A master work which starts off slowly and then fizzes into unexpected space. Pregnant with insight.

The Critical Edition of Q : A Synopsis Including the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Mark and Thomas.

This is an exceptionally clear and easy to use book.

The section on the history of "Q" research is a splendidly clear and concise review of the work done today and would bring you up to speed very quickly.

The layout of the synopsis in 8 columns is actually a great deal easier to understand than at first glance and quickly becomes user friendly.

The Synoptic Gospels, Q and other canonical texts are paralleled in Greek with the gospel of Thomas being paralleled in Coptic. Q is translated into French, German and English with the parallels of Thomas being translated into Greek, French, German and English.

I would not hesitate to recommend this work to anyone who is studying in this field or has an interest in it.

This newest updated version of Q is a MUST read for all!

Informative and thought provoking;for all serious thinkers..... this book clearly settles the case....once and for all.

Mike in Melbourne,Fla.

Great book on really being intentional in reaching the unchurched of your community. Paul Nixon gives some great practical staffing advice - areas such as hiring, etc... You can really sense the passion for seeing the church become the focal point of the community through these pages. If you feel called to be a "community" church - or a church FOR the community, this is a must read!

This book is incredible. The ideas that Nixon conveys are brilliant and challenging, yet written so that the reading is enjoyable and fun. You cannot help but have several "aha" moments as you turn the pages of this book.
Paul Nixon demonstrates how to give the church away to the community so that it becomes a focal point for community life. This engraves community outreach into the very being of the church. It creates an avenue (or even a freeway) to share Christ with the unchurched and reestablish a relationship with those who have not been to a church in some time.
Successful churches in the 2000's MUST Fling Open the Doors and establish a true relationship with their community. Nixon is right on. I highly recommend!

This is the wave of the future, a book that invites a church to be, not just for the membership, but for everyone. Any church that adopts this philosophy of ministry will be a 21st Century church.
Nixon writes in a clear, easy to understand way, modeling his teaching that the church must speak in language the unchurched person can comprehend.
One of the best books on church organization that I have ever read!

Through exceptional Norman Rockwell-style art and an enchanting story line, this nostalgic book gently reminds us to follow our dreams.

While reading a book sent by his globetrotting Aunt Frances, young Earl is electrified by a photograph of Duke Kahanamoku riding a wave. Despite the fact that he's surrounded by Illinois cornfields, and the only nearby body of water is Mr. McDougall's pond, Earl decides he must learn to surf.

Everyone thinks this impossible, except for Earl's grandfather. Grandpa says there are two kinds of people in the world. "The Mechanics," like doctors, ditch diggers, plumbers and bureaucrats, keep the planet running smoothly. And then, he tells Earl, there are the Dreamers.

"The Dreamers drive the imagination of the world to new places. They discover and reinvent our universe for the rest of us to live in. You could say the Dreamers provide the light so the Mechanics can go to work. I should think that you, Earl, are one of these Dreamers."

Surfers will be pleased by the author's ability to capture that first magic moment of being able to actually ride on water. Rogo, an avid surfer living in San Diego, dedicates the book to Kahanamoku. It is no coincidence, Rogo tells me, that Earl, like Duke, has an English title for a name.

While the publisher designates the book for all ages, it should particularly appeal to children ten and older.

The Surfrider is truely a fantasitc book. The beautiful color illustrations and storyline made it one of the best books for both myself (a long time surfer)and my 11 yr old son (future surfer). One of the best attempts a writer has made, at trying to convey to the reader, the thrill of learning to surf and finally catching that first wave! After you have enjoyed this wonderful book, it will also make for a great art piece to keep around and display the fantastic colorful paintings. For sure one of my sons best books ever!

After allowing the rich colors of the cover to to smooth around my being for many minutes, I opened the book. I was back in grade one in Canada standing up to take my turn to read , holding a book this size with the same style of art in 1957! Reading aloud at that time is one of the few accademic experiences that I treasure.
The story in the Surfrider is fantastic as well. If you love adventure and need beautiful art to nourish your soul,then buy this little treasure.
Aloha!

