I think this would have been a better anthology if the editor had spent more time finding sources. It doesn't really seem like he searched lesser-known documents; just about everything here is pretty well known. The quality ranges from excellent to somewhat pointless.

I purchased this book without having any firsthand knowledge of it as a background source and I haven't been minutely disappointed. Kadzis assembled both primary and secondary sources either from the time of the Civil War or from more modern secondary source writings about aspects of that war. In any case the extracts were singularly well chosen and are valuable for my purposes. I would recommend Kadzis' compilation to any person searching for a single source of Civil War rememberances written at the time or of modern fiction writers using the events of that war around which to build their longer story. The writings he has selected are very useful and interesting.

This book is in a series put out by Adrenaline books and each book contains certain selections chosen by the editor. The selections are generally either excerpts from books, excerpts from diaries and journals, short stories, or an occasional essay. I look at how good the writing is, and how good the stories are.

This is a strong anthology in many ways. It had a variety of civil war literature that helps to give a fuller picture of the civil war experience. There are many letters, stories, and diary entries and even a copy of orders given by a General. We get a picture of the inner workings of the war by people directly involved, as well as a picture of the world outside the war and how it was effected. We hear aspects of the war from multiple points of view. A soldier's fighting experience, a General's commanding view, letters to loved ones back home, the viewpoint of a young southern girl, life in a military prison. The reader gets to see not just the war, but the world it encompassed.

The anthology is made even stronger by the selections of famous people's writings. We get to read the words of General Ulysses S. Grant, Stephen Crane, Generals Pickett and Sherman, Abraham Lincoln, and even Walt Whitman (who worked in the hospitals treating wounded soldiers from both sides).

The only negative thing about this book is that it has no amazing powerful pieces. Almost all the selections are good (with two or three exceptions), but none are outstanding, in terms of either the writing or the story. There are no exceptionally well written pieces and no really incredible stories. This is unfortunate, but does not detract too much from the overall book. And also this volume includes some fiction, which generally does not exist in these series of books. Other than that the book is good and worth reading.

Williams' book makes an interesting read, yet, based on an evaluation of one area of his "research," he was a fantastically sloppy "scholar." Williams claims that, among other things, the psychic Edgar Cayce plagarized Blavatsky and Donnelly. Williams also states as a fact that the Cayce readings contained the name "Churchward" many times and that over 30% of Cayce's readings concerned Atlantis. In fact, Edgar Cayce wrote no books, not a single one of Cayce's nearly 15,000 readings ever mentioned the name "Churchward," and only 4.9% of Cayce's readings mentioned Atlantis. Williams seems oblivious to the fact that references he cites as Cayce's readings were books written by the psychic's son, Edgar Evans Cayce. This occurred despite Edgar Evans Cayce stating repeatedly that the psychic Edgar Cayce was his father. He begins his book by stating that he values truth, but it seems to be a "truth" that he's peddling based on his beliefs. Many other areas of this "academic" textbook are riddled with distortions and sloppy research that cross the line of incompetence. Yet, for those interested in gaining a background of information on some of the incredible claims often made in archaeology, the book can be useful. However, the reader should understand that Williams does not portray the fringes of archaeology either factually or fairly.

This is a great book on the area of pseudoarchaeology in North America. It is one of only 2-3 on this subject, and with the various wild claims of prehistory, such books need to be read. I do wish the author would do an updated edition, as it is a little dated.

An excellent introduction to the history of American archaeology, starting from the decidedly crackpot side. This book fascinated me because the first half took place in my home state -- Ohio -- and involved sites within easy driving distance! I had no idea the lengths to which people would go in order to "prove" one theory or another.

I was disappointed by this book. Most of the space is taken up by a listing of the Swing class types and parameters. Whilst the annotation is useful, and the book is distinctive in it's reference style, the information is too focussed on a method by method rather than "how do I do this?" types of questions.

If you already have David Geary's Swing book and the O'Reilly book, this adds a small value but get those titles first.

Definitely for the advanced Swing user (or someone who feels they are done with tutorials), I have been finding this book a useful reference.

The inheritance diagrams are a great help, along with the table of Look and Feel keys in the appendix.

Though this book is not nearly as useful as other Swing books when it comes to learning hoiw things work. It is organized so nicely that referencing things is often faster than it is in the online docs. Not my favorite book, but well done and original. I recommend it only for veterans. Also its the only book that covers all of the Basic PLAF (I would have given it 3 stars if it didn't have this).

