat up. Being the good friend, Jeremy jumps in the truck and drives off. The Logans take off and pick up Moe in another town so they can take him to Memphis so he can catch a train to Chicago. On their way to Memphis they run into a lot of trouble with white people and they have a lot of car trouble. When the get near Memphis, Clarence gets really sick and has to go to an old lady's house to get better. The Logans finally get to Memphis and they get their car fixed so they can make it home. They finally get Moe on a train ticket. When he is getting ready to leave he expresses his love for Cassie. She is very disappointed because she knows she might not ever see him again. The ending of the book amazed me so to find out you need to read it.

I really enjoyed this book because it showed what black people had to put up with everyday. Also because it taught a very good lesson which was that even if things go bad they can turn out well.

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is the first book of this series.
Let the Circle Be Unbroken is the second book in this series.

I thought The Road To Memphis was a very dramatic,compelling book. This is the third novel in the series written about the Logan family. This book takes place in 1941, right before the outbreak of World WarII. Cassie is 17 years old and a senior in high school dreaming of going onto law school. Stacey is working in Jackson and is driving his first car. A sequence of tragic events, incuding pregnancy and death, threatens to seperate the family, possibly forever. In Jackson Moe lashes out at his white tormentors, an act unheard of in Mississippi back then, almost killing them. Cassie, Stacey and their friends must try to get Moe to Memphis and safety. At the end of the book it doesn't tell you what happens to Jeremy, Stacey, Moe or Cassie. I found myself asking what happened to them? Mildred D. Taylor is and excellent writer. In reading this book I found she depicted the magnitude of racism in the 1940's very well. It really gave me an idea of what life was like in that era. It also made me realize how times have changed and how ucky I am to live in this day and age. I would suggest this book to readers who are old enough to comprehend the realism of it. This is a great book that I think all people should read at sometime in their life.

I love The Road To Memphis. I started reading Mildred D. Taylor's book at the beginning last year at school as a class reading but right away I loved it by the time my teacher stared I was at the end of chapter 1 in Roll of Thunder,Hear My Cry. After that I couldn't stop reading, and I got in trouble for reading it so quickly, but then I read Let the Circle be Unbroken, then found myself reading The Road To Memphis. The main charcters of this book is Cassie,Stacey,Moe,Claudia,Little man,Christopher-John. When Moe gets tired of the whites treating him like dirt,he beats up 3 white boys,almost killing them. Then has to make a run for a train in Memphis to get to Stacey's uncle Hammer, But on the way somebody dies (i'm not saying who).In the end even a white's life messes up.Before I read this book I knew slaves had a hard time, but after slavery I didn't know how they were treated, and I think all whites (including me) are well respected of blacks even without reading theese books.! And I recomend you reading her other books to!

...very similar to some other books I've read on the subject.

I used this book for my A'level exams, it was such a helpful and informative book. Even now,I still find it very useful; which as we all know is not typical for most texts.
I recently bought a new copy & put the old one to REST. Yes! Because this book is sooooo big - expect it to fall apart!

I used this book for my A'level exams, it was such a helpful and informative book. Even now, I still find it very useful; which as we all know is not typical for most texts.
I recently bought a new copy & put the old one to REST. Yes! Because this book is sooooo big - EXPECT IT TO FALL APART!

Even after reading this very competent and entertaining biography Thackeray remains an enigma. He wrote one novel, Vanity Fair, which ranks with the greatest in English and another, Esmond, can be argued as the finest and most convincing historical novel in the language. Pendennis and The Newcomes are still enjoyable today and Barry Lyndon has a cynical realism that makes it a more chilling work than the elegiac cinematic masterpiece that Stanley Kubrick made from it. Yet much of the remainder of his work is tedious to the modern reader (this reviewer must be one of the few to have read The Virginians cover to cover and has no desire to repeat the experience). As this biography details so clearly, Thackeray regarded writing as necessary drudgery for much of his career and never ceased to look for alternative sources of income. Today this shows through in his work to an extent that may not have been obvious to his contemporaries, who read much of it in the form of magazine contributions and monthly parts. The inevitable comparison, today as in his lifetime, is with Dickens and the difference is primarily one of character. Thackeray, for all his mildly satirical stance, remained a man uncritical of, even content with, the world he lived in, incapable of feeling the indignation with which Dickens viewed social abuses, even if he seldom proposed concrete solutions for them. At its best this tolerance of things as they were led to Thackeray's greatest gift - his ability to portray real and credible characters, often flawed and weak at the same time as they are well-meaning, loveable and fundamentally decent. It also means however that his work is largely devoid of any larger message and that it so rooted in his time and culture that much of it loses universal appeal. This theme of essentially uncritical acceptance of his society - and to a great extent also of others such as the Western Europe and United States of his time (the latter on the brink of the Civil War) - is perhaps linked to the somewhat brutishly sybaritic attitude which is a disturbing theme through the biography. Thackeray's contemptuous attitude the prostitutes he consorted with in his early life, and perhaps later, and his acceptance of women and slaves as beings to be used and patronised, strikes a very unpleasant note, even allowing for the standards of his time. This also as echoes in his slow disengagement from his insane wife. Reading the American-tours section of this biography sent me back, for comparison purposes, to Dickens' "American Notes". The contrast between Dickens' honest indignation at the realities of Slavery is in stark comparison to Thackeray's half-tolerance, half-disgust, whole disengagement when coming in direct contact with the institution.

