Just confirmed as the seventh Comptroller General of the United States, Walker ads to his impressive list of credentials. This is not another "Financial Planning for DUMMIES",it offers a more comprehensive treatment of the subject matter.

I really found this book interesting from start to finish. There are the usual behind the scenes explanations and in particular the debacle between Michael Grade and the programme is explored in detail.

Personally I found the Colin Baker years some of the most interesting times on Doctor Who. Probably because of when I was growing up I suppose! The stories are described in detail and reviewed by the authors. Revelation of the Daleks (my favourite all time story along with Trial of a Timelord) is chosen for an in-depth analysis.

An interview with Nicola Bryant (Peri) is also included relating to her career and how she saw the character.

It's a good read if you're into the background of the programme.

Having worked at Orbital during the period this book covers, I was shocked at the inconsistency throughout this book. The author writes as an authority on Orbital, but in reality, he has had a very small slice of insight into what went on during that time. Critical events affecting the company as a whole which almost everyone at the company would know about did not show up in this book. For instance, two highly publicized failures of the Pegasus Rocket which occurred prior to the flight of Orbcomm were not even discussed. These failures definitely had some impact to the Orbcomm project. When you talk about Orbital, you talk about an end to end space company. That includes building the satellite, launching it, and providing the infrastructure to control it. The attempt was made at getting this across, but it really did not do justice to that topic. The book should be described as the incomplete history of the design of a satellite, not a history of Orbital. I do have to say that management personalites were described rather accurately. The engineers in the story are really depicted as an inexperienced bunch of kids who came right out of school with their "license to learn" (degree) and were directed to design a satellite system with nothing but their egos. Quite a bit of the book describes the long hours they worked and the stress involved in getting it done. This wasn't a superhuman abnormality in the engineering world at Orbital, as the author would lead you to believe. He could have told us about it in maybe 3 sentences, not 300+ pages. With that out of the way, the author could have brought this history of Orbcomm into recent history, instead of stopping before the constellation was launched. In summary, I have to say this book was a big disappointment. It doesn't do justice to Orbital or provide a consistent picture of the Orbcomm constellation development.

As someone who worked at the 'old' OSC during the time that this book covers, I knew a lot of the characters portrayed here and am acquainted with the Orbcomm story. It's not only accurate but it also tells a lot more about the engineering team and the management of the project than most people in the company knew at the time. Some people fault the book for only covering the time period to the '95 launch, but for the three critical years of the start-up's story, he captures every significant facet. I'm sure some engineers might not be happy with how they're portrayed, but this is not a technical book. As a story about entrepreneurial guts and the essence of engineering it's one of the best. The recent award from IEEE was highly deserved.

One of the most inspiring business books of the past year tells how a little company full of big ideas, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp., got into the business of putting commercial satellites into space. In Silicon Sky: How One Small Start-Up Went Over the Top to Beat the Big Boys into Satellite Heaven, author Gary Dorsey chronicles the progress of a pipe dream as it has evolved into a company with 1998 revenues of $734 million. Orbital founder David Thompson gave Dorsey unfettered access to the company's inner workings -- from the beginning of its efforts to design a commercially viable communications satellite in 1992 through the first launch in 1995. The author clearly identifies with Thompson's entrepreneurial ardor, contrasting Orbital's culture of discovery with the 'feudal,' unimaginative culture of old-line aerospace companies addicted to government contracts. What Dorsey lacks in objectivity, he makes up for in clarity. From his fly-on-the-wall perch, sitting in on company meetings and peering over the shoulders of workers in the lab, he has observed and distilled into concise prose the details that made Orbital's success possible. Dorsey explains the technology behind the business so fluidly that it hardly seems like rocket science. BOOKPAGE, June 1990 REVIEW BY E. THOMAS WOOD