It is incredible how they trust blindly in EVERY aspect of General Relativity. Space-time warpages and singularities happens ONLY in mathematics! There is no way out. It is funny how Scientific American gives credibility to such a kind of science-fiction. It is time to stop lying to the public!

Hawking and Thorne, grasp it: Time-travel is physically IMPOSSIBLE.

Time travel appears pretty impractical based on this book. Maybe it's mathematically possible to fold time and punch wormholes in it in theory, but I don't think NASA or Greyhound is going to be offering trips back and forth through our lives. However, it's always intriguing to read what really smart people come up with, because they make a lot of it seem so obvious, even though I could never come up with it on my own.

I'm usually wary of books that are collections of essays, especially essays by several different people. Like many such books, The Future of Spacetime is something of a hodgepodge. Still, when I saw that the authors included Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, Timothy Ferris, Alan Lightman and Igor Novikov, it seemed to be worth taking a look. That decision was very well rewarded.

The five essays in The Future of Spacetime were first presented as talks for a celebration of the 60th birthday of Kip Thorne, a leading theoretical physicist. Three of them, plus a brief introduction by physicist Richard Price, deal with relativity, and especially with the possibility and implications of "closed timelike curves" in spacetime--time travel for short. In addition, Tim Ferris writes insightfully about why it is so important for scientists and science writers to do a better job of informing people about scientific theories and discoveries, but even more importantly clueing them in about how science works. He points out that it may take 1,000 years for a concept to penetrate to the core of society. Since modern science is at best 500 years old, there's lots left to be accomplished. Alan Lightman, who is both a physicist and a novelist, beautifully describes the creative process that lies at the heart of both science and creative writing. Scientists and novelists, he argues, are simply seeking different kinds of truths.

The three physics essays are gems. Each sheds at least some light on the nature of spacetime, on the possibility (or impossibility, or improbability) of time machines and time travel, and on intimately related issues such as causality and free will. Novikov, for example, concludes that the future can influence the past, but not in such a way as to erase or change an event that has already happened. Hawking argues that time travel is happening all the time at the quantum level, but that nature would protect against an attempt to use a time machine to send a macroscopic object, such as a human being, back in time. I was particularly impressed by Kip Thorne's essay, in which he makes a series of predictions concerning what physicists and cosmologists will discover in the next thirty years. He explains the importance of the gravity-wave detectors that are now starting to come on line. They promise to let us read the gravitational signals of such primordal events as the collision of black holes and even the big bang itself. It is as fascinating to get to piggyback on how these great minds think as it is to read their conclusions.

In short, The Future of Spacetime is a bit of a salad, but an extremely delicious and satisfying one.

Robert E. Adler, author of Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation (Wiley & Sons, 2002).

if you're like me and need some extra practice on verbal reasoning then i would definitely recommend this book. it's not too expensive and it has 3 full length tests plus some other tips to boost your score. i mainly bought it for taking the practice tests and found that tips for reading speed are fairly ineffective. you can either read quickly with absorbtion or you can't. i found that the tests are pretty close to real mcat passages but maybe a bit easier.

The book offers extremely valuable practice for the MCAT verbal section at a very reasonable price (three full verbal sections and various other passages and questions throughout). However, the tips given to improve reading speed are not effective given that most people start studying for the mcat only a few months before the actual test. If verbal reasoning is your weakest point, then this book is a GREAT place to start. The more practice you get, the better off you will become. Good Luck.

This book is a great find if you are studying for the MCAT. I have found it difficult to improve my reading speed and comprehension studying on my own and even using a prep course. This book gave me new and real strategies to significantly improve my verbal reasoning. I am scoring much better on practice exams after working through this book. I even had fun working through it!

This book made it point in the first 3 chapters. They also add useless software to drive the price up. Their coverage of basic marketing and the 4 P's is done ok but the book just drags on and on. Their readable examples are great. What they need is minimal theory, lots of examples and NO SOFTWARE in a 200 page book for $19.95. Then this would be a good book.

You know this book could have been nothing more than a glossary of definitions, a few summarys and outlines of the 4 this or 8 thats and it would have been much more interesting. The material in here is so basic and simple that I do the reading and don't feel that I have actually learned anything that wasn't fairly obvious to begin with. The examples are relevent if you happen to be a really slow learner and need 3 page explainations of 2 sentence definitions.