Thackeray himself lamented that the cultural mores of his age prevented a fictional hero being presented with the honesty with which Fielding portrayed Tom Jones. This is borne out not only by his treatment of Pendennis, but by the obscurity with which he seems to have cloaked so many of his own comings and goings. Beyond the farcical platonic affairs he conducted with a married Englishwoman and with a young New York socialite in his later life, it is difficult in the extreme to know what was going on under the cover of extreme busyness. Thackeray was almost constantly on the move around Europe, when he wasn't similarly active in Britain and the United States, but one can only wonder what he actually did during his endless visits to France, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. Comfortable they can't have been - the latter chapters make grim reading as his life was made miserable from complaints arising from earlier venereal infection. The overall impression, for all the friendships, literary and other, is of a sad and unfulfilled individual. The writer of this biography is to be complimented for bringing Thackeray so well to life, not just through the formal biographical sections, but via a few fictional vignettes in which third-party observers comment on Thackeray at various stages of his life. One in particular - of Thackeray and his mentally unstable wife as viewed by a French waiter - is poignant in the extreme, a small masterpiece in its own right.

(Shortly after penning the above, I stumbled on a tattered late-nineteenth century edition of a collection of Thackeray's marginal drawings in books he possessed in his lifetime. This was in a street market in Britain and I picked it up for the equivalent of a quarter. The volume is totally fascinating and wholly complementary to the Taylor biography. The most chilling detail however is a pen sketch, made in Paris in the early 1830's, of a young woman attired in male clothing for a ball. It corresponds with the description Thackeray gave of an English governess who had embraced the Bohemian life - and if Taylor's surmise is correct she may be the individual who infected him initially, to dreadful later effect. The coincidence of reading the biography and finding this volume so serendipitously was remarkable in the extreme)

Even after reading this very competent and entertaining biography Thackeray remains an enigma. He wrote one novel, Vanity Fair, which ranks with the greatest in English and another, Esmond, can be argued as the finest and most convincing historical novel in the language. Pendennis and The Newcomes are still enjoyable today and Barry Lyndon has a cynical realism that makes it a more chilling work than the elegiac cinematic masterpiece that Stanley Kubrick made from it. Yet much of the remainder of his work is tedious to the modern reader (this reviewer must be one of the few to have read The Virginians cover to cover and has no desire to repeat the experience). As this biography details so clearly, Thackeray regarded writing as necessary drudgery for much of his career and never ceased to look for alternative sources of income. Today this shows through in his work to an extent that may not have been obvious to his contemporaries, who read much of it in the form of magazine contributions and monthly parts. The inevitable comparison, today as in his lifetime, is with Dickens and the difference is primarily one of character. Thackeray, for all his mildly satirical stance, remained a man uncritical of, even content with, the world he lived in, incapable of feeling the indignation with which Dickens viewed social abuses, even if he seldom proposed concrete solutions for them. At its best this tolerance of things as they were led to Thackeray's greatest gift - his ability to portray real and credible characters, often flawed and weak at the same time as they are well-meaning, loveable and fundamentally decent. It also means however that his work is largely devoid of any larger message and that it so rooted in his time and culture that much of it loses universal appeal. This theme of essentially uncritical acceptance of his society - and to a great extent also of others such as the Western Europe and United States of his time (the latter on the brink of the Civil War; compare the account in this book of his attitude to slavery with Dickens' honest indignation in "American Notes") - is perhaps linked to the somewhat brutishly sybaritic attitude which is a disturbing theme through the biography. Thackeray's contemptuous attitude the prostitutes he consorted with in his early life, and perhaps later, and his acceptance of women and slaves as beings to be used and patronised, strikes a very unpleasant note, even allowing for the standards of his time. This also as echoes in his slow disengagement from his insane wife. Thackeray himself lamented that the cultural mores of his age prevented a fictional hero being presented with the honesty with which Fielding portrayed Tom Jones. This is borne out not only by his treatment of Pendennis, but by the obscurity with which he seems to have cloaked so many of his own comings and goings. Beyond the farcical platonic affairs he conducted with a married Englishwoman and with a young New York socialite in his later life, it is difficult in the extreme to know what was going on under the cover of extreme busyness. Thackeray was almost constantly on the move around Europe, when he wasn't similarly active in Britain and the United States, but one can only wonder what he actually did during his endless visits to France, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. Comfortable they can't have been - the latter chapters make grim reading as his life was made miserable from complaints arising from earlier venereal infection. The overall impression, for all the friendships, literary and other, is of a sad and unfulfilled individual. The writer of this biography is to be complimented for bringing Thackeray so well to life, not just through the formal biographical sections, but via a few fictional vignettes in which third-party observers comment on Thackeray at various stages of his life. One in particular - of Thackeray and his mentally unstable wife as viewed by a French waiter - is poignant in the extreme, a small masterpiece in its own right.

