Urban growth is pervasive. It can be as benign as following the signs to new housing tracks on weekend drives or discovering that old downtown buildings are being reused with trendy lofts. Is this growth simply the result of a free market at work or is it the result of a specific agenda created by a powerful lobby for the purpose of influencing politics? The Jonas and Wilson text explores through a compilation of scholarly essays, the urban growth machine thesis developed by Harvey Molotch over two decades ago.

It is a great reference point for practicioners, scholars, students or individuals interested in reading about one of the field's seminal arguments explaining urban economic development. As a graduate student I found a great reference point in my research. The reference section alone is worth the purchase. It is a great day for the serendipty of research when you can find a compilation of essays, both critical and supportive, of this major theme in the field of urban affairs.

I think the book did an excellent review of an interesting case. The authors insite into the background of the "burn abuser" was the best i have ever seen.

I am an adult college student...I used to use the Ziggy planners in high school and I have found them so useful for keeping track of special projects and homework assignments. The week is laid out onto two pages so it is easy to keep track of semester weeks and testing as most professors map out the class schedule on the first day. I highly recommend this planner for grades 7-12 and above. And for those college students who are a little older like myself: Ziggy is a fun character who reminds me to stay young at heart!

A deeper look at what it takes to raise respectful, responsible kids. Not the "10 Quick Steps to.." kind of thing, but a thoughtful and comprehensive discussion of developing good character thoughout all of life and with the help of family, school and community. Offers badly needed theory to the whole character education movement that is popular right now. A philosohical book yet very practical, a spiritual book without being religious. Some parts are really beautiful to read. Inspiring for teachers and perfect for administrators or for a graduate student studying education who want to understand the moral side of education.

I loved this book! It is full of such heartwarming stories
and presents research in such an enlivening way. I have added this book to the collection I keep on my bed table and it always inspires me and seems to be just what I need when I look through it. As a therapist, family educator and most importantly, a mother of young daughters, I highly recommend this book to any person who hopes to contribute to the education and character building of a child.

This book give readers the answer to the question "Why is character education important?" It should be read by all educators, every single parent, and everyone who hopes to be a parent someday. To my knowledge, it is the most comprehensive book out there to date on the topic of character education. Readers will learn about programs that have been implemented all over the country to help students "cultivate heart and character." It provides a wealth of information about what is currently happening in the field of character education. After reading this book cover to cover I felt inspired, energized, and determined to make a difference! Read this book, and then GO MAKE A DIFFERENCE!

This is a very good book for those in the military establishment to study and heed. One point though, it is quite complicated to follow and requires a bit of technical knowledge of simulations and how the military runs exercises in order to fully grasp RAND's conclusions. Not for the faint of heart or curious reader.

Dr. Molander et. al. do an outstanding job bringing home the dangerous reality of warfare in the information age. The scenarios are well-designed and plausible, and the entire work is engaging and readable.

This book is relatively well written and well thought out.
IT contains usefull samba information. Here is what I didn't like.
I felt like half the book is dedicated to setting up interfaces to configure and maintain samba, ie SWAT and Webmin. WASTE OF TIME!!!! There are plenty of more in depth issues that I felt this book didn't cover in greater depth. I was recently in a situation where I had to integrade a Windows 98, Windows 2000,NT 4.0 and AS/400 clients with a SCO Unix Server. There were many authentication issues related to Windows 2000 that the book didn't cover. If you are a windows admin and you like flashy interfaces and you are just looking to set up simple file sharing between Unix and smb clients. Then get this book. It will help you do that. However, I don't think the text delves deeply enough into the integration challenges that Unix/NT admins face everyday. Overall a good book. But too much focus on web tools and not enough on scenario planning and architecture. Another problem with this focus is alot of people understand the classic unix approach.
The /etc/smb.conf file is very straight forward and self referencing. I find it much easier to deal with that file and not have to worry about all sorts of flashy stuff that take the focus away from the task at hand.
Making windows clients happy.

Only a 3. This book has some interesting topics about it, most has to do with Administering a Samba Server from the Web. Not from a Prompt. I was looking for more of a "Tricks of the Trade" kind of book. But this one does have some good points to it about web administering. But, what happens when the web is broke?
You are going to SSH into the box and fix it from a prompt not from a Web Page. Otherwise this book IS GOOD but not GREAT!

Very Very Good Book!! Beyond Excellent!! Beyond 500 stars!! I am very new to Linux and this book made it a breeze to get Samba running. Very refreshing to see such a useful reference tool available for the Linux community.

The appeal in this Julie Andrews biography is the amount and quality of the pictures it includes. The book covers her childhood and then divides her career into Broadway, Movie and Television sections. The text is somewhat basic; informative but not very in-depth. Robert Windler's book is much more informative as to Julie's career and an older book that only goes through 'The Sound of Music' concentrates much more on her childhood and Broadway career. The Arnzt/Wilson book is a good overview of her life and career and the pictures are truly superb!

