The Lawyer's Guide To Insurance: Personal Insurance Coverage For Professionals And Their Clients is a complete, comprehensive, authoritative survey of all aspects of insurance for members of the legal profession. The various aspects of insurance examined include Insurance Company Solvency; Disability Insurance; Long-Term Care Insurance; Medical Insurance; Homeowner's Insurance; Vehicle Insurance; Personal and Professional Liability Insurance; Life Insurances: Definitions and Purposes; Types of Life Insurance Contracts; Managing Life Insurance; Variable Universal Life: Understanding and Managing It; and Annuities. No law school, law firm, independent litigator's reference shelf would be complete without the inclusion of The Lawyer's Guide To Insurance.

This is a fascinating book which tells you in the most pleasurable way the history of Mexico and how one enduring symbol, the plumed serpent, connects ancient Mexico with modern Mexico. Great illustrations matched by a restrained text makes this a delight to read.

The map guide is a nice compact New Orleans-only version of the larger Let's Go guide for the USA, plus some very handy laminated maps. Its easy to carry this one around and not look like a tourist. The sights picked, often have a good local sensibility about them, in that they may not be typical touristy places.

Harold Norse is the author of 12 volumes of poetry and a novel, Beat Hotel. His selected poems, Hotel Nirvana, was a National Book Award nominee in 1974. His numerous grants include one from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in San Francisco. Of his writing, Christopher Street said: "Norse's work is one of the foundations of a post-World War II tradition that includes the prose art of John Rechy and Jean Genet." Anis Nin wrote "I enjoyed the Memoirs tremendously... So well written so honest.. The Memoirs are a live and powerful". Of his latest volume, Love Poems, Booklist wrote: "A major work of gay literature". Library Journal concurred "An elder statesman of homoerotic verse, making this volume an important addition to poetry collections". And James Baldwin wrote: "If light ever enters the hearts of men, Harold Norse will be one of those who have helped to set it there.

Over the past decade or so, The Beats have become white hot...so much so imitators have come crawling out of the woodwork with their own bad poetry or semi-autobiographical tales of the East Village.

Make no mistake about it: Harold Norse is the real thing...and more. From Barry Miles's book, The Beat Hotel: "...for a brief period -- from just after the publication of Howl in 1957 until the building was sold in 1963 -- it was home to Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin, Peter Orlovsky, Harold Norse, and a host of other luminaries of the Beat Generation."

Norse was there -- no only as witness -- but, much more importantly, particpant. And he wrote. Here's one of my favorite parts of the book:

"In February 1960, before moving into the Beat Hotel, I began doing ink drawings and cut-up poetry at the Hotel Univers on rue St. Grégoire de Tours next door to Edouard Roditi. He had often put me up at number 8 where, he said, Théodore de Banville had rented a room for Rimbaud.

Shortly after I moved into the Beat Hotel in April, I wrote Sniffing Keyholes, a sex/dope scene between a muscular black youth called Melo and a blond Russian princess called Z.Z. It was my first narrative cut-up. I felt I had broken through semantic and psychological barriers; hashish and opium helped with the aleatory process.

My experience of breaking new ground alarmed and exhilarated me. For awhile I believed I had lost my reason but didn’t consider it a great loss—the mind works in mysterious ways. Actually, word, image, and perception come together in a simultaneous jumble, not, as grammar and logic would have us believe, in a linear structure. I telescoped language in word clusters in a way James Joyce had pioneered, but with this difference: I allowed the element of chance to determine novel and surprising configurations of language. John Cage had done it in music, Pollock in painting. When I showed it to Brion Gysin he raved, “You’ve done something new! It’s a gas! Bill must see this right away.”

Bill Burroughs came down to my room. “Well, Harold, Brion says you’ve written a very funny cut-up. I’d love to see it.” In his fedora and topcoat he sat at the edge of my bed reading the piece, exploding in little sniffs and snorts, his equivalent of lusty guffaws. “This is marvelous,” he said, looking up. “You must show it to Girodias.” Maurice Girodias, owner of Olympia Press, had published Naked Lunch; his father had published Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. But I wasn’t so sure he’d go mad about a few typewritten pages of cut-up. Burroughs disagreed. “I’m calling him right away to get you an appointment.”

A day or two later I trekked over to the office a few blocks away on the rue St. Séverin. I was right. Girodias read it and thought it similar to Burroughs. He wanted to see more but didn’t sound enthusiastic. “He missed the point,” snorted Burroughs. “He rejected Naked Lunch the first time it was offered to him.”

Poetry (Norse is one of Ferlinghetti's "Pocket Poets"), cut-up, essays, important correspondence (his letters to William Carlos Williams have been published, and soon to be are his letters to Charles Bukowski) and, most recently, this memoir; it's a fascinating look into the life of a writer who can't be pigeonholed into any category, whether it's Beat, Gay, or Counterculture. Norse is more than any label the critics will try and stick on his forehead. If you ask me, he's one of the 20th century's most overlooked writers, and with the paperback edition of this fine work, maybe His Day is just around the corner.

