Although this book is almost 20 years old its detailed and fully referenced facts on how our national debt is masterfully misrepresented by our government is an irrefutable fulfilment of prophecy of our present debt crisis. Learn how Shiff, who testified before congress in opposition to the removal of gold and silver backed currency has been vindicated on all accounts. See through the con of how our present politicians are solving the budget crisis.

I learned more concerning our government's tax policy and the manipulation of money (versus the pieces of paper we carry around in our wallets) from this book in three hours than four years of study in college. Schiff boils it down to the essence, from three men beginning a culture to a controlling government, taxing and watering down the money supply. Your view of Keynes' ideas and why Adam Smith's concepts were abandoned will become cystal clear. Should be required reading for anyone involved in economics - which is exactly why the government would prefer that this book be left on the shelf.

Have you ever wondered what your birthday would be like without a cake, candles, gifts, or a birthday song? These are examples of rituals that we associate with the anniversary of our birth. Think about how many events in our lives we have ritualized. Thanks to Hallmark, most of these events include a greeting card.

In Judaism, we mark life's milestones with ritual. We bring babies into the fold with a naming ceremony. We are called up to the Torah for an aliyah on our wedding anniversary. We visit the graves of our loved ones before holidays. We crave ritual, and we seek new and different ritual acts for different occasions - imagine if we only recited the shehechiyanu for every milestone in our lives, how would we make
that event stand apart?

CLAL - the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership (full disclosure: I served an internship at CLAL in 2001) has been adding occasions to the list of ritualized events for several years, and now these sacred practices have been compiled into book form. While the book contains many of the acts that are already in the Jewish canon of ritual (e.g. fasting on Yom Kippur, Counting the Omer, and Studying Torah on Shavuot), the contributors, who are all CLAL faculty, put a new spin on these events. So, while we might have found putting up a sukkah to be a very ritualized act, chock-full of religious symbolism, this book offers a way to bring out the significance of taking our sukkah down at the end of the holiday.

Indeed, many of you have sent your children off to college or on a summer trip to Israel, and perhaps you would have liked to mark the occasion with a blessing or meditation. This book transforms these actions into sacred acts. Upon successfully quitting smoking, CLAL recommends reciting the blessing, "Blessed is the One who frees those who are held captive."

A meditation for starting to workout begins "each extra step on the treadmill or the Stairmaster, each lap in the pool or around the track, each turn of the pedal, each lift of the weights, each stretch of muscles long out of use... in each bead of sweat and panting breath I praise You-with all my bones. For each event included in the book, the sacred practice of a meditation, blessing, ritual, and teaching is included. The chapters are usefully divided by category (parents and children, relationships, special moments, healing, learning, etc.).

Many will undoubtedly find new rituals for which they have been wanting, such as saying good-bye to a beloved pet or honoring a teacher at the end of the year. However, it might never have occurred to anyone to recite a blessing or learn a piece of rabbinic text before preparing a family recipe or taking on a volunteer role in the community, but each of these new rituals helps us bring a bit more holiness into the seemingly mundane actions of our daily lives.

If each of us can find one new aspect of our lives to sanctify and make more meaningful through the aid of this book, then it is a most worthy and enriching addition to our bookshelves.

This book is really great for anyone interested in discovering new ways to celebrate not only the regular holidays, but also the sacred that can be found in everyday life. The way it is organized, readers can use the blessings just as written, or with the helpful background information, readers can create their own religious practices. A definite must for anyone interested in connecting to their Jewish inherited tradition both intellectualy and spiritually.

Although the title would seem to aim this book at a specialized market, this is in fact an excellent guide for writers in all markets. The theme of the book is that a well-written story will be much easier to sell than a poorly written one. The majority of the book is devoted to guidelines for plot and character development in the context of the specialized requirements of film and television. Many of the directions in the book are applicable to writing aimed at a wide variety of markets. There are several useful examples of actual scripts and other industry-specific forms that serve as bluprints for the aspiring film and television writer. There are also examples of synopsis and treatments as they are used in the industry. The second half of the book is devoted to the mechanics of the visual entertainment industry and how the script and writer fit in. The appendices deal with the Writers Guild and include an agency list. This book is a must-have for the aspiring film and television writer.

This is a small, compact book at a relatively cheap price, but its contents is priceless. It covers everything a scriptwriter needs to know (and any writer for that matter!), including conflict, dialogue, setting, and so on. The chapter on dialogue alone makes this book worth every cent. If you're a writer of any genre, or a budding scriptwriter, this is the one book you must get before spending hundreds of dollars on other books which don't deliver. By the way, Blacker taught scriptwriting to people who became very succesful scriptwriting (Back to The Future writer). Get it and you'll never look back!

The idea for such a book IS a good one. The ideas are certainly sound..... I live in a newish(6yrs) 6000+ sq ft house,with a neighborhood association,good school district(etc) and felt that this book would NOT apply to my market.... however it could be useful for someone that lives in an urban or older neighborhood.... where a house might need curb appeal or sprucing up.... the thought of adding value to a sale is always appealing no matter what the size of your 'estate' ... no matter how deep or thin your pockets are! It is always a challenge to make the most of what you have.

Offering "50 surefire techniques and strategies" to help improve the value of one's home, Irwin utilizes common sense to help owners decide where it is best to spend their money on their homes. With the recent real estate run-up (especially where I live in Southern California), the best investment we can make is in the very place we live. While I don't plan to sell in the near future, I always want to be sure my home could be ready for a sale at any time, just in case. Irwin gives dollar-sign guides as to how much value an improvement could help increase the price you could eventually ask for your property. Although very little in this book was new to me, I highly recommend it for folks who are not very sure about how to increase the value of their homes. Although there were several suggestions I questioned (especially the value he gave to some improvements and how little he valued other improvements), I believe that he used sound judgment to guide the reader. I plan on utlizing several of the improvement ideas in my own home!

