Sallis has written a beautiful concentrated gem of a book, no doubt hard to get by now. Unique and insightful, and really essential for anyone who wants to understand how and why these noir masters were able to create and produce what they did. If you are intrigued by any of them, don't miss it; and if you are as mesmerized by Jim Thompson as I am, you can't live without this jewel. (And don't even think about asking for my 'signed edition'...its staying with the first edition Thompson paperbacks that surround it.)

When I looked at the cover of this book, I knew it was going to be contrarian. It shows volatility moving in the opposite direction to growth. Looking inside the book, I found the cover figure in Chapter 9 where it was described as volatility versus growth for 75 years of the Ibbotson Index starting in 1926. I looked at the Ibbotson table, and, indeed with the authors' eleven outlier years eliminated, the correlation is still negative (-.142). (With all 75 years included, I found the correlation to be (-.317).) At any rate, the Markowitzian notion of finding how large you can stand for volatility to be and then finding the portolio which maximizes growth is stood on its head.

The authors come up with an alternative to the Markowitz approach for portfolio selection based on something they call a simugram, which looks to be computer intensive.

Much of the book is spent on fundamental analysis, and indeed the authors do not seem favorably disposed to technical analysis. They dump on Black-Scholes and blame its use for the collapse of LTCM and Enron.

Some finance professionals will find much of this book annoying, since it attacks many standard concepts, such as the Efficient Market Hypothesis. And it seems to attack some of the basic tools in the finance tool kit, such as "risk neutral" evaluation.

One of the troubling things I found is that though the authors attack the canon of modern finance, they have only limited alternatives to recommend. They seem to recommend either doing deep fundamental analysis, using their complex simugram portfolio analysis, or putting one's money into an index fund. Most of us don't have the time to do the first or the software to do the second. To do the third really gives up on mathematical finance.

This is the most wonderful Bible I've ever owned, and I have tried many over the past 20 years, including a variety of study Bibles.

Although study Bibles do offer value, I think that sometimes there is too much of man's option for me to use these as my every day primary usage Bible. The New Thompson-Chain offers something truly different from other study Bibles... it fully uses God's Word to explain itself without the help of man's opinions. It is an incredible tool to dig deep into the Word of God easily - it can be used by beginners or "road scholars" of God's Word alike. Top of mind benefits are easy to read text, incredibly thorough reference system, the pages just the right thickness, extensive maps, great archeological section, many blank pages in the front and back of the book to write your own notes. But what I like best of all is the unique index system where you can look up a topic and see all the scriptures on that topic printed out together, not just the scriptural references to look up on your own. That way, you can read 10+ scriptures on the topic, all on one page viewing, rather than flipping through 10 or more scriptures.

New King James Version + Thompson Chain Reference = AWESOME BIBLE!

For many years, I searched for the "ultimate" Bible. Being an avid New King James Version reader, we don't always have as many resources available as the King James or NIV people. My most useful Bible study tool is many, many cross-references, which I always looked for in NKJV Bibles that had the most. The Thompson Chain has much more than the standard cross-references. The chain references are just that: you go to the alphabetical index to find your subject, (which there are listed around 4,400 different topics) and you go to the first reference, and simply chain through the scripture references. In other words, they are cross-referenced in sequence order! The topics are as detailed as "blue" and as extensive as "God"; these more extensive subjects are then broken down into various sub- topics. Also, in the back of the Bible, the subjects are listed by title, then all the references are given, and the more main ones are chained throughout the scriptures, and some topics' scriptures are written out in the back also! There are also absolutely no commentaries, nor any conclusions drawn in this Bible! I would 100% recommend this Bible (in any version you use) for those of us who love many, many cross references, and believe first and foremost to compare scripture with scripture (1Cor. 2:13) in Bible studies. For those who like this, this Bible has everything!

I purchased my first Thompson Chain Reference Bible as a new believer back in the 70's. It was and continues to be the best study Bible for those who desire to search out the Word for themselves and compare scripture with scripture. And, the extensive Bible study helps in the back of the Bible do add a rich dimension in addition to the topical chain references.

I was a little concerned about the "new" TCR's as several reviewers mentioned degradations in quality and I certainly didn't like the thin glossy paper I saw in the hardbacks in the bookstore. I was delighted today when I received my large print deluxe leather edition Bible.

The Bible I received has excellent flat, opaque Bible paper perfect for note-taking. And, the binding appears to have stitching in addition to the glue, so I'd say the quality of the binding is fine and should serve one well for years.