Marcus Hearn's exhaustive research in the early 1990's provides the basis of most of the information in this comprehensive guide to the formative years of Doctor Who, yet nowhere in the book does he recieve even pssing credit. Rather than being presented as a dry 'info-dump',the book's accessibility could have been vastly improved by more user-friendly approach to conveying its wealth of material, some of which is interesting, some mindlessly dull. Unforgiveable, too, is the insulting 'What others said about William Hartnell' section, which is not used in any other handbook in the series, woefully implying some kind of inadequacy, or unreliabilty in Hartnell's own words. Equally annoying are the reviews offered by David Howe for each individual story, which are vapid and predictable in the extreme. He awards 'Marco Polo' and 'The Crusade' 10/10, despite both being broadcast some 35 years ago, claiming 'he really can't find anything wrong' with either story. Is this really the point of being a Dr. Who fan, as Howe claims to be? Strangely enough, the stories that remain intact in the archives (and thus accessible for review) such as 'An Unearthly Child', the classic first ever story, favour less well, suggesting, as John Nathan-Turner once infamously stated, 'The memory cheats'. Although, as usual, it's sheer wealth of information is indispensible, this is by far one of the weaker handbooks in the series.

This book is a must for any Doctor Who fan. From the inception of the show in April 1962 to the end of October 1966, this book looks at the William Hartnell era of Doctor Who. These handbooks are really good. I've only seen these stories recently, but the book brings back the memories of them. It even thoroughly helps out on the missing episodes that can't be seen, by summarising these stories. So you get a sense of how it might've been like to have seen them. The attention to production details is excellent. You learn about interesting facts about the episodes: budgets, originally intended actors, location and studio recordings, original titles, original direction of some stories, etc. The book is divided into 8 chapters: William Hartnell stuff, the Doctor, the stories, establishing the myth, production diary, a focus on the making of the classic story "The Ark", and selling the doctor. The First Doctor Handbook is a great reference source of information on Doctor Who's early years. These handbooks are all great (there are 7 volumes in the Doctor Who handbook series), but the fact is that the first doctor handbook was actually the third one made in the series, published in 1994.

The co-authors trio of David J. Howe, Mark Stammers, and Stephen James Walker have proven themselves to be the definitive historians on the Doctor Who TV series. Besides the handbooks, they have also written three volumes focusing on the three decades of Doctor Who's television run: The Sixties, The Seventies, and The Eighties. I highly recommend all of these books to any fan of the world's longest running science fiction TV series!

I was expecting a book which showed you how to draw beautiful plans and explain the techniques used to produce these drawings. Instead this book hardly touched upon the techniques. This book is nothing more than a collection of copied architectural drawings bound together for display.

I teach Visual Communications at a College of Architecture and find that the 5th edition is a book that is an absolute necessity for anyone planning a future in architecture or landscape architecture. The selection of work represents a great variety of graphic communication techniques for the student and professional to review. The work is slanted to site issues, but can only help to reinforce the integration of site and structure. Not only does it present a variety of techniques, but also a collection of ideas that the student can learn from. It is also a great resource for the practicing professional. I use both this book and Color Drawing by Doyle in my course and find they make an excellent pair.

William Allen, Professor of Architecture, RLA

After reading David Frum's The Right Man, I'm a bit at a loss as to what the fuss was all about. Not to ruin the surprise, but all the Bush-critical quotes you've heard are all that you'll find in the book. By and large, the portrait the book paints of the President and those who toil for him is balanced and respectful, and judging by the apoplectic reviews by the "Saddam isn't evil, but Ashcroft is" contingent, it's annoying all the usual suspects. Good.

In this book, Frum styles himself as a unreconstructed Gingrichite (albeit one largely unmoved by the social issue agenda). Frum supported Bush, not McCain, in the primaries, thus setting him apart from his fellow neoconservatives. But he openly admits he was slow to warm to candidate Bush and his "compassionate conservative" philosophy.

This skepticism is a rising Republican leader isn't a first for Frum. In August 1994, Frum famously published Dead Right, which in its broad outlines proclaimed the conservative movement impotent and the Reagan presidency a failure. This was followed three months later by a 52-seat Republican gain in the House.

Not anticipating September 11th and its "transformative" effect on his new subject is no doubt more forgivable than misjudging the results of a biennial election. Still, Frum's "conversion" to Bush, the palpable theme of the book, is more grudging than it needs to be. Frum goes into a fair amount of detail about the months before September 11, enough to be reminded of how remote the bite-sized politics of that era feels today. Frum's argument was that Bush wasn't doing especially well in 2001, and that he may have found himself a one-termer based on his performance those first few months.