If my house was on fire, this is the one book I would grab. The pictures are outstanding, the book features much information about her early career and lots of memorabilia from her childhood years. These are not the overused pics of Julie that we all see over and over again. Not sure why Julie had it pulled from the shelves, but I would certainly describe this book as a love story to Julie from Arntz and Wilson. This book just warms my heart.

Julie Andrews. The world's most beloved singer and actress. The darling of entertainment closest to our hearts. But, there is just one problem. When the world thinks of Julie, they immediatly think of Mary Poppins (for which she won an Oscar) or Maria von Trapp. Nothing annoys me more than that. People can't seem to undertsnad that hse is NOTHING like Mary Poppins! The only thing I think they may have in common in they are both good with children.
I encourage all of you out there to read a Julie biography book! Heck, maybe I'll write one! But do yourselves a favor and get this book! Learning about the fascinating life of Julz Andrews will be something that will both surprise and capture you- you will NOT regret it!

While I haven't had the pleasure of having Buffa for a professor (and by all accounts I'm planning on avoiding it), the book really isn't that bad. The sample problems are helpful and the escalating difficulty is appreaciated.

The downside is that he tends to get bogged down in little details that aren't really as important as he makes them out to be--especially considering that the book is for people who don't need calc-based Physics (read life science majors, and all non-science related majors who need a GE), and occasionally the problems seem totally unrelated to what has been presented in the text.

Still, as far as text books go, this one isn't bad and if you have a good teacher to go along, it'll serve you just fine.

One of this book's authors is a professor at my university. While he himself did not teach my physics class, he definitely conveyed our school's philosophy of "learn by doing" through the use of numerous pictures, diagrams, and straightforward exercises at the end of each chapter. I thought the book explains the general ideas and concepts of physics very well, without requiring a calculus background to understand the material.

Physics is a difficult subject. This text does an admirable job of making a difficult subject easier.

There are advantages and disadvantages to disallowing the writer to use calculus in writing the material. Some formulas require calculus to derive and so must be either taken on faith as true, or the derivations looked up in a calculus based test. Fortunately the times when this issue comes up are few enough to not seriously hamper the flow of the book.

This book may be read as a first book on Physics. I strongly recommend the book Conceptual Physics by Hewitt for a running start at the subject.

Members of the lay public interested in physics may read both of these texts, as they are at introductory level and contains material on classical as well as modern physics.

The units are in SI ( metric ) which simplifies the math.

The Wilson and Buffa text has Color photos of natural phenomenon and situations that illustrate the physics under discussion. There examples are intermixed throughout showing how to work problems involving the principles involved.

I believe this book is an important part of a well rounded education. Physics is NOT an easy topic. If it were, then Newton would have developed theories on relativity and gravity waves. This book does what it was designed to do, that is assist beginners in starting their journey.

I read the book. I found it to be fun.

Katherine Rogers
Yes, Real girls do physics.

This is really a reference book without much in the way of advice or strategy. It does literally what the description says and nothing more. This book was written by and for the man who is clueless about lingerie and is petrified at entering a lingerie store. If you have little fear of such stores and can read the Victoria's Secret catalog, you may not have much use for this book. I spent a fair amount of time trying to find something in this book that was really useful to me. About the only thing was the size guide. The book is fairly brief and the publisher/author made it push over 100 pages by including a wide flowery graphic in the margin of each page, leaving only half the page available for text. Do I need to be told that department stores carry lingerie? No. Do I need a brief history of lingerie? No, but it is interesting. Do I need 'bra' and 'panties' defined? No. Do I need a comparison of retail shopping versus mail order? No. The author defines all the basic lingerie items, but unfortunately uses hand drawn graphics rather than actual photos. In the section on mail order sources, the author lists just three: JC Penney, Spiegel, and Victoria's Secret. How about Frederick's of Hollywood? Or Sears? He couldn't even fill up the page with all the well-known sources, let alone find some we haven't heard of!

This book got me past the confusion about shopping for lingerie. My wife was very appreciative (know what I mean!). I recommend this book for any guy who wants to give a lingerie gift in the right size, color, etc.

Do others ever misjudge you? Did you, as a result, ever have a nickname you didn't like? Did you appreciate that experience? How did you overcome it?

What if you had been switched in the baby nursery at the hospital for another child? How might your life have been different?

These are the kinds of thoughts that will occur to you as you read Pudd'nhead Wilson.

I was attracted to the story after reading about its genesis in the new illustrated biography of Mark Twain.

Pudd'nhead Wilson is tragic story about the consequences of two children being switched at birth in the slave-holding society of the American South. Those who admire the eloquent portrayal of common humanity among African-Americans and whites in Huckleberry Finn will find more examples of this point to delight them in Pudd'nhead Wilson.

Pudd'nhead Wilson was a novel that gave Mark Twain a great many problems. The book started as a short story about Italian Siamese twins with a farcical character, as the drunken twin caused the Prohibitionist one to get into trouble with his woolly headed sweetheart. As Twain turned the story into a novel, the most important characters began to disappear in favor of new characters. Stymied, Twain realized that he had written two stories in one novel. He then excised the original of the two stories in favor of the tragedy, while leaving many satirical and ironic characteristics. Part of this switch no doubt related to Twain's growing pessimism as he grew older and to the personal tragedies and financial difficulties dogged his efforts and life.

