If you love the Great Plains and have a heart for the prairie, this book will delight you. The photography in here is outstanding. After working with buffalo earlier this year, this was a book I had to get. Some of the photos, including the cover photo, bring not only the sights but also the smells and sounds of the giant herds to mind. These photos are worth more than 1,000 words... because they speak to my prairie heart.

I can't remember the last time I read a book so useful and so much fun at the same time. This is a sweeping tour of decision making chock full of insight and information that makes you laugh out loud (usually at yourself!) How nice it is to read a book that doesn't assume the reader is an idiot, too. I can think of about a dozen people I'd like to give this to for Christmas.

The author analyzes Third Reich public opinion, politics, and propaganda to challenge some widely-held beliefs about the role and effectiveness of propaganda in reinforcing consensus the among the German people.
Viewing propaganda in the light of the total takeover of the media, the omnipresent atmosphere of terror, and the progressive madness of Nazi ideology, Welch inter alia finds that the support of the Nazis and the war was more apparent than real, and that Goebbels' campaigns became less effective as the war wore on.
Very readable; essential for students of the Third Reich, and the role of propaganda in the totalitarian state.
(The numerical rating above is a default setting within Amazon's format. This reviewer does not employ numerical ratings.)

Good book for the person who loves a large amount of information on Pez. If you are mainly wanting a guide and pictures I suggest "Collectors Guide to Pez : Identification and Price Guide
by Shawn Peterson". Welch's book gives a LOT of history about the company which may not be appealing to everyone. It focused mainly on history and older pez items than trying to cover Pez in general. Gives a lot of information you won't find elsewhere. The size of this book can prove intimidating to the novice collector :)

There's a lot of good information in "Collecting PEZ" by David Welch. Unfortunately, you'll have to wade through a lot of irrelevant stories and details to find it. As someone who has been collecting PEZ for years, I would recommend this book only to the very serious collector who's geniunely interested in how the PEZ company evolved into an international candy conglomerate. For the beginning collector, I would recommend Shawn Peterson's "Collectors Guide to PEZ," which contains more photographs and more current information.

David Welch exhaustively investigates the history of PEZ in the US through interviews with former employees of PEZ and early distributors. Included are a price guide; a PEZ timeline; and hundreds of pictures of the dispensers, the people, and the places that are PEZ. In addition, Mr. Welch has assembled one of the largest `paper' collections of PEZ related ad sheets, displays, and premium offers found anywhere in the world and adds many prints from his personal collection giving the reader a true feel for the evolution of what has become one of the hottest collectables today.

To American history buffs, the name of Ishi may strike a familiar note. In 1911, he stumbled out of obscurity into newspaper headlines. For years he had been in hiding, the last surviving member of the Yahi Indian tribe. Hungry and confused, he turned up in a slaughterhouse in Oroville, California, looking for food. It was some time before authorities could piece together his story. His real name was never known: "Ishi" was a name given by the Indian's kindly benefactor and friend, Dr. Alfred Kroeber of the University of California at Berkeley. "Ishi" was the word for "Man" in the Yahi language.

Collins and Bergren share Ishi's story in a smoothflowing narrative, beginning with the Indian's appearance in Oroville, flashing back to his years as a boy and man, then closing with his final years living at the California Museum of Anthropology in Berkeley. Nicknamed "The Wild Man of Oroville," the lone Yahi survivor emerges as a gentle, kind person with curiosity and quiet demeanor. Clearly, his years of growing up were painful, his people fighting a losing battle against the determined "saltu" - white people, who wanted land, land and more land. As hunters and fishermen, the Yahi were masters. As warriors, they seemed less able.

"Ishi, the Last of His People" offers a sympathetic look at a most unusual member of history's cast of characters. Pluses to the book, in addition to the ample bibliography and index, are a timetable of Ishi's life and a glossary of Yahi words. Although aimed at a young person's reading level, the book is an interesting "read" for any age.

The only minus in the book is the collection of illustrations, which are mediocre at best. The volume would have been a five star rating, but the drawings are relatively lifeless and add little to the text.

This Is a great book for pictures of dispensers that you have heard of, but never seen. Or if you need PEZZY pictures for any reason, this is the place to get them!

