The best daguerreotype portraits are some of the most striking photographic likenesses you'll ever see. Talk about verisimilitude: Those who posed for daguerreotypes in the last century seem about to start speaking, or to step right out of the image. The pictures are practically holographic in their three-dimensionality, and you feel you could almost reach out and touch the faces captured therein so long ago. The generally small size of the images doesn't detract from the experience; in fact, like the finest Mughal miniatures, the reverse is true. As you draw close to the frame, you find yourself entering the daguerreotype's exquisite little world. The experience is enhanced by the thought that, since daguerreotypes are positive images, the photograph before you is the only one in existence.

A daguerreotype's power is greatest when you're seeing the actual image before your eyes, of course, but the reproductions in this beautifully designed coffee-table book, many of which are reproduced in actual size, are so stunning that you're truly getting the next best thing. Here you'll find likenesses of some of the most famous figures to traipse through the 19th century -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jenny Lind, Tom Thumb, James Whistler, Dorothea Dix.

The author, Melissa Banta, a kind of curator-at-large at Harvard, was not content simply to ferret out all daguerreotypes then existing at Harvard (over 450 images, some of which are seeing the light of day for the first time here). She delved into the often compelling stories behind each image's creation, life history, and curation. In lyrically written short essays, we learn how the first daguerreotypes of the moon came into being in 1851, why Louis Agassiz had daguerreotypes taken of slaves forced to disrobe, what Harriet Beecher Stowe was thinking at the time her likeness was taken, why Asa Gray collected daguerreotypes of his fellow botanists (all images that appear here).

In short, this is a coffee-table book with substance and personality. It will serve as an excellent introduction to daguerreotypy for the layman, and a must-have compendium for the avid daguerreian. Highly recommended.

Reading this book will definately slap some respect and reality into people, especially the North American denizens.

Having some rules and ethics from other countries will disipline the world with cooperation and peace.

In their classic studies of political culture, Almond and Verba attempted to use "civic propensities" to explain the stability of governments. There method was quite groundbreaking, for comparative political scientists of those times were heavily into analyzing constitutions. But just reading these legal documents was not proving much explanation for social changes. This was the context in which their work progressed. In the opening chapter of the Civic Culture, Almond & Verba define a civic culture as "a pluralistic culture based on communication and persuasion, a culture of consensus and diversity, a culture that permitted change but moderated it" (pp. 6). For them, Britain and the United States were prime examples of such cultures. The reason was that the citizens of these countries operated in a culture with a highly effective set of orientations towards politics. These orientations include a tendency to have pride in one's government and expect good t! reatment from it. Citizens of a civic culture operate under a myth of sorts-they are not actively involved or interested in politics, but they believe that "the people" are politically powerful. There is just the right mixture of pragmatism and emotional commitment.

This book provides several useful ways to understand the phenomenon of political participation -or the absence of it. Verba and his collaborators examine several variables that encourage people's involvement in politics, showing clearly that if differential rates of political activity reflect not different motivations, but differential resources, democracy is potentially threatened. The book is theoretically and empirically well-grounded -two characteristics of Verba's previous work that appear here again. In spite of being concerned exclusively with the American case, I think it will be a worthy reading for any person interested in politics in other countries, as it was for me.

This book is the typical fake statistics written by political scientists who do not know that they are talking about to political scientists who will never know about the true statistics. Do not waste your money and time on such junks. Another book to avoid: unifying political methodology by Gary King. Spend your money and time on books written by real statisticians instead. Learn first hand from those who know.

Many books contain errors --usually typos or other small ones. The book by King and others, however, really takes the biscuit, by making fundamental malinterpretations of statistics and methodology. The book aims at proposing a research methodology for both qualitative and quantitative research. The result, however, you wouldn't want to show to your undergraduate students. The most annoying malinterpretations for a social scientist are probably the following. First, relying on Pearson's 1892 (!) monograph, King e.a. state that method is more important than content of science. Apparently, nothing more has been learned in the last 120 years. Second, correlation is malinterpreted as causation. This is something you can't take for serious, especially when it is proposed in the introductory chapters and heavily used in the rest of the book. Third, some assumptions are proposed that your data should meet. These assumptions only apply to some sense to the statistical 'ordinary least squares' (OLS), but even in stats or econometrics these assumptions can be by-passed by using other estimation techniques. Furthermore, how would you test homogeneity in your cross-section when your qualitative reseach focuses on, e.g., motives of actors, while you cannot categorise that variable? Fourth, decision rules are proposed for 'constructing causal theories'. King e.a. seem to unconsiously mislead the innocent reader by mixing the concepts of 'hypothesis' and 'theory'. Fifth, some more assumptions concerning data quality are heavily misleading, and at most apply to OLS, but can easily be solved by using other estimation techniques. Some last bloopers: 'A research desing that explains a lot with a lot is not very informative' (p. 123); this is nonsense as long as long as your degrees of freedom are sufficient, and you don't face multicollinearity; 'Abstract, unobserved concepts [...] can be a hindrance to empirical valuation [...] unless they can be defined in such a way that they can be observed and measured' (p.109). This statement completely ignores that research on latent variables as, e.g., done by Maddala or others in the 1980s and more recently.

In sum, if you wish to buy a book on methodology: buy a book on methodology, written by a methodologist, and not by some political scientists. If you wish to get some introduction into the field of statistics or econometrics, then buy ANY other book that has a title as 'introductory econometrics' or similar. In either case, don't spend your money on this one.

Hands down, this is one of the best texts of qualitative methodology available for the political scientist. The ideas and arguments made in this volume are very pertinent to study creation. Moreover, King et al. are both willing and able to criticize one of the most common logical fallacies that we find in the literature: the misuse of inference. What my colleague from the Netherlands overlooks is the clear and oft-stated differentiation between correlation and how it applies to THEORIES OF CAUSATION. By not reading the text in a clear way, my colleague has also confused the issue of theory vs. hypothesis as well as the focus of the work on testing hypotheses derived from theories objectively. The mathematical notations used are SPECIFIED as only being applicable in the abstract. In fact, one does not need the math to understand the points made. Moreover, my colleague notes that there are some problems with categorization, despite the fact that King et al acknowledge that if you can't categorize it or find data on it, then you should change your hypotheses and try again. Quite honestly, I question whether or not this gentleman bothered to read the book. I don't see how the points made in this volume could be any clearer. I would recommend this book to anyone seeking an all encompassing approach to qualitative analysis. However, if you are a person that sees little or no value to testing theories or are very polarized in the qualitative vs. quantitative debate, then you are most likely better off reading a good novel than this book.