Perhaps it is this deep plot difficulty that caused Twain to leave the novel with two rather large flaws, which vastly reduce its effectiveness. The first flaw is building a plot around switching two children at birth to establish that perceived racial differences and slavery had been unjust. Unfortunately, the "bad" actor in the novel turns out to be the irresponsible Tom Driscoll (ne Valet de Chambre), who is 1/32 African-American but is raised as a white free man. Thus, those readers who wish to believe in racial differences affecting character can point to that underlying racial factor as still being present in explaining the misbehavior in the story . . . despite what appears to have been Twain's opposite intention. Had Twain developed his story to make the false Tom morally equal to his all-white counterpart Chambers (ne Thomas a Beckett Driscoll), the story would have worked much better in condemning racism and slavery. The second flaw involves having the story turn on establishing the unchanging nature of finger prints in a trial conducted in a small Missouri town many decades before that point was scientifically proven and legally accepted.

For us today, the story moves slowly because we know all about fingerprints as a means of identification which makes much of the eventual resolution easy to anticipate, and also because Twain left many unnecessary remnants of his other story in the book.

Despite these weaknesses, the Pudd'nhead Wilson has many brilliant sections that strikingly portray how the concepts and realities of slavery corrupted both African-Americans and slave-holders. Because of thefts in the Driscoll household, the real Tom's father threatens to sell his slaves down the river (a fate to be avoided). When three of them confess, he agrees to sell them locally. Frightened by the potential for her child to be sold in the future, Roxy plans to kill herself and her son. By accident, she realizes that she can successfully switch the two children's clothing, since both of them look the same to Tom's father, and ensure that her son will never be sold, because he will be raised as the master's son, a white person. Many of the ways for rearing white child are bad for Tom, making him spoiled and disagreeable. Chambers does much better on a simple diet, and from performing physical labor. Tom is arrogant and nasty. Chambers is uneducated and cowed. Later, when Tom realizes that he is 1/32 African-American, he begins to behave as a slave would towards white people.

But the story is much broader than that. Pudd'nhead (a derogatory term somewhat like "featherhead") Wilson is thought to be a fool by the townspeople because of something he said about a dog when he first came to town. Because of that perception, his legal career is delayed by 20 years . . . even though he is actually quite bright. In other areas of the story, a man dresses as women and a woman dresses as a man. A thief has his booty stolen from him, so he is also the victim. In many ways, the story reminds me of Shakespeare's many comedies and tragedies about misperceptions being harmful to all concerned.

Although you will not think this is one of Mark Twain's best books, it is one that will encourage you to have many valuable thoughts about questioning labels and assumptions that we apply to one another. For example, if someone is not very quick to grasp certain widely-accepted points, we may feel the person is stupid. The person may actually be able to grasp many nuances that make the situation ambiguous, and be the opposite of stupid. Or someone who is slow in one way may be a positive genius in other ways. Yet a label may be attached that is the opposite.

Keep an open mind, and observe vastly more about what is going on . . . and be able to create vastly better results!

Pudd'nhead Wilson
By Mark Twain

To keep her son from being "sold down the river," Roxy, a woman 1/16 black, devises a way for her son to grow up with all the privileges of 1830s white society. But questions as to underlying nature of the boy, born Valet de Chambres and now called Tom, soon arise.

David "Pudd'nhead" Wilson is a well-educated man who found a place in Dawson's Landing, Missouri, not as a small town attorney, but as the local curiosity. He earned his nickname due to his strange and frivols hobby of fingerprinting his friends and neighbors, keeping the glass slides carefully labeled and filed.

The melding of Pudd'nhead with the plot of the story comes late, and to modern readers, the way in which a murder is solved comes not as a surprise. It is, however, an interesting enough piece of history, recorded with care and style by Twain. The most amusing and enduring portions of the book are the random quotes taken from Pudd'nhead's calendar. They include nuggets of wisdom such as "keep all your eggs in one basket... and watch that basket!"

This book takes thought to read. As slim a volume as it is, each chapter takes quite a time to work its way into your brain. And Roxy's speech, written in Twain's famous dialect spelling, can make you set aside a whole afternoon just to grope your way through. But if you find your lips moving don't worry. Each word is important, and there is little in each short chapter that is not necessary and interesting.

I found Roxy to be the most compelling character. Her life in and out of slavery is one of a mother trying to do right, a woman trying to live her life, and an unfortunate pawn in the manipulative world that judges her only by her lineage.

To the 12 year old who wrote the review giving it one star. I am very surprised, but not entirly. At your age a book such as this would obviously not make since, if an adult reads this book you are gaurenteed to roar with laughter. Mark Twain does not write with the slapstick humor which today's youth find so very funny. It is true that the first chapter is mainly description, but that is only setting the stage of the story and by the end of the chapter Twains humor has already emerged, i highly recomend Pudd'nhead Wilson. "nothing in life is harder to deal with than the annoyence of a good example" -Pudd'n Head Wilson