(A postscript to the above is that directly after penning it I picked up in a street market in Britain, for a few pence and quite by accident, a bedraggled book from the 1890s containing copies of the drawings Thackeray sketched in the margins of his books from a young age onwards. Quite chillingly, one of them shows a young woman in man's garb at a Bohemian celebration in Paris in the 1830's. One feels that this may well be the English Governess described in this way in Taylor's biography and whom he suspects may have infected Thackeray with such ultimately disasterous consequences. For me an amazing coincidence!)

This book introduces only one novel concept, which is okay, because many best-sellers contain no original thought at all.

Brams and Taylor spend the book explaining the concept "adjusted winner" and its implications for dispute resolution. The authors begin by laying the following framework: the dispute involved is a two-party dispute, goods or issues ("items") are being divided, and the division is a voluntary choice.

Within that framework, according to Brams and Taylor, there are four basic ways of dividing items: strict alternation (taking turns); balanced alternation, which adds something to compensate for the disadvantage of going second; one-cuts-the-other- chooses, and "adjusted winner."

The "adjusted winner" situation has three characteristics: it is envy-free, efficient, and equitable. Each of these terms has a specific meaning in this book (the concepts can be hard to keep straight on a first reading).

"Envy-free" means that no party is willing to give up the portion it receives in exchange for the portion someone else receives.

"Equitable" means that both parties think they received the same fraction of the total items to be divided, as they value them.

"Efficient" means that there is no other allocation that is better for some party without being worse for another party.

How is this gold standard of negotiation outcome achieved? Ah, there's the rub. First the parties designation the goods and issues in a dispute. Then, each party indicates how much the value obtaining the different goods, or "getting their way" on the different issues, by distributing 100 points across them. Each item is initially assigned to the person who puts more points on it. Then, an equitable allocation is achieved by transferring items, or fractions thereof, from one party to the other until their point totals are equal.

The book addresses adequately, I think, the problem of one or both parties being insincere about their preferences (it can be demonstrated mathematically to backfire). However, despite the concrete examples offered of the David and Ivana Trump divorce, the Camp David Agreement, the Clinton-Bush debates, and the Spratly Islands dispute, the reader is left wondering, doggone it, how do I actually assign these point thingies in my next negotiation? And is this method just too fancy to get the folks across the table to buy into? I suspect it probably is.

In a broad perspective, we see a strong desire in society to understand dispute and simplify the process of closure. In one camp, there have always been those who have worked toward addressing the underlying reality of disputes through logic and wisdom (Solomon for example). In another camp, there have always been those who have arbitrarily simplified dispute resolution leading to forced, bureaucratic solutions, which more often than not led to a more intense conflict.

In this reviewer's opinion, it is critical to understand which camp ideas on dealing with disputes belong to. Win-Win does not present a variation of a one-size-fits-all solution or conjure up a quick fix by slight of hand. By recognizing that disputing parties have different needs and priorities, they developed an efficient process that offers the opportunity for all parties to assert, and perhaps win what they think best for themselves. Their idea is nothing less than an addition to the science of fairness in the Western philosophical tradition.

Fair division is not a complete solution to every dispute. Solomon might have been confused if confronted by two parents with equal rights, responsibilities, and motivation. In such complex situations as divorce with children, much can be gained however by partially stripping away disputed issues and focusing a new wave of effort on those that remain. Judging from what is presented in Win-Win, I believe the authors would be satisfied with a recommendation that their ideas deserve to be part of the general toolkit for dispute resolution. I would go farther in suggesting it as part of a basic scientific understanding of fairness that every culture needs.

Many books attempt to address a broad class of problems and eventually end up in the dusty stack of fads with Hoola Hoops. In Win-Win, Brams and Taylor have presented a valid idea with mathematical precision that adds to our understanding of fairness and is not likely to go out of fashion. But it doesn't stop there. They provide systematic processes for applying the knowledge in real life. I could not possibly imagine the full list of professionals and non-professionals, scientists, politicians, negotiators, and den mothers, who can find value in Win-Win.

Roger F. Gay, Project Leader Project for the Improvement of Child Support Litigation Technology http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/5910/index.html