One caveat in regard to the large print edition--It is LARGE! Not the print (it's 9 point instead of the regular 8), but the Bible itself. It's not so unwieldy that I would think twice about using it, but if size is an issue for you, check the dimensions and choose accordingly.

I can't say enough good things about this Bible. It has my highest recommendation; you won't be sorry in choosing this Bible.

This tome purports to explain why GWB is a talented leader of the American people and the world.

In fact, it demonstrates conclusively that the American people suffered a collective fit of halluciantion when they voted this incompetent man into office.

The book has some nice information about Crawford, Texas and the Bush's dogs -- but it does not tell us anything about the psychology of the Boy Emperor. Perhaps this is becuase the BE has no particular psychological nuance to display? Perhaps.

Leadership, as Fred Nietzsche once opined, is about breaking the rules when others think that rule breaking would be a mistake.

Bush's "leadership," as noted by the author, consists of learning the rules and efficiently applying them with charm and gingerly worded disinformation. Then again, maybe the book isn't half bad. I learned how to be manipualtive and nice at the same time.

There are so many wonderful leaders out there and many books about what they do. Oh yes, this book is about what Goerge W. does but most important for me, it tells step by step how I can be disciplined like he is and develop my personal core values and hold people accountable, etc.

If you want to enhance your ability to lead - read this book. Mine is covered with notes and I bought one for each of my staff!

I am an avid reader of biographies and this book provided a biographical sketch of President Bush's lifestyle and then used that foundation to show how his management skills transformed his life. I grabbed a pencil and highlighter half-way into the first chapter and began writing in the margins. I liked this book because I could open to any page and find a nugget of information with a down to earth example. Some of the examples were just real funny and actually made me laugh out loud.

Then after reading the first few chapters, I realized that this book was not about President Bush's politics (although there was some strategies revealed) or about his faith (although his personal convictions are the heart of his core values) or even about his IQ level (his emotional intelligence is recognized as highly intuitive). This was a book was about how an average person can become the leader they want to be.

I finished the book quickly from a purely biographical point of view and now am going back over each chapter to concentrate on the leadership competencies and how I can learn from the examples. The authors know what they are talking about but they also made it real easy for the reader to put into practice the lessons that need to be learned.

After reading this book, I also came to appreciate and admire President Bush and how his personal discipline is one of the timeless principles of his leadership. I am glad that I read this book at this time in history.

As this posthumous collection of essays suggests, Weaver felt most at home writing about the old South, which was his birthplace, the topic of his dissertation, and the subject for which he reserved his highest praise.

To Weaver the evils of the world were rooted in modernism, industrialism, materialism, and nationalism, all of which he blamed on Union victory. At one point Weaver even asserted that total war -- war unrestrained by chivalry or other ethical restraints -- was a northern custom which had led to the rise of National Socialism in Germany.

The stark line Weaver drew between South and North, with divergent and logical worldviews ascribed to each, was for him the line between good and evil. In reducing every issue to either-or, Weaver oversimplified his subjects, so that his essays resemble legal arguments: Haynes v. Webster, Thoreau v. Randolph, Lee v. Sherman, Emerson v. Warren. In each case, Weaver's preference is obvious.

I found the strongest essays to be in section one, about southern literature and the Agrarian writers. Here are many useful and profound insights that time has not diminished. When Weaver leaves his specialty, however, his comments are less persuasive, amounting to sweeping sociological observations and cheerleading for the old South.

The converse of Weaver's feeling at home in an imagined South is feeling alienated in an imagined North. Although he spent most of his career teaching literature at the University of Chicago, he isolated himself from the city both physically and intellectually. Perhaps if Weaver had made more effort to adapt, he would have left us a richer legacy, one less marked by decline and defeat.

I admire Weaver's work a great deal. He should be praised for showing, from a conservative perspective, the limitations of capitalism, industrialism, and modernism, limitations which are more often the outcry of the radical left and dismissed as anti American. He would have been wise to consider also the limitations of the old South. I am less willing to blame today's discontents on Union victory. In Weaver's rigid arguments, moreover, there is little to be learned about the vital American principles of acceptance, pluralism, and compromise.

Sometimes it is difficult to sort out the contradictions in Weaver's work, but I prefer to keep in mind his comments from Ideas Have Consequences: Piety accepts the right of others to exist, and it affirms an objective order, not created by man, that is independent of the human ego.

In short, if you are a friend of the South, or would like to read the words of a man who can explain the conservative axiology, this book is for you. The contents are essential for anyone seeking a neoclassical education. For me, reading Richard Weaver's Southern Essays brings together the final sentences of Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily."

"Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair."

The book is a monument to Lee and Jackson. Anyone who wants to understand Picket's charge needs to read this excellent book.

This is a marvelous book, and a marvelous collection of essays, written by a clear and conscientious southern conservative. Richard Weaver was heir to the Southern Agrarian tradition of protest and opposition to the directions modern American society and politics was taking, particularly in the New Deal and post WW II eras. Writers like John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Allan Tate, Caroline Gordon and Robert Penn Warren, were caustic critics of modernity, of the decline in community, and a sense of the common good. Weaver, an english professor who might better be described as an intellectual, lived, learned, and worked in this tradition. Of all the essays in this collection, all of which are well written and thoughtful, two stand out in my mind. His essay on 'Lee the Philosopher' captures the pragmatic and common-sense spirit of southern political and social thought. Southerners felt little need for abstract theorizing, or great theoretical and philosophical models. Simple, everyday ideas, the ideals of common sense and everyday life, were more than enough for the down-to-earth farmers and planters of the American South. Weaver does a brilliant job of portraying Genl Lee as the epitome of the southern ideal of both gentlemanly duty and social thought. The second wonderful piece is 'The Two Types of American Individualism'. Weaver contrasts the individualism of a character like John Randolph of Roanoke, a fixture on the Virginia political scene in the early 1800's, with the individualism of Thoreau (and by implication the North). Randolph was a supreme example of an eccentric indivdual. He had bouts of insanity throughout his like, fought duels, appeared on the floor of Congress with his hunting dogs, jug of hard cider and his slave attendant, and refused to toe the party line. Yet, when the needs of his community demanded, or the society in which he lived was threatened, he was willing- even eager- to rally to the cause and defend it, despite his personal believes and misgivings. Weaver felt that Thoreau, on the other hand, with is notions of civil disobedience and voluntary taxation, put the individual ahead of the community, and would refuse to defend anything that was not justified according to his principles and beliefs. This was recipe for chaos and disorder, and disintegration. Weaver leaves no doubt as to which he preferes. The division between community and tradition, and individual liberty is a fault line that continues to run through American political and social ideas. Weaver, in powerfully defending tradition and community, has been one of the men shaping current political discourse, particularly among the social conservatives and in the religious right. He deserves to be read.

Professor Thompson writes a very thought provocating book filled with his personal philosophy on model building. It should be taken seriously though, since Professor Thompson has a great deal of experience consulting on real problems particularly for the US Army.

I recommend that the reader go through the preface. It is not the standard preface that outlines the text but rather it introduces arguments justifying the approach. In the preface he describes the Monty Hall problem. This is a wonderful problem for illustrating the subtleties of probability theory. Many mathematicians (including thee famous Paul Erdos) were led to incorrect solutions through probabilistic arguments. Although a careful mathematical treatment would lead to the correct answer, Professor Thompson points out that the easiest way to be convinced of the correct answer is to simulate the game.

The text is fairly technical and is meant for the applied statistician with a strong mathematical and statistical background. For the right audience it is a very entertaining book.

The philosophy is very similar to the philosophy of Efron and other resampling statisticians who see the value in the use of intensive computing to replace analytical methods when the analysis is difficult. The book covers many of the computer-intensive methods that are currently popular including the EM algorithm, Markov Chain Monte Carlo (Gibbs Sampling) and resampling methods including bootstrap. Monte Carlo methods are introduced early (after discussing pseudo random number generation) along with various techniques for variance reduction in the simulations. Then a variety of models and interesting practical examples are presented.

The presentation is not very systematic which may be unsettling for some readers. However, I think it is worth the effort. Any statistician with a broad range of consulting experience will appreciate and relate to Thompson's ideas.

I was asked to review this book for an Industrial Engineering Journal and in so doing I took a much closer look at it. I have not changed my opinion but am even more impressed with what Professor Thompson has written so concisely in a book of only 284 pages of text. In addition to providing the philosophy of a statistician and scientist with a wealth of experience, he makes several points that I find that I agree on with him. It is interesting to note his comments on high dimensional computer graphics and even one of his favorite tools non-parametric density estimation in high dimensions. On both topics Professor Thompson feels that the curse of dimensionality is difficult to overcome and we need to pay attention to useful models to guide us in the analysis. He has similar distrust for neural networks and fuzzy set theory. Exploratory analysis with no guiding model is fraught with difficulties!