This is a visually stunning book covering one of the remotest mountain regions of North America. Approx 150 colour photos depict the massive icefields, glaciers, high mountains and valleys east and west of the Coast Range.
The text gives the reader details of the author's travels through this vast wilderness on foot and skis and describes the difficulties encountered in such a rugged and remote area.
A must for anyone who loves "armchair wilderness travel" or for those who want to see what this magnificent and generally inaccessible region looks like.

Lola Baldwin indeed was the first policewoman in the United States with arrest authority. Portland also may boast of the first woman to be named Chief of a metropolitan police force in 1985: Penny Harrington. Harrington's innovations in diversity training and community policing are heralded today throughout the country, and reflected upon in her autobiography, Triumph of Spirit. The dedication and leadership of women like Baldwin and Harrington provide role models, not only for women who desire a career in law enforcement, but for all women who have the courage to follow their dreams.

David A. Baldwin's edited work of Neorealism and Neoliberalism is composed of twelve chapters. Arthur Stein remarks that states take decisions independently in anarchic international system while institutions/regimes necessitate joint decision making in this process. Stein cited regimes as a solution to common cooperation problems in the prisoners' dilemma settings. He also argues that regimes create an environment, in which states find rational incentives for cooperation since rational self-interest would lead to joint decision making through regimes. It is also remarkable in Stein's chapter that he holds power as determinant of regime transformation, however, he also ties changes in knowledge and technology as important sources of regime change. Charles Lipson in "International Cooperation in Economic and Security Affairs" basically points out that international cooperation in economic areas is relatively more easier than in security issues since relative gains calculations are dominant in security-military realm while absolute gain assumptions are more likely to happen in economic affairs. On the other hand, Lipson also argues that neorealism generally ignores the role of interdependence in international cooperation. In fact, this tendency is one the fundamental differences between neorealists and neoliberals. While the former generally assumes that interdependency lead to conflict among states the latter sees it much more as facilitating factor for international cooperation. Robert Axelrod and Robert D. Keohane's "Achieving Cooperation under Anarchy: Strategies and Institutions" has important insights about the problem of cooperation. They mention three factors that directly influence the probability of cooperation among states. They are mutuality of interests (payoff structure), the shadow of future, and the number of players (sanction problem). These considerations, no doubt, are about game theory driven settings among states. In addition, they emphasize that states should not be considered under just one game setting; rather multilevel games in various issue areas take place among states. Duncan Snidal also emphasizes the difference between two-state and multi-state settings in the seventh chapter. Moreover, Axelrod and Keohane attribute significant importance to perceptions and misperceptions for international cooperation. In the following chapter, Joseph M. Grieco makes a critique of neoliberal institutionalism (NLI). He generally sees NLI as unsuccessful in their criticisms of realism. However, he separates sociological institutionalists and knowledge driven institutionalists from NLI as well competitors with realist approach of institutions and international cooperation in general.There are two important arguments that deserve attention in Helen Milner's chapter. First of them, the separation of domestic and international politics is not so useful in studying the problem of international cooperation since sharp distinctions are hardly possible. The second argument is that overemphasizing anarchy is dangerous, it serves much more to conflict not to cooperation among states. The distinguishing discussion in Robert Powell's chapter is that his argument on iterated/repeated games. He claims that iterated games do not ensure cooperation unlike to some optimistic neoliberal institutionalists argue. Michael Mastanduna in his part (ch.10) makes the same argument as Helen Milner does: the separation of domestic and international politics is hardly possible since domestic and international settings intermingle with each other. (p.263) The other important argument in this chapter is that the decreasing external security threats will lead to the rise in relative gain calculations among states.When one looks the emerging problems between the US and the EU and Japan in the aftermath of the Cold War this argument has been seemed to be relevant. R. Keohane and J. Grieco extend the debate of international cooperation in the last two chapters. Keohane as a neoliberal institutionalist puts institutions on the center for the problem of cooperation among states. He argues that institutions change conceptions of states' self-interest throughout 'bounded rationality'. States then find rational incentives for cooperation in serving their self-interests. He also reiterates the neoliberal institutionalists' central argument; relative gain assumptions make cooperation more difficult. On the other hand, Grieco from the realist side boldly argues that institutions do not mitigate anarchy's constraining effect. Both Keohane and Grieco, however, agrees that the future of the European Union will be a very good test case for neorealist and neoliberal institutionalist debates on international cooperation. Overall, Neorealism and Neoliberalism offers a good epistemology of neorealist-neoliberal debate, hence it should be a must reading in IR theory.

Amazing how such simple food can be so tasty. Seafood, chorizo, tomatoes and more all come alive. This book has beautiful photos too. From very simple to terribly complex, tapas cover the range. A big hit with guests.

The Ottoman Kitchen makes for a delightful journey to this historic area. Having visited Greece and Turkey two years ago, the book immediately caught my attention.

The recipes are accompanied by an interesting overview of the area. One should not be too surprised that Turkey and its neighbouring countries offer cuisine that is similar in many ways. These countries' common past is the reason for this.

The author has adapted the recipes for a North American kitchen. There is no need to obtain what might be unobtainable ingredients in North America.

The book bought back many memories of this fascinating region. I have already tried my first recipe (Topkapi pilaf), and intend to try many more.

Not only is the book beautiful to behold ... the food contained therein is a true delight to savour!