Winnie the Witch has long been a family bedtime favourite in our house and my 4 year old and I were pleased to see Korky Paul's wonderfully zany illustrations of Winnie's latest exploits. As with the original book he guffawed at her outrageous exploits and Valerie Thomas' storyline.

It's a wonderful book. Every parent that has a child who needs glasses should have it. It's funny and like the previous book on winnie the illustations are just as funny. My son doesn't need glasses but we enjoyed it just the same. Pure enjoyment.

I read this book to my kids (3, 5 and 7) and they loved it. The story is funny and the pictures are wonderful. It's a very silly story and tons of fun. A must have for all home libraries

This, reader, is an unvarnished narrative of one doomed by the laws of the Southern States to be a slave. It tells not only its own story of grief, but speaks of a thousand wrongs and woes beside, which never see the light; all the more bitter and dreadful, because no help can relieve, no sympathy can mitigate, and no hope can cheer. -William Wells Brown, Clotel, or The President's Daughter

Clotel would have historic interest simply by virtue of the fact that William Wells Brown appears to have been the first African American to write a novel. But it's not merely a literary curiosity; it is also an eminently readable and emotionally powerful, if forgivably melodramatic, portrait of the dehumanizing horrors of slave life in the Ante-bellum South. Brown, himself an escaped slave, tells the story of the slave Currer and her daughters, Clotel and Althesa, and of their attempts to escape from slavery. The central conceit of the story is that the unacknowledged father of the girls is Thomas Jefferson himself.

There is an immediacy to the stories here--of slave auctions, of families being torn apart, of card games where humans are wagered and lost, of sickly slaves being purchased for the express purpose of resale for medical experimentation upon their imminent deaths, of suicides and of many more indignities and brutalities--which no textbook can adequately convey. Though the characters tend too much to the archetypal, Brown does put a human face on this most repellent of American tragedies. He also makes extensive use (so extensive that he has been accused, it seems unfairly, of plagiarism) of actual sermons, lectures, political pamphlets, newspaper advertisements, and the like, to give the book something of a docudrama effect.

The Bedford Cultural Edition of the book, edited by Robert S. Levine, has extensive footnotes and a number of helpful essays on Brown and on the sources, even reproducing some of them verbatim. Overall, it gives the novel the kind of serious presentation and treatment which it deserves, but for obvious reasons has not received in the past. Brown's style is naturally a little bit dated and his passions are too distant for us to feel them immediately, but as you read the horrifying scenes of blacks being treated like chattel, you quickly come to share his moral outrage at this most shameful chapter in our history.

GRADE : B

This is a exemplary novel that also deals with the harsh realities of slavery. This novel distinctly tells a true story, which is relevant to ALL Americans (believe it or not. This is a must reader for ALL.

This book covers the theory and applications of extremal value theory (an area of applied probability). The mathematics is kept at an acceptable level, i.e. advanced undergraduates in math/physics/engineering, but the breadth and the sophistication of the statements are such that the results are never trivial. Chapters 2-3-4 introduce the reader to the property of sums, maxima and order statistics of random variables. Many results are only stated but not proved. Yet, this does not detract to the readability of the book. Chpater 5 treats point processes and requires a deeper mathematical background. Among the chapters, this was the most disappointing to me. The monographs of Resnick and of Kallenberg, as well as many good introductions to point processes in queueing theory, are in my opinion both a more intuitive and rigorous introduction to random measures. This is not a major flaw of the book, given its view toward applications; and besides this, the bibliographical notes will point the reader to the relevant literature. Chapter 6, on statistical analysis of extremal events, is enjoyable and extremely useful for practitioners in finance and insurance. Chapter 7 touches upon time series and its relation to heavy tails. Finally, chapter 8 is a put-pourri of topics: ARCH processes, stable processes, self-similarity. Overall, I found this book useful as a reference, but sometimes lacking in focus: some topics seem juxtaposed with no clear logical continuity. Another potential shortcoming of the book is that it is neither completely rigorous nor completely readable (i.e., an undergraduate-level book). At the same time, these can be considered as qualities: with regards to the former, there is plenty of material to consult and draw inspiration from; and at the same time each reader will find the "right" level of mathematics in the book. In my opinion the final balance is largely positive, and I would recommend this book without hesitation.