This prediction seems implausible and unnecessarily glum. My judgment then was that Bush did indeed face some stern tests domestically, but the brunt of them would arrive not in 2001 but in 2002 - with ample room for recovery in 2003. As for the charge that little got accomplished in that time, how soon we forget that what we were emerging from: the Clinton era, when virtually nothing got passed in six years. Characteristically, Bush benefited from all the low expectations coming out of the election, when critics pronounced him the functional equivalent of an Italian prime minister whose fractious minority government was near collapse. On this basis, the Washington elite simply assumed he wouldn't bother pushing a big agenda. Their first indication that Bush wasn't playing by the received wisdom was the tax cut, which Bush executed through masterfully - leaving in the dust all the mandarins who predicted in February that no tax cut would ever pass the Senate. Bush's early success seemed like the supreme vindication of the Colin Powell aphorism "You don't know what you can get away with until you try."

September 11 has enabled Bush to transform the Presidency into something more meaningful than it was throughout all of the 1990s, and it's by this measure that the pre-September 11 period (and by extension the Clinton era) seems impossibly small in comparison. Frum certainly isn't the first to posit this transformation, but a few of his insights into this overanalyzed period are worth exploring further.

Perhaps this book's most significant contribution is the author's account of how Bush's views on the wider implications of this conflict for the Islamic world hardened as the fall of 2001 wore on. In those initial few days, the President and everyone around voiced support for Islam as a "religion of peace" (Frum condemns this tack bitterly, but concedes there was probably no alternative to it). By November, Edward Said nemesis Bernard Lewis was speaking to the White House staff and the notion that Israel's struggle against terror was inextricably linked to Bush's war on terror was gaining currency. In a parallel evolution, Bush lost patience with Arafat and instructed his U.N. Ambassador to insert language condemning by name Arafat's own Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade into any new U.N. demand for Israeli withdrawal.

During this time, Frum takes great pleasure in wryly quoting conservative war hawks warning about the next Bush "wobble." After the magnificent culmination that was the axis of evil speech (yes, there's stuff in there about that, too) and Bush's June 24, 2002 call for new Palestinian leadership, it finally sunk in that the vaunted Bush betrayals were not to come.

Frum's most enjoyable and original formulation involves a Civil War analogy. Would our war on terror be a "small war" to restore the status quo ante, as Copperhead Democrats had argued during the Civil War? Or had our enemies already pushed the envelope so far that nothing less than a "big war" - involving a complete social revolution - would be required to reform the slave-holding South/despotic Middle East? However distasteful the analogy, Frum's right: to secure a lasting peace, we have no choice but to attempt Radical Reconstruction once this war is over.

This is the first major work by a true insider from the Bush White House and it paints a very detailed and vivid picture of the nature of Bush's approach to both the Presidency as well as how his White House staff operates.

Frum is a former Wall Street Journal writer and has written on conservative social and political issues. He worked in the White House as a speech writer, focused on economic matters initially and then refocused on international issues after September 11th. While he's philosophically aligned with Bush he nevertheless was somewhat uninformed about Bush both personally and politically when he first appeared on the national scene (weren't we all) and somewhat ambivalent about him when he went to work for the Bush Administration. That sense of ambivalence comes through subtly throughout the book and lends it, to my mind, an additional layer of credence.

The boom is very detailed and wide ranging. It covers policy, Bush's personal leadership style, his political philosophy, the usual White House intrigues--pretty standard stuff for this sort of effort.

Several tings set this book apart, however. One is the simple dearth of genuine, detailed insider White House reporting that has emerged on this administration to date. Frum deftly explains that this is a function of several factors--this White House's penchant for security, the unusually close knit operating structure in the White House as compared to, say, the Clinton era, but most especially the incredible loyalty George Bush naturally inspires. Frum gives this penchant for loyalty the full treatment and it's a fascinating phenomenon to behold in this day and age.

Another truly interesting facet is the ways in which the deep Christian fundamentalism of many bushies affects both the policy aspects of the administration but also--much more interestingly to my mind--the general day to day operations and culture of the White House. Frum also gives this the full treatment and it is, again, a fascinating look at this extraordinary aspect of the current administration.