The Kingdom of Moltz is an entertaining and humorous cartoon book that greatly simplifies the economic concept of inflation, and how the system is created and abused by those in charge -- in this case, the King of Moltz. A fast read, but leaves you with a powerful understanding of inflation and monetary systems that economic students spend years trying to learn. Great for adults and kids alike.

The book appears to be an earlier and less extensive version of Schiff's "How an Economy Grows and Why It Doesn't."

This book will easily explain how our economic system was designed by our forefathers and how the so-called new-deal, great-society, and modern-day social engineers have all but completely destroyed it.
Written with simplistic comical satire, it is the epitomy of what is needed to survive as a nation.
If this book isn't in your collection, you are missing a key piece to life's puzzle.
Rick Cleland

The title of the book is somewhat misleading, in that most of the research papers involve advanced issues concerning one particular graphical model, namely the Bayesian network. For this reason I highly recommend, as a prerequisite to this book, Finn Jensen's "Bayesian Networks and Decision Graphs". Jensen's book is adequate in giving a good introduction and overview of the subject, but not sufficient for calling oneself an "expert" upon successfully digesting it.

To its credit, "Learning in Graphical Models" has several well-written and interesting papers, but the tutorial papers just did not seem enough of an introduction for me to feel comfortable using it as a first source of introduction.

What I find most compelling about Bayesian networks is the fact that they seem both highly modular (which facilitates reusability and network interconnectivity) and can be designed in a semi-rational manner (contrast this with neural-network architectures for which few good algorithms exist for determining size and number of layers). For this reason I imagine they will be important players in future engineering projects that require learning and adaptation.

My area of research revolves around graphical models... Best Book... The book that introduced me as to how effective graphical models are... As stated in the editorial review, graphical model is the marriage between graph theory and probability and this book justifies the sacredness of this marriage!

I had never spoken a word of Spanish (okay, except 'si') before taking up this course, and two months and 25 lessons later I could speak better than friends who had taken Spanish all three years in H.S. This is an excellent, practical course that emphasizes conversation skills. I do wish there were more comprehension drills, as I still have lots of trouble understanding anything on Spanish TV here in New York. But without a doubt this is the best Spanish course I have come across. For example, much, much better than Barron's "foreign service institute" courses.

When my wife and I set off to study Spanish in Guatemala several years ago, we decided to to go the "immersion" route (i.e. NO ENGLISH, 5 hours a day of 1-on-1 instruction, live with native families). Since we knew zero (nada!) Spanish, we set off to our local Borders, and luckily found (along with 501 Spanish Verbs), this extremely helpful (and fun) book. I enjoyed this book so much that before we even left for Guatemala, I had read through probably one-third of it, so I wasn't TOTALLY clueless when I arrived in Antigua. Fun dialogues of increasing difficulty, pronunciation guides, grammar and usage, vocabulary lists, quizzes, and cultural notes -- they're all here, laid out in a user-friendly way. If you want to learn Spanish (which is not a bad idea these days, since Spanish is probably the fastest growing language -- of the major spoken languages -- in the world), this is as good a start as any...

It's a great book because of it's extensiveness.

Great tutorial that helped me get a A on my final ezam. Amust have to review important concepts and terms.

This vastly interesting thriller takes place over several months in 1959-60 in Algeria, at the height of the struggle for liberation from France (1954-62). It would certainly be useful to familiarize oneself with the history of Algeria's colonization by France, and especially the fight for independence (at the very least, rent "The Battle of Algiers" which will get you in the right mood). The story centers on a French army officer who turns out to be an agent for the FLN, his exposure by his neo-fascist lover, and his attempt to go underground. The book is highly effective at showing both the underbelly of the fight for liberation and its flip side on the French side. It's also a believable portrait of a committed Marxist and his adversaries.

Anyone looking for a James Bond thrill-ride should look elsewhere. True, there are bursts of intense violence and daring, but this is novel is closer in spirit to Albert Camus or Graham Green in that it is an intense psychological study of a fanatical Marxist out to do real damage in French Algiers circa 1959-1960. Some of the situations stretch credulity, but the atmosphere is vivid and convincing and the characters realistically disturbing. There are even some debates about Marxism that are quite interesting and thought-provoking. The ending, however, is a bit puzzling.

"Sarah with an H" is a very good book but it got sort of redundant at times. The basketball parts in this book were very cool. It was very redundant in that a lot of the basketball parts were the same. There was a lot about basketball and a lot of personal issues which made this book the best of both worlds. Overall this was a very good book and I would definitely recommend it. I learned a lot about discrimination, about how it may not seem to be a big deal to you, but it may be toward the person that you are discriminating.

Sarah with an H To start out my saying I rate this book * * * * * five stars because of all that it teaches you and how great it is. I like it because of that it teaches you that you should not treat new people the way that they did in the beginning of the book because Sarah was new and Jewish. I think you should open up to if they are new because they have no friends yet. It was really good because when the big deal of the story was when the dolls were stolen, how every one made a big deal over them it was a good part of the book. Well I have not read any other books by this author so it was a different style for me. It was very interesting because I did not know his style. Back to why I like the book it had a lot of different things like you did not know what was going to happen next. It was also good because they could be talking about something, then they could talk about something else. Well I don't have much else to say about the book. The only thing that is left is the ending and I am not going to tell about the end because then you might not buy the book. That would be bad for the store. That is what I think about the book. IT WAS GREAT!