This is a fairly comprehensive fundamentals of marketing book. It is laid out well. It begins with an elementary explanation of the marketing discipline and its relationship to society. This is followed by an explanation of the ingredients in marketing strategy planning. Following this section, the author addresses the external factors that affect marketing decisions. This is followed by a discussion of demographic and behavioral deminisons of the customer. Then, the author catergories different type of customers. The next chapter presents an elementary review of marketing research. The most of the remainder of the text focuses on the 4 Ps--Product, Place, Promotion, and Price. This is probably the strongest part of the text. Throughout the text the author incorporates global and ethical issues that relate to the subject matter of each chapter. This is an excellent text for a principles or fundamentals of marketing course.

the different slides in the book specially philippine editions are not complete and obsolete and should be further revised.

If one is looking for a microbiology text that contains clinically relevant information, diagnostic approaches, and tests need to specify and diagnose an organism, then this is the one book that you need to get. Things like molecular basics in bacteria, viruses, etc are not extensively covered, but the text is clinically oriented. I would recommend this book highly to anyone in the medical/clinical field as well as to clinical pathologists.

The recent edition of the "Color Atlas" is the standard by which all other comparable works must be judged. The volume should be the standard reference for both laboratory personnel and clinical microbiology educators. Previous reviews to the contrary, charts and figures represent the current state of the art in microbiologic taxonomy and identification methodology. The book is highly recommended for both professional microbiologists and for the interested layperson with a background in biology, chemistry and pathology.

Kerry Snow, Section Leader, Clinical Mycology and Myobacteriology Laboratory, Walter Reed Army Medical Center

Ted Williams book, the science of hitting, is a good book. This one is not. Mr. Ferroli has a rigid view of what a good swing should be. There isn't just "one" right swing and a good swing is only one important facet of being a successful hitter. I have boys who play in little league, high school, and D1 college. The ideas in this book are so off-the-mark that I literally threw the book away so my boys wouldn't read any of it. It is that bad. Just my opinion, but if your looking for good books on the swing: stick with Williams book, books by Dusty Baker (for the beginner), or Charley Lau Sr. book. Those are some of the best.

it is a good book. It tells the fundamentals and good ways of hitting the ball. And being a playerthat used to not hit too well, I am saying this is the book to get if you are looking to hit better.

Steve Ferroli has been personally selected by Ted Williams as his "technical successor" - Steve is a really first-class dedicated hitting instructor. Steve is the head of the newly formed Ted Williams League for youth baseball, and this book is his presentation of the Ted Williams approach to hitting. The book is well done, with tons of photographs and diagrams - and a Foreword by Ted Williams himself.

Anyone wanting to learn better hitting should definitely pick up this book. It also presents some of the latest theories of the Ted Williams League, such as the 14-inch plate for youth baseball. Even if you're just a fan and not actively trying to learn better hitting, this is quite an interesting book with many insights into baseball, and hitting in particular. Highly recommended.

--Bill Nowlin, co-author (with Jim Prime) of TED WILLIAMS: A TRIBUTE

Ockham is generally said to be a difficult philosopher. As the translator says in his introduction, one does not read the Latin of Ockham; one studies it. So it helps little that this book gives such a small selection of Ockham's works. Harldy enough to give the reader even a vague idea of Ockham's stance concerning universals. Because translations of Ockham are hard to find, or very expensive, this book has its place (it is often the only translation that can be found in libraries), but it would be best to buy a single, complete work of Ockham and to read that.

This is a good sampling of important exerpts from Ockham's writings dealing primarily with metaphysics and ethics. It is useful in a course on medieval philosophy or on Ockham in particular.

Ockham is an important philosopher who's nominalism can be reasonable viewed as the beginning of british empiricism. It is the shift from the metaphysical realism of the ancient and medieval worlds to the nominalism and mechanistic understanding of human beings that is essential for understanding the difference between early and modern world views. Ockham's volunterism in ethics is also the foundation of the Protestant reformation (at least Luther's reformation) and also for the moral relativism of modern ethics, especially Hume.

Needless to say, I am in sharp disagreement with Ockham and find that his approach is fundamentally wrong and his criticisms of Scotus' realism rather weak. A good read on the influence of Ockham's nominalism in breaking down society is Louis Dupre's "Passage to Modernity." Check it out.

