There's no other collection of poets and poetry like this one. It's a continental view of the way a collection of creative minds saw the world at the end of the twentieth century. This book includes poems by some of our leading poets: Dana Gioia, John Knoepfle, Philip Miller, Anne Youngs, Stephen Wright, Glen Sorestad (poet laureate of Saskatchewan), Bill Cowee, Shaun Griffin, Ursula Carlson, Tom Whitehead, Yvette Schnoecker-Shorb,
Paul Dilsaver, Hank Hurley, Tony Clark, Jim Harris, and many others. This is a collector's item that will grow in value.

'American Racer' by Steven Wright is the most comprehensive and thorough book about motorcycle racing available.The text is accurate and very educated. The photographs are both stunning and rare. We had to recently replace our copy (due to mindless lending!) and we searched relentlessly until we found a way to order this book. It is well worth it, especially if you or someone you care about loves American Motorcycles as much as Steven Wright!

Where can I find the pictures from the book ONLINE? Please be helpful

..pacing, time, and distance. I focus on the starter, centered on his moves, I open the throttle..full. My motor launches, as from a catapult, almost ripping loose from my hold. My timing is of the essence, I see it, a flash from the starters gun, perfect timing. Cutting a hole through the pack of my competitors we have the lead. Full open throttle, and our speed is still increasing. We climb the boards, centrifical force pushing, I use the 62% banking as ammo, in my fight against force, and speed. Wreck ahead, I see both riders going down. Their machines wobble, ones going over the top, the other hits the boards hard. Splinters are flying, I partially close the throttle, and pick my path to avoid hitting downed riders, debris, and the broke-up motorcycle. Having no brakes, transmission, or other means of slowing down quickly I jockey clear of all...

To me, reading this book is like transporting in time. I become there. The year, 1912. The track, St.Louis, Missouri. The sport; Board track racing. Motorcycle racing, performed on tracks of wood. From 1/16mile in length, to 2 miles. Speeds reached in 1912? Lee Humiston, on Dec.30, 1912, at a 1mile board track in Los Angeles, became the first American motorcyclist to travel at 100mph(Excelsior).
This book to me, is a key. This key unlocks many, many, whys.

This book is great. I thought I would have trouble finding info on a bike i picked up used but I was wrong. This book has EVERYTHING you need to know and even a few extra tips.

This is a very inspirational book for all boaters. It was very entertaining and informative. It is a lovely adventure to Florida making it apparent that Yes anyone can capture their dreams.

..you will love this book. From the banter between the sailor husband and the vacationing wife, to the struggles with demanding draw bridge attendants, you will find yourself wrapped up in their adventure. Included in the book are interesting breakdowns of estimated and real costs along with recommendations on places to stay and see. Mr. Watterson proves to be a good story teller keeping you afloat from front to back. Try it, you'll be hooked.

One of the best books I've ever read. Do yourself a favor and get this book. I finished the book in a day and a half.

James Griffin uses drugs, not to forget the Vietnam War, but to remember. Home, in the United States, James finds life rife with loneliness and alienation. The Vietnam War, he tells us, really didn't mean anything; all of the fighting was, and will become, fruitless.

James' girlfriend, Huey, is a painter of sorts who paints graffiti on walls, graffiti she calls "soulographs." These soulographs are huge abstractions of the war. James' wall is covered with them, so he whitewashes all of his walls and asks Huey to paint something new. But while she is in the process, the old soulographs begin to bleed through, causing James to experience a flashback to his Vietnam years where he imagines himself in the middle of battle with flashes and flares and rifles all around.

In a surrealistic and utterly brilliant and original manner, Wright manages to show us all the similarities of the Vietnam War and life as we lead it on a day-to-day basis. His protagonist, James, realizes these connections and begins to meditate, to escape these similarities, to escape the absurdity of life, both then and now.

Meditations in Green is a highly symbolic and surreal book. Wright, one of the most brilliant and original writers of the twentieth century, writes this novel in a very elusive manner, using very elusive narrative strategies and structural principles, organizing the book in interesting, overlapping, spiraling circles, which often echo, duplicate and bleed through one another much in the way Huey's soulographs do.

By attempting to devolve himself down to a plant form, James hopes to purge himself of his memories and antipathy towards nature and its eternal cycle of birth and death and rebirth. He is, like all of Wright's characters, very flawed, but these very flaws are what make him so human and let us identify with him and his sufferings.

Stephen Wright is a brilliant writer, but one whose extremism has caused him to be sadly undervalued by the general public. For some reason, I don't believe Wright care much about this. We should care, however, for Wright is brilliant, original, creative and absurd. His books are surrealism, black comedy, absurdism and postmodern literature of the very highest order. Wright is a writer not to be missed by anyone even remotely interested in great literature, postmodern or otherwise.

The fact that this book is receiving so little attention encourages me to start a ten-page rant, but as that will never be reproduced, let me just say that it's an absolute travesty that this author is being essentially neglected.

Any comparison to Mailer or Vonnegut or O'Brien is absolutely superfluous. This is a unique American voice, a John the Babtist crying in the wilderness and feeding on locusts, but the blind will never hear. This is an Artist in the strictest sense who moves and shapes print in ways that others cannnot hope to emulate. I have no reservations in raising his standard in whatever rung of hell we find ourselves in at present. This is the real deal, people. Put away your childish things and read the message of a true modern prophet, crying from the confines of Hades, urging us to at least look closely at ourselves, even if it drives us mad.

Wright has shown himself to be a writer of the first order with MEDITATIONS IN GREEN. You follow a path of unsteady characters and numerous potholes to a profoundly sombre conclusion: we are all broken people.