This is an accurate accounting of how Welch ruined the very heart and soul of a wonderful company--one which employees were proud of their association before Welch. I worked many years for GE, both before Welch was CEO and after, and the book read like "this is your life". It is so sad that other executives appear to be on the edge of their chair waiting for every word spoken by Welch and to learn from him the theme of the year or the latest corporate slogan to espouse. I do hope this book becomes a best seller as it would give me confidence that more people would understand the depth of the problems Jack has created. And lastly, I would hope that our business schools would make this required reading to best illustrate how NOT to run a business.

The public perception of Jack Welch's tenure at General Electric has been that he focused business effort on his company's core competencies, and thus rewarded the long term shareholder with great financial returns. Tom O'Boyle peers behind the curtain to reveal the darker side of Wizard Welch and his disastrous tenure at one of America's great industrial treasures. Yes, Welch increased GE's stock value; but Welch did it with a draconian management style that failed to pay all of the bills along the way. It is easy to look rich when you don't pay your bills.

O'Boyle identifies some of the unpaid bills, including:

1) The human cost of GE's massive layoffs througout the 1980's. Welch embraced and greatly popularized the "layoff" approach to business: lay off bodies, save money, show more profit. But for every dollar the company profited, others lost. Much of the cost of the layoffs fell on individuals, families and communities that saw jobs at US-based GE operations vanish. This caused untold hardship to both families and governments, which had to rebuild shattered lives and communities. Not all survived, literally.

2) Welch took a rich and deep GE culture of research and development into technological fields, and utterly gutted it. GE's R&D abilities formerly covered a spectrum from steam turbines to appliances to jet engines to railway locomotives. Under Welch, GE's R&D arm became so weak and atrophied that the company's product lines lost the once commanding technological lead they formerly enjoyed. The company's future is betrayed. (Not satisfied with merely gutting GE's R&D, Welch purchased RCA and stripped its assets as well. Only NBC television remains in the GE fold as a major, former-RCA asset. Shockingly, NBC spends more each year to broadcast basketball games than GE spends on R&D. It is so sad, when you think that the only man-made object ever to leave the solar system, Voyager spacecraft, carries a camera that bears the RCA logo.)

3) GE's continuing failure to clean up the PCB's and radioactivity it has left behind in its numerous manufacturing operations; while at the same time making a business unit out of cleaning up PCB's and other pollution for other customers. The unpaid bills also do not include the people who remain afflicted with industrial illnesses from their exposure to chemicals in the GE workplaces over the years.

These are just a few of the topics. The book is profound, and will shock the unitiated. O'Boyle is a historian of American industrial history. He takes the reader on a trip through time, from the laboratories of Edison; to the early workshops of Ford; to the mills of Carnegie; to Tom Watson's IBM; to Rickover's nuclear navy; and so much more.

O'Boyle spent eleven years with the Wall Street Journal, and he knows how to dig out the story and tell it in the best journalistic style. Also, as the notes reveal, O'Boyle has met and talked with many of the luminaries and leaders of American and European industry of this era. O'Boyle has captured the essence of an American tragedy, which was GE's abandonment of its research-oriented, manufacturing legacy to satisfy the ego of one man.

Jack Welch started at GE selling plastics, and he has become his own product. It seems that Jack Welch, who came into control of one of the nation's greatest industrial enterprises, really wanted only to run a credit card company as his life's ambition. Today he has his wish, but the nation has lost.

Is the most profitable and valuable US company spiritually dead? That seems to be Thomas O'Boyle's thesis in "At Any Cost." His riveting book is the first that I have read which chronicles the dark side of Jack Welch's restructuring of the General Electric Company. In an introductory note, O'Boyle expresses regret that Welch and other executives "were unwilling to be interviewed" or to respond to his serious efforts to solicit their comments to issues and concerns raised in his book. His note is to explain the extremely negative views of Welch and GE that O'Boyle gleaned from mountains of court and government records and from interviews with restructuring and down-sizing loosers. Predictably, corporate and business reviews dismiss the book as "muckraking." It is also predictable, however, that this book will have an impact on the eventual replacement of Welch and re-restructuring of GE.

Although O'Boyle closes his book speaking of Welch and GE in the past tense, I believe that his objective is to help. If O'Boyle and Welch haven't, I urge these Irish-Catholic gentlemen to read "The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism" by Michael Novak, a leading Catholic theologian. I am not a student of such matters, but Novak's and O'Boyle's books arrived on my bedstand almost simultaneously as result of absolutely unrelated activities. The possibility that this confluence of books was ordained prompts me to share my observations.