Although the title is "Simulation", don't get the idea that this is a typical traditional text like say Fishman. Thompson covers many of the same topics but in different and interesting ways. For example the chapter on random quadrature covers most of the Monte Carlo techniques that one can find in Hammersley and Handscomb but he demonstrates the methods as ways to approximate integrals of functions. Although this was an early application of the Monte Carlo method, it is not what we typically do in simulation. But these techniques are still useful and regaining popularity when intensive computing is involved as comes about with bootstrap or Markov chain Monte Carlo. He also shows graphically the pitfalls of some pseudorandom number generators but does not get carried away in the quest to test randomness, a trap that too many of our colleagues fall into.

As Pieter van Gelder pointed out in his review, Thompson stimulates us with some examples of how Monte Carlo methods can readily attack solutions to differential equations such as in the gambler's ruin, the Dirichlet problem and the Fokker-Planck equation.

Thompson's strength is his knowledge of nonparametric density estimation and stochastic processes. Areas in which he has done a great deal of research.

Several authors including Thompson and Dudewicz have noted that the nonparametric bootstrap suffers some because of its discrete jumpy nature. If the distribution that one is sampling from is known to be continuous then smoothing the empiric distribution before resampling makes sense. Dudewicz refers to this approach as "the generalized bootstrap". Thompson and Taylor put a great deal of effort into such a resampling algorithm and named it SIMDAT. Section 5.3 addresses this approach. Thompson also presents SIMEST an algorithm that develops a likelihood function through simulation to then find parameter estimates that approximately maximize this likelihood. He demonstrates this with an oncological example of a stochastic model for tumor growth.

Other very practical and interesting examples of simulation in the text are rank testing for high-dimensional multivariate statistical process control, models for stocks (using geometric Brownian motion)and other problems in finance.

A whole chapter, Chapter 10 is devoted to resampling-based testing of hypotheses and Chapter 9 "Bayesian Approaches" covers Gibbs sampling and Markov chain Monte Carlo. Ideas of experimental design and response surface optimization are covered in Chapters 10 and 11.

Unusual for a statistics text is Chapter 8 that deals with the mathematics of Chaos theory.

Chapter 12 should not be overlooked. This puts many of the techniques together in the study of the AIDS epidemic. This is an endeavor that Professor Thompson has put a great deal of research effort into and his finding about the effects of the homosexual bath houses is very informative and enlightening.

This is a great book for statistician, operation research analysts, scientists and engineers. It contains some valuable material and philosophy that you will find nowhere else!

I found Thompson's book a pleasure to read. I was amazed to find out that difficult mathematical problems (such as the Gambler's Ruin problem, or Fokker-Planck's model) can be analyzed much easier when a microaxiomatic format with a simulation flow diagram is derived. Thompson uses a very clear style to explain things. Geometric Brownian processes, resampling-based tests, multivariate procedures and much more interesting stuff are treated in this book. People who are interested in the possibilities of problem-solving by simulation (more than in the mathematical fundaments of simulation) will find this book useful. For sure I am going to use simulation in my research more than I used to do...

Not all the Civil War was fought in Virginia. The vast expanses of the dry Southwest were claimed by the Confederacy. Here, in this harsh land, Paddy Graydon, an Irish immigrant and veteran Army man, recruited a company of Spanish-speaking recruits to harass the Confederate invaders. The Apaches, the Spanish and the rebel Texans met in bloody struggle. The true-life Old West shootout that ended Captain Graydon's outdoes anything thought of by Hollywood.

The Iowa Breeding Bird Atlas presents the first detailed state-wide survey results for breeding birds. Detailed species accounts are provided for more than 150 birds known to breed in Iowa. These are accompanied by maps showing the distribution of the birds. Several introductory chapters summarize information about the vegetation, geologic origins, and history of the state. Summary statistics include tables showing the most common species, the most frequently confirmed breeding species, and correlations between species groups and the different landforms. The data in this volume includes key information on both common and rare species. This book is an excellent reference for anyone interested in birds or bird atlases. The species accounts are extremely well-written and informative. I highly recommend this book.

This text was assigned as required reading for a public administration course. I found the book to be easy to read and it gave a great deal of information on the NPR. I found it well worth the time.

I purchased this book expecting it to cater to someone beyond University level. However, the contents clearly cater for high school level learning and therefore provided little value to me. If you are looking to strengthen your technical and analytical skills look somewhere else. If you want basic training, give it a try.

This insightful book proved worth its weight in gold. A must read for any entrepreneur looking for serious funding.