Frum also gives us an insider's insight into the wiles and intrigues of Washington politics. This is best exemplified in the "Axis of Evil" phrase, which Frum essentially originated (though his actual phrasing was "Axis of Hatred" modified to evil by Bush himself) and the aftermath of Frum's getting "credit" for it.

The only negative I'd voice--and it's why this gets 4 rather than 5 stars--is that Frum inserts himself into the meat of the book a bit too much for my taste. This is neither billed as or written as a memoir as much as an insider takes on the WH--not on Frum. It's a minor quibble but nevertheless a bit less focus on Frum's personal situations would have been welcome once his qualifications, bonafides and so on were established. It's not so much that what he writes isn't interesting (he tales about being a foreign national (Frum's Canadian) working in the White House and the complications that this causes are often interesting and even entertaining, but nevertheless distracting from the main focus of the book.

In the end though it's what he learned about Bush and what he came to believe about his abilities and destiny that are key, and they form genuinely fresh and enlightening look at the man, who he really is, and what he really stands for. What he has to say won't in general shock anybody who's read the title of the book, it's nevertheless firm and thoughtful insight about a man whose destiny is so critical and about whom we really, truly know very little.

Highly recommended.

Throughout this book I found the tone similar to David Gergen's "Eyewitness to Power." Whereas Gergen was trying to fit 4 presidents in one book, Mr. Frum deals only with our current president. That focus sets this book apart.

On the jacket, the book talks about Frum's "honest admiration" for George W. Bush. This might set alarm bells off for some potential readers. It shouldn't. It is easy to perceive Frum's surprise (and he does tell us outright) at feeling this admiration after his doubts during the 2000 campaign.

The book is insightful and intimate. The focus is personal, but you can directly compare this profile with those of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton in Mr. Gergen's book. The observations are of a similar vein. More than that, it is an opportunity to get to know a president who, as Frum admits, is pretty insular. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

I've done extensive usage of this book lately together with Sears and Zemansky's "University Physics". So it has been natural to me to compare the books while using them day by day.
The result has been quite disappointing for me, regarding Halliday's book.
The book is very clear and well illustrated, and can be successfully used as an easy intro to the subject. It is also complete since you'll find all of the classical and modern Physics topics.
But ... but unfortunately in this case easy has meant shallow to me, since it often happened that for a given topic, concepts were given "as they were", with no explanation of the why or how scientists arrived to a given formulation or result. Take the case of Simple Harmonic Motion: x = Acos(wt+f). Although this formula presents no difficulties to me, I wonder where it does come from, how we (humans) first arrived to this conclusion. I had to read Sears and Zemansky to learn that the experiment that lead to this kind of formula includes a simple form of phasors.
The approaches sounds quite different to me: Halliday says "Take it for granted, be faithful", Sears and Zemansky say "This is the proper kind of formula, and you can see why by yourself if you do ...".
This is important to me, since I use to block myself on a concept until I fully understand it.
Another drawback of this book is the quantity of problems at the end of the chapter. In my humble opinion, an average of 65-70 problems are too few (considering you have the solutions of only half of them, i.e. the odd numbered ones).
So, this is my conclusion: easy and complete introduction to Physics, but too shallow to be really useful in a university course.

I used this book in high school for AP Advanced Physics for mechanics and electromagnetics, but unfortunately did not take the AP test. So now that I am in college and am taking physics - only the second semester electromagnetics and optics, guess what, it is the exact same book. I can see how people find the book not very easy to read. I didn't understand much of it in high school. Now that I am taking it for a second time in college though, I can read the book and it makes perfect sense. I skip lecture about 50% of the time, and have a 97% in the class. Problems at the end of each chapter aren't that difficult.

I am a graduate student in physics and I have been a teaching assistant for 3 years now at Iowa State Univesity and SUNY Stony Brook. I have taught introductory physics numerous times and I have teaching experience with this book: IT IS GREAT. It is everything that the students ever dreamed of. Every chapter has really easy to follow explanation of the fundamental theory and numerous step-by-step solved problems and examples. It also has nice boxes with general strategies for solving problems. At the end of every chapter there is an extensive collection of exercises that fit well with the material of the book.