This volume contains a nice amount of material for anyone interested in trying to read and understand Ockham's thought. The introduction is a nice treatise explaining the contents and providing the reader (especially the beginning reader) with a good explanation of Ockham's work. The book itself contains these particular philosophical works: 1) The notion of knowledge or science, 2) epistemological problems, 3) logical problems, 4) the theory of '[supposition,' 5) truth, 6) inferential operations, 7) being, essence, and existence, 8) the possibility of a natural theology, 9) the proof of God's existence 10) God's causality and foreknowledge, and 11) physics and ethics. So as you can see there is enough that is provided in this one volume to give any reader a better grasp on some of the things Ockham taught and espoused. If you are interested in Ockham's logical treatises (which is one of the things he is best known for) then I recommend Alfred J. Fredosso's translation of "Ockham's Theory of Propositions: Part II of the Summa Logicae" which is also available here at Amazon.

I sure hope Schanuel wrote this book and the publisher simply tacked on
Lawvere's name for marketing purposes. This text is a fantastic
example of why research mathematicians should not write for John Q.
Public. The random, pointless examples scattered throughout the book
remind me of the "word problems" that were so popular in high school
algebra texts written after the Chicago School hijacked the educational
textbook market.

After teasing the reader with examples of real mathematics, e.g.
Pick's Formula, the authors stop short of actually proving a theorem
and scurry back to their shelter of objects and arrows where they can
safely field trivial questions by ersatz students with politically
correct names.

Perhaps Category Theory is just not something that is accessible to the
general public? High school math teachers (I assume one intended
audience for the text) that can achieve even the slightest appreciation
of why Eilenberg and Mac Lane invented Category Theory are surely as
rare as rocking-horse poop.

What I would really like to see from someone as eminent as Lawvere write a
first year graduate level book that covers elementary set theory and/or
logic using Category Theory. Translating Model Theory and Topoi(1.) to
this level would be a good start. College math professors are really
the only people in a position to understand and transmit this beautiful
theory to aspiring mathematicians.

1. Model Theory and Topoi, Lecture Notes in Mathematics 445,
Springer-Verlag 1975

Keith A. Lewis ...

As a topic in itself, category theory should need not to wait until grad-level to be described just because that may be when category theory's power can really begin to be exploited, but unfortunately, most of the category theory books I have looked at presume that level of mathematics.

Similar to what other reviewers noted, I would also say that this book demonstrates the potential of creating a good high-school/undergrad level intro to category theory. But unfortunately, that potential is not quite realized here.

There are hokey intermittent "conversations with students", as a tool to describe ideas, that are more distraction than aid. Some of the examples given are rather condescending in their simplicity. Yet, at other times the authors seem to breeze through more difficult topics with little or no examples. And the organization seems erratic - there is no clear sense of a gameplan as to where they are leading the reader or how all the concepts fit together.

Functors are surprisingly almost glossed over, as if they were relatively unimportant. There are exercises throughout the book, but with no answers provided, they are not really very helpful.

Having said all that, with some focused effort on the reader's part, the ideas do come forth, and admittedly, the authors do cover a fairly broad spectrum of aspects of category theory. This is certainly a non-trivial topic to try and teach, and an introductory book cannot be faulted for not carrying every notion to the nth-degree of either breadth or depth.

Category Theory is one of those topics that (to me) appears 'ho-hum' until you see it actually applied to various topics. The authors have necessarily had to perform a balancing act between describing concepts while not getting caught up in excessively complex examples. I think this will leave many readers less than satisfied, but realistically, the book would have been twice as long had they really delved deeper into examples (or they would have had to be very terse in the actual descriptions of category theory, which is the choice most authors writing for a more mathematically-inclined audience seem to make - e.g., _Mathematical Physics_ by Geroch (good book!) or _Basic Category Theory for Computer Scientists_ by Pierce).

If you are mathematically astute, you probably will find this book tedious. But if you are not a grad+ math major, then this book may well be worth the effort as a way to begin to learn a very profound and powerful set of tools and concepts.

There is a wonderful course in category theory for high school students, just begging to be excavated from this multi-layered book.
Please don't be put off by the disjointed and uneasy combination of materials that cluster around certain themes. You know you will have a lot of work to do when the same definition (of monomorphism) is presented both on page 52 and also on page 336.
With all the elementary themes covered in many varying ways, it would be best to consider this book as having been structured as a retract for which your job will be to construct the appropriate section.