If you are an avid reader of business self-help and motivational books, which I am, you should pick up any of the Mission Possible series. I recommend Volume Three with Stephen Covey, Deepak Chopra and others. This book is not a deep study of one particular business topic. Instead, each author tells their story of success from their own perspective while focusing on their particular business expertise. By the time you're read all twelve authors, you've got a plate full of new insights and inspiration. I like the intervew format. It's a quick, easy read. Great for airports and soccer practices.

If you are looking for that special holiday gift, Mission Possible, Vol 3, is it!! The various authors provide meaningful guidance about life, living, and inspiration. It is a quick read, that you will want to read and reread.

The latest volume of the book, MISSION POSSIBLE, was one of the most uplifting and positive reading. I am currently living with an incurable disease, and the sharing of all the authors in this volume were very inspiring and let me know the Truth of my being, That I am truly whole, perfect and complete already, right where I am in my Path on this planet.
I have also heard two of these renound speakers, in person, and in my opinion, they indeed "walk their talk". I am greatful on this special Thanksgiving.

John Rossetti Deerfield Beach, Florida

This book by Nocedal and Wright has several attractive features. For one, it is probably the most "state-of-the-art" of the existing texts in optimization and as such covers most of the modern methods. It also has a nice section on LP (simplex as well as interior point methods) for someone interested in a course on optimization as opposed to NONLINEAR optimization (which is what I was looking for). Another strength is that it covers many of the algebra-related details very well. My only major complaint is that it seems to not get into any of the methods designed specifically for convex programs - these while admittedly less general are often very powerful. For example, there is NO mention even of Geometric Programming which has wide application in design. The convex simplex method also isn't mentioned anywhere. Finally,I wonder why there is no mention of the generalized reduced gradient (GRG) method.

All in all, a good book to own I think...

The book does a very good job in teaching non-discrete mathematical programming techniques. But, it is not an introductory book. The reader is supposed to know linear algebra and numerical analysis to a certain extent. Most of the modern techniques are presented, but the layout is a little chaotic- the sequence of subjects could be made better. So, I would have preferred to give it 4.5 stars (which is impossible). However, that does not take away the fact that the book is excellent. I have used it primarily for modelling financial portfolios, and I am sure it can be used as a guide for other applications.

Conclusion: A little difficult, but well worth the time and money involved

The fundamental concept that assets are worth what it costs to create them is useful, but this book suffers from a fatal flaw in miscounting the cost of creating assets, particular intangibles. The authors correctly assert that the "goodwill" created by companies like Microsoft must be offset by "badwill" in the long run. However, Tobin's-q, similar to a price-to-book ratio using "mark to market" variation of book value, does not properly measure that. The flaw rests in the fact that the "badwill" does not appear in assets worth more than implied by the market value of their owning company, but in money paid to employees to develop drugs that don't work and software that did not become a best seller. That is to create Microsoft, investors threw money at perhaps 20 other companies that did not generate assets. The net-asset value of these companies does not reflect what was put into them, because that money was paid out in salaries or opportunity cost of founders and workers who forgo salaries. Thus the authors metric is biased towrards understating the cost of creating new companies, so their valuation of the stock market should be regarded as a lower limit.

Smithers and Wright have written a very compelling indictment of today's stock prices. They argue that prices are way too high by historical standards, and exhort us to SELL. This is the same conclusion reached by Yale Professor Robert Shiller in his new book "Irrational Exuberance"; however, Smithers and Wright are much more convincing.

Smithers and Wright use as a measure of valuation for stocks a statistic called "q" (or Tobin's q, named after Nobel laureate and Shiller colleague James Tobin). q represents the value of equities divided by the cost of replacing the underlying capital stock. So you might expect the stock market to be worth somewhere near q=1, where companies are worth what it cost to build them; historically, the average value of q is near 1.

Smithers and Wright show that changes in q and equity prices are almost identical, since the cost of replacing the capital stock changes so little. They also show that high values of q are associated with terrible subsequent returns. They show how a simple strategy of selling when q rises to 1.5 and buying again when q falls below 1 * trounces * a buy-and-hold strategy. And they top it all off by showing that today's level of q, around 2.5, is unprecedented. So SELL!

The reason the book is so much better than Shiller's is that Smithers and Wright give a coherent, fact- and theory-based argument for why q should be used to value stocks, not just P/E, stock earnings yield compared to bond earnings yield, or other popular measures. Shiller just used P/E and told us to sell due to today's high P/E; he did not even consider, not to mention try to debunk, other theories of valuation.

Smithers and Wright point out, for example, that in the early '30s, P/E was very high due to the depressed depression-era profits of companies, but that q was very low, providing the buy signal of a lifetime that would have been missed by looking at P/E alone.

The only negatives of this otherwise excellent book are: (1) Like most finance books, this one would gain from adding computations of after-tax returns, which shift us away from fancy trading strategies and towards buy-and-hold in taxable accounts. (2) They should admit that there are significant differences between today's economy and economies of the past. For example, in an economy such as ours where intellectual property is paramount and provides barriers to entry, firms' values may stay above the cost of replacing capital.

This is far from the dry boring stuff that is usually written on finance. The authors produce an extremely convincing and logical argument that the stock market is overvalued. This is based on comparing Tobin's q to its long term average. Tobin's q is based on flow of funds data and hence overcomes the problem of looking at corporate data. They also discuss other valuation techniques and explain their strengths and weaknesses. The book is full of interesting insights. I particularly like an example they use to demonstrate the power of compund interest. A gem of a book and well worth reading what ever your view on the state of world equity market.