An advice for the students: Dont start doing your homework before you understand the material. I have seen it numerous times, students that have not understood what is really going on, trying to solve the problems. Big mistake. Open the Halliday-Ressnick book, study the material first and then solve the problems. There is a general fear among the students to go through the theory of the book (any book) first and spend some quality time trying to absorb it. They just think that physics is too difficult of a subject and that they wont understand a thing. For that reason they just use their collection of formulae and blindly try to apply it in order to solve the problems.

I believe that Halliday-Resnick breaks this barrier, their treatment of the subject shows how much they care for the student and they do their best to explain things in the easiest possible way.Something that really breaks the ice is a photograph at the beginning of each chapter that shows an everyday phenomenon that will be treated in the course of that particular chapter, like the picture showin a young girl up in the mountain, with her hair floating up in the air! (a dangerous situation as explained in the book), or the explosion of the Hinderburg and also the picture of a man inside a car that is being hit by a lightning without harming the man inside!

As an undergraduate in physics I used this book too for my introductory physics courses so I also have read it from the student point of view. I believe that it does a superb job clarifyng the fundamental principles of physics without difficult or "intellectual-kind" of explanations. It goes step by step building up until you understand it. I also used this book extensively to prepare for the Physics subject GRE test and it helped a lot. I still keep it in my office and frequently look for things that I have forgotten. I totaly recommend it.

As for the mathematical prerequisites of the book that a previous reviewer has commented on I would say that you need to how to solve simple integrals (nothing more dramatic than a polyonym or a trigonometric function or 1/r and 1/r^2) and also it would be nice to know the meaning of a derivative as the rate of change of a function with respect to some variable. Nothing more. Enjoy!

P.S.1 I am familiar with the 4th and 5th edition. P.S.2 There exists a solution manual for the book. Very helpful.

David W. Zang's "Fleet Walker's Divided Heart" is a detailed biography of a talented, tormented, late 19th century catcher: Moses Fleetwood Walker--America's first black major league baseball player. "Fleet" Walker was born in Mt Pleasant, Ohio on Wednesday, October 7, 1857. This simple fact is mentioned on the first page of "Divided Heart." It is from this unassuming birthday that Zang begins his interesting, but confusing, discussion fo Fleet Walker. After mentioning Walker's birth, Zang tries to explain how Walker's life follows the lines of the nursery rhyme: "Monday's child is fair of face, Tuesday's child is full of grace, Wednesday's child is full of woe, Thursday's child has far to go......" According to Zang, "it might have appeared that [Walker's mother], a midwife, used the nativity as a practicum and elected to give birth across the first four days of the week."(2) Following this, Zang attempts to connect the sixty-nine years of Walker's life to the nursery rhyme by saying " For as sure as he carried a full measure of woe, Fleet Walker was unquestionably fair of face, full of grace, and possessed of an ambition that would banish his dreams to distant places....Walker had overwhelmed the simplistic prophecies of the nursery thyme to such an extent that the possibility of a four-day birthing could not be dismissed out of hand(2)." This is only one of many, needless, airy speculations (as another reviewer called them) that wander from the solid facts of Walker's life. Because of these, the true essence of the man, Fleet Walker, is lost in "Divided Heart." The facts of Walker's life are intereting enough without Zang's meandering commentaries. Throughout the book, Zang points to several beliefs he has about Fleetwood Walker. He believes that Walker had a "divided heart," as he puts it; but he never pointedly explains what he believes this divided heart to be. The reader is left to wonder if the divided heart existed because Walker was considered a mulatto (mixed race of black and white), or if the divided heart existed because Walker wanted to belong to the white race and to the black race, but never fully belonged to either. Sometimes, the "divided heart" seems to belong to the author, who never fully explains why the story of Walker's life should be important to a reader today. After reading, it might be difficult for the reader to understand the importance, too. Walker was, indeed, the first black man to play major league baseball. He played collegiate baseball for Oberlin College in 1881, and for Michigan University in 1882. He also played professionally for the minor league New Castle, Pennsylvania, Neshannocks. When Walker began playing for the Toledo ball club of the Northwester League in 1883, the state was set for him to become the first black major league baseball player. How was this possible? In 1884, the Toledo club joined the American Association. At the time, the American Association was considered a major league. In a brief, but unusually clear way, Zang explains the process: "The American Association had been formed in the winter of 1881 with the avowed intent to become a major league rival to the National League, a status it won with an 1882 agreement meant to keep them from raiding National League rosters(40)." Because of the agreement, Walker became the first black major league baseball player. Due to injuries, Walker lasted only one season with Toledo. He never again played major league baseball, nor did any other black man until Jackie Robinson on April 15, 1947. After the first two chapters, which explain Walker's rise and fall from major league baseball, Zang shows how Walker's life turned into an aimless, but somewhat successful life of entrepreneurship, invention, race theory, and jail time. He played more baseball for some minor league teams, ending his career with the Syracuse Stars in 1889. Afterward, according to Zang, Walker did "temporarily lose the attention that had been his... he would reclaim it in dramatic and unhappy ways." Walker became a mail clerk, a murder defendant, a convicted mail thief, an inventor, an author on the subject of repatriation of blacks to Africa, and an opera house owner. Generally, the state of Ohio is shown to be a hospitable home to a black man in the late 1800's. Zang excels in showing the history of Ohio's Quaker population's rejection of racism, and in showing how Walker thrived in several businesses in different towns in Ohio. The last two chapters show how much affection Zang has for Walker. Zang's details in the end give some needed energy to Walker's story. Zang even explains the cost of the lid for Walker's casket. Unfortunately, Zang's writing does not follow a chronological timeline closely enough to be easily read. For clarity's sake, the reader will turn pages back and forth to put events in some order--a job usually fulfilled by an author. "Fleet Walker's Divided Heart" is a complicated, detailed biography of a complicated, historical figure. Too bad Zang never explains "WHY?"