This book presents extreme value theory and its applications with the finance industry as its primary target. There have been many excellent texts written on extreme value theory but none this extensive. As the authors admit even as extensive as it is the theory of multivariate extremes is neglected. They chose to only cover in detail the theory that is mature enough for application.

What you will find here that is not in many texts on this subject is a treatment of risk theory and fluctuations of sums and various time series models including cases with heavy-tailed marginal distributions.

Chapter 8 on special topics is particularly interesting with a lot of coverage for the extremal index, large claim index, ARCH processes, large deviations, reinsurance, stable processes and self-similarity. The book contains over 600 references to the literature and is a welcome resource for practitioners in finance and insurance as well as extreme value theorists.

This book is "The Thinner Aquinas," a targeted text specifically focusing on Aquinas's political and ethical writings.

Incluced are obvious selections from Summa Contra Gentiles and Summa Theologica (Five Ways of God's Existence and Essay on Law), but also included are excerpts from "De Regimine Principum."

There are hidden treasures in the back, excerpts from backgound sources and essays that influenced and were influenced by Thomisitic thought.

This book is geared towards a poltical scientist and poltical philosopher. For the theologian or the philosopher, however, I would reccomed Penguin Classics "Selected Writings."

PS--Nice picture on the cover!

This is a truly excellent selection of Thomistic writing, both by the Angelic Doctor and his critics and modern-day followers. It is not only comprehensive on the subject of Aquinas's politics and ethics but it is a good introduction to Thomism and natural law theory in general. Mortimer Adler's spanking of Bill Moyers on the subject of objective ethics is worth the price of the book just by itself.

I ask my students to use this book in an anthropological course on globalism. It is a gold mine of information--historical, economic, social. It is a must-have reference book for the historically and geographically challenged. However, the information is aging. I fervently hope that there is an update in the wings.

fgdsgfds

The book centers on the life of Robert MacDonald, an engineer who has spent his life on the Project-a giant listening post in Puerto Rico that scans the heavens for signs of life out there. Just as the project is threatened with demise, a signal is received from the planet Capella. Religious fanatics are convinced that it's a message from God. MacDonald deciphers the message which is a basic primer to their counting system and what appears to be a note that their sun is expanding and killing off their planet. MacDonald gets permission to reply. The catch is that it takes forty five years to reach Capella and then their reply would take forty five more years to get back. At the end of the book, MacDonald's grandson is running the Project to hear the Reply. On that day, ninety years after receiving the message, the Reply comes and the World is listening.

I read the Listeners when I was in college in the 80s. The edition I read had a forward written by Carl Sagan. The book was truly visionary and insightful. Some years later Contact came out and I was amazed at how Sagan had comletely stolen Mr. Gunn's plot. What really purturbed me was that nowhere in the credits did Mr. Sagan even mention James Gunn. It just seemed to me that Sagan just stood by and took credit for the entire story. To Mr. Gunn: The Listeners is a much better story than Contact! Thanks.

On a desperate hunt one summer day for that science-fiction rarity -- a sci-fi story that followed actual scientific laws and did not try my intelligence and patience, I accidentally discovered two books at a used book store. One of these books was Wine of the Dreamers; the other novel was The Listeners. I read them both- and fell in love with them both.

I was in heaven that late summer. This was real science fiction. These books were fantastic! There were no "starships" or "Deathstars. There were only well-drawn, complex, and brilliant characters using their scientific and technical gifts.
Obviously, as one reviewer had already observed, this "first contact" novel was the inspiration for Carl Sagan's later work "Contact." In my opinion, "The Listeners" is the better-written book, even though I will always remain great fan of the late - and forever great - Carl Sagan.

North and Thomas seek to explain the "rise of the Western world" by illuminating the causal importance of an efficient economic organization that guarantees a wide latitude of property rights and both incentives and protection for economic growth. Although they pay homage to both Marxian and neoliberal theory, they take a theoretical middle ground that privileges the sociopolitical backdrop of economic affairs (as opposed to solely private or class-based activity) and in doing so identifies the roots of modernization as far back as the 10th Century. To justify the novelty and originality of this approach, they write that most analysts have misidentified the symptoms of modern economic growth (technological change, human capital, economies of scale) as the causes. In doing so, previous scholars have failed to answer the question "if all that is required for economic growth is investment and innovation, why have some societies missed this desirable outcome?" (2). Their answer is that some societies (England and the Netherlands) were better than others (France and Spain) at providing an efficient economic organization that could guarantee conditions favorable to per capita economic growth among a rapidly growing population.