So the concept of this book is pretty cool. I know I'm always wondering what the meaning is behind a song's lyrics. *Especially* Bowie's songs because the guy is such an intellectual that a lot of his stuff is filled with crazy references to random philosophers and artists, and a fan like me rarely knows what he's talking about. Jean Genet anyone? Kahlil Gibran?

Unfortunately, this book does a really crappy job of telling the stories behind the song. The author really doesn't know much at all; basically I learned nothing new in this book that I didn't know already. You can find out the same kind of information by browsing around FAQs on the net, or going to alt.fan.david-bowie and asking a question of the people there.

The only thing saving this book from a 1 is that it has pictures, and it takes you along the whole discography path (well, up until 20 years ago at least), and what can I say, Bowie's had an interesting life. If you buy this, though, be prepared to return it... it doesn't do much of a job of serving up the stories.

Before I even owned this book, I knew it didn't deserve 5 stars. A David Bowie book written in 1999 should go a little further than 1980's Scary Monsters! Many Bowie fans will argue that Scary Monsters was his last good album. This statement is prejudice and wrong. Chris Welch needs to realize that 3 pages covering nearly 20 years of music does not earn a book 5 stars. If the publishing would have been delayed a few months, Welch could have written another sentence about "Hours...". However, Welch makes the reader think about things that would usually be overlooked by other biographers. Yet sometimes Chris can get carried away. (My main reason for giving it 3 stars.) For instance, the review of "Fame" is out of control. Now, "Fame" is a great song and deserves a lengthy review since it's David Bowie and John Lennon together. Unfortunately, this certain review is filled with garbage and nonsense. That's the only real bad review in the book that I can recall. Every Bowie fan should still buy it, and there are some quite enjoyable pictures in there as well!

Well, not every David Bowie song, despite what the title says. No, this covers Bowie's RCA period, from Space Oddity up to Scary Monsters. Each section is done per album, and before the song-by-song analysis and description, there is a detailed history of Bowie's life at that point. Bowie's better-known collaborators are given decent print, especially Mick Jagger, Marc Bolan, John Lennon, and Tony Visconti, as are influences such as Kraftwerk for his three Berlin albums, Stanley Kubrick's 2001 for Space Oddity, and George Orwell's 1984 for the Diamond Dogs album. Bowie's inter-album projects, such as his movies and plays are also included in the history. And there's a good deal given about his early life before Space Oddity.

There are certain insights into Bowie concerning his art. He even said, "I don't like a lot of my albums... I like bits and pieces. A bit of it works exceedingly well and a lot of it only works." This mirrors somewhat my feeling on his lesser albums, such as Diamond Dogs and Young Americans, but not on his spectacular ones such as Hunky Dory, The Man Who Sold The World, or Low.

Many of the stories behind the song are revelatory for those not in the know. I wasn't totally aware of the 1984-theme that pervaded Diamond Dogs apart from the "1984" song, but "We Are The Dead" (in 1984, Winston Smith's words to Julia before they are caught by the Thought Police) and "Big Brother/Chant Of The Ever Circling Skeletal Family" are two other songs that contribute to that.

To take an example from my favourite 1970's Bowie album, Hunky Dory, I learn that Bob Dylan wasn't exactly happy with the playful tribute "Song For Bob Dylan" because Bowie referred to him by his real name and described his voice akin to "sand and glue." Ouch! However, as I learned, the song was actually calling for Dylan to go back "to writing songs for the 'revolution' and to scour his scrapbook for inspiration if the muse is not upon him."

And it's peppered with colour and black-and-white photos. At the end of the book, a chronology from 1947 to 1980, and a singles and album discography are included, with song listing and album issues and reissues included, as was done under Ryko for the albums being explored in this book.

In the end, Bowie is revealed as a great songwriter, wordsmith, and artist whose creativity knows no bounds, even if he did alienate many of his fans with his shifting musical directions.

To me this book promised more than it delivered. For a start it
was written in a journalistic style, for example sentences that
were regarded as important were shown like headings in bold type

e.g. "in a journalistic style"

I for one found this annoying particularly as the author is a
professor and should have written a more scholarly book.

The book deals with all of Hitler's life. It tells how he rose to power and once he became Fuhrer dealt more and more severely
with any real or imagined opposition. The most famous opposition
of course culminated in the July 20 1944 bomb plot. His coverage
of this is quite good and he shows that even though Hitler was
not killed the conspirators might have seized power if they had
not hesitated and waited for others to act.
There is a good selection of black and white photographs.