To properly understand the Twentieth Century American civil rights movement, one must understand how and why a similar movement failed during the Reconstruction years following the Civil War. Likewise with baseball history--to properly appreciate Jackie Robinson breaking the major league color line in 1947, one must understand the less salutary 1884 experience of Moses Fleetwood "Fleet" Walker.

Walker, born of middle class mixed-race parents in Ohio in 1857, attended and played baseball at integrated colleges in the early 1880's. In 1883 he left school to pursue a professional career with the minor league Toledo Blue Stockings. Baseball teams of the era determined whether to employ African Americans on a team-by-team basis, and Walker's presence on Toledo drew only occasional attention from fans and opponents.

In 1884 the major league American Association absorbed Toledo as an expansion team. Walker, by then an excellent defensive catcher, followed his team into the Association to become the first black major leaguer. Injuries hobbled Walker, however, and eventually cut his season short. The Toledo club folded after the season.

Walker returned to the minor leagues in 1885, but faced hardening racial prejudice which blocked his return to the majors. In 1889 the minor International League, in which Walker then played, joined the majors in adopting an unwritten, unofficial color line. By then Walker's career was winding down anyway.

Walker's subsequent life defies easy characterization. He patented four inventions, published a book, and owned a successful opera house--but also struggled with alcohol, served jail time for stealing from the U.S. mails, and stood trial (but won acquittal) for his role in a knife fight.

Author Zang integrates Walker's varying experiences into the larger mosaic of declining race relations in the America of his era. Indeed, Zang often ventures too far from the facts of Walker's life--interesting enough in their own right--into airy sociological speculation. He perhaps over-emphasizes Walker's mixed-race parentage as bringing about the "divided heart" of his title. His book nonetheless serves as a valuable testimonial to a fascinating and forgotten life.

Clinical Application of Neuromuscular Techniques is an alternative to Travell's Trigger Point Manual if you do not do TP injections. It has great pictures, well explained treatment techniques (if you are up to date with your anatomy and medical terms) and lots of references. The disadvantage are typos (the editor must have had a bad day and was unable to write the German words for the references right, but also some English words are off!) Parts of the text are repeated in the book twice, what I thought is unnecessary and only adds to the number of pages but not the quality of content.

I used this book as a textbook while at university and found it very helpful. It looks at Computer Systems more from a business point of view than a technical one. It defines 'what is an information system' and then goes on to discuss some typical information systems. The real weakness though is its age - its 1988 release means the information is hardly up to date. Nonetheless, it is interesting to see that some of today's business problems are hardly new - the concept of Office Systems (which is discussed) must surely be the foundation of today's Workflow systems. Despite this, I would recommend it to anyone studying computer systems who thinks it is all about cutting code. ;)