These conditions are conceptualized as mechanisms to reduce the gap between "social" and "private" rates of return, the key operating concepts in the analysis. Indeed, any old economic undertaking can provide private gains, but the "social" costs or benefits of this undertaking will affect the society's well-being, and a given discrepancy between the two rates of return means that a third party will absorb benefits or costs of this undertaking (an example would be the lack of intellectual property rights for inventions, leading to copying and piracy by third parties). A lack of strong property rights gives these third parties the institutional incentive or imperative to absorb social costs or benefits, and if private costs exceed private benefits then no rational chooser would ever undertake any risky new private economic activity (trade, inventions, investment, etc.). In a sense, then, the analysis becomes a refreshing neoliberal justification for strong government power.

Population growth serves as a convenient control variable for this analysis, because by holding population growth constant across all the countries concerned, the authors are able to pinpoint their causal variable (parity between private and social rates of return) in the cases where it spurred the rise of capitalism (England and the Netherlands). Population growth serves as a control because the authors show that the rise of the Western World happened only after the second population boom in the period being studied (16th Century) - the fact that it didn't happen during the first population boom (10th through 13th Centuries) means that population growth alone cannot be seen as accountable for modernity. But how did the two population booms differ from each other? Only during the second one were England and the Netherlands able to provide per capita growth by providing a climate of incentives and protections (rule of law, property rights, insurance companies, joint stock companies, etc.) that reduced the gap between private and social returns and laid the groundwork for the industrial revolution to begin.

The evidence provided to back up this causal argument comes in two primary forms: citations of historical scholarship (often quoting large passages out of encyclopedias) that are given a "new" economic spin, and a great deal of quantitative evidence, in the form of graphs and charts, to verify the cycles of population growth and economic growth and recession being identified. The authors admit that the quality of statistical data from the early period under study is rather dubious, but if one can grant the integrity of the historians that uncovered such incomplete and partial data then one can probably take this data as high-quality evidence of the trends being identified.

The authors are intentionally ambiguous about their theoretical implications. Clearly, they seek to refute Marx by showing that technological change alone could not have been the cause of capitalist development, since this change itself was a symptom of both population growth and a favorable institutional climate (what Marx would dismiss as the superstructure). However, it's not clear how much they wish to refute neoliberal theory, since they follow much of its logic regarding the role of incentives in economic growth. They admit that Adam Smith himself went too far in his laissez-faire beliefs, since a weak state would not be able to provide the kinds of efficient economic organization that our authors advocate. But their analysis does not clarify just how strong of a state is required for such organization, especially in the information age economy.

An outstanding book that clearly explains how 'our' current understanding of property rights can be found and more fully understood through the feudal history of western Europe. The breath and sweep of this book is truly impressive. The roots of how nations protect property rights are found in western feudal history. The case is made that economic efficiency, or more specifically economic prosperity, is dependent upon how a society defines and protects property rights. Therefore, differences in economic performance among nations can be in part explained by how that particular nation's notion of property rights evolved. North and Thomas compare and contrast the development of property rights and the resulting economic performance during the feudal period in several nations, such as France and England, to make their point. Transaction costs, intellectual property, and negative and positive externalities are also discussed.

I read this excellent book in preparation for the writing of my senior thesis. It is the most thorough and comprehensive tretment of the economic reasons for the rise of the western world. Every sentence is information dense, and I often found it necessary to reread sentences or even whole paragraphs to digest the wealth of information and analysis. That said, it should be kept in mind that firm backgrounds in both European history and economics are necessary prerequisites for a full appreciation of this book. Moreover, this book is a crucial but nevertheless incomplete explanation for the rise of the western world. In this sense, it has everything on something (economic history), but nothing on anything else. For a broader analysis, see McNeill, "The Rise of the West." (McNeill has something on everything, but everything on nothing. Get it?)