A good read and a thought provoking and rare educational book. This book cannnot help but improve ones grasp of the educational process. A must read for aspiring educators! (V.A. Howard is the co-Director of the Philosophy of Education Research Center at Harvard University.)

As a reviewer, I owe potential readers the disclosure of a deep-seated personal bias. I have the greatest respect for Howard Raiffa, for his academic contributions, as well as for his worldly achievements such as his pivotal role in the creation and enlightened leadership of the Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxemburg, near Vienna, Austria--probably the only institution that insured a sustained, open, and fruitful dialogue between the West and the East during the coldest periods of the Cold War.

While most aware of my bias, I give a five star rating to this modest collection of class notes. Indeed, while the form--commented transparencies--qualifies as humble, while the content could appear as naïve, and while academics constitute his primary audience, Raiffa provides deep, wise, operational insights useful to all people engaged in negotiation--i.e., most of us--throughout the 111 pages that make up these lecture notes.

The key to the originality of this surprisingly homogenous scholarly piece resides with Raiffa deciding to assume the opposite of what most of us would entering a negotiation. Indeed, Raiffa assumes a Full Open and Transparent Exchange (FOTE) of information between the parties taking part in a negotiation. Lifting the veil of secrecy enables Raiffa to pinpoint what often preempts satisfactory negotiation outcomes and to discuss ways and present methodologies that allow the parties engaged in a negotiation to all get better deals. How can we achieve this? By identifying the efficiency frontier and by coming closer to it and, hence, to optimal deals. Most methodologies rely on the ranking and quantification of the respective, relative preferences of the parties in the negotiation. Implicitly, they constitute arguments in favor of the intervention of a neutral facilitator. The parties would swear such a facilitator into secrecy and communicate to the facilitator confidential information. In turn, the facilitator would help parties move towards better deals.

Now, rest assured that Raiffa does not stick to FOTE throughout. Raiffa knows very well that, more often than not, negotiations entail some measure of secrecy. Consequently, Raiffa lowers the veil of secrecy just a bit and analyzes more common if not more realistic configurations, such as POTE or Partially Open and Transparent Exchange.

My main methodological caveat relates to the limits imposed upon us by the mathematics of optimization. When replicating the examples in the text, I realized that my ability to match the numerical results depended on the version of the software that I used. This says something about the sensitivity of the results to the numerical algorithm used to solve the constrained optimization problem. It may also say something about the sensitivity of the results to the specific numerical values provided by the parties in the negotiation. This realization certainly calls for caution as far as concerns the robustness and reliability of the results both in a quantitative and a qualitative sense. Working with ranges of values and/or performing parametric and structural sensitivity studies would nicely complement the methodologies presented here. This might make it possible to overcome the aforementioned practical implementation problem.

I believe that the operative concepts and useful tools that Raiffa presents in his lecture notes go beyond the metaphorical. In truth, I believe that they could benefit parties engaged in many different kinds of negotiations. Moreover, as an MBA and environmental physicist/climatologist with an expectable special interest in negotiation and conflict resolution in the environmental field, I also believe that parties engaged, in particular, in international climate negotiations could benefit from meditating on Raiffa's specific insights about negotiation and from listening to his lifelong plea for sustained, open, and fruitful dialogues.

Packed with over 150+ b&w and color photos in it's 96 pages, this informative and visually stunning book follows each member of Led Zeppelin from their musical influences on through to their historic first rehearsal, and on to the tragic death of the late great John Bonham in 1980. The text of the book follows the band from their earliest gigs (with RARE photos of those gigs, of which about 85% are exclusive to this book) and is a fascinating account of Led Zeppelin live in concert. I've been collecting Led Zeppelin books/rare magazines for years and I have to say this one of if not THE best books I own on Led Zeppelin. A must for any Zep fan!

This is an invaluable tool that is a must have for any student of Arabic as a foreign language. The material is comprehensive and graduated form the easiest to the hardest. Passages include questions on content written in Arabic and the appendex is a translation with the answers to the questions. Perhaps this description doesn't do the book justice. The translations are in real life English not halting translation scribble and the questions are very realevant to the material and truley capture the most important elements of the passages. As if that were not a strong enough reccomendation, there are also trivial persuit type questions that enhance one's knowledge of the region and history. Bottom line, if you are an English speaking student of Arabic, you have to use this book!!!

Howard Richards leads us through a critical analyis of the development and elaboration of Western thought and highlights its shortcomings while illuminating the possibilities for revolutionary and humanistic action. Destined to join the Peace Studies canon

Not only are these letters to Harriet Monroe, William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate, Donald Hall, Robert Frost (and many others) fascinating and entertaining, but the comprehensive index makes it possible to find Stevens' own comments about and explanations of individual poems--for instance, his favorite poem was "The Emperor of Ice Cream"--and details about the circumstances in which they were composed. Not only does Stevens outline his evolving theory of poetry, he also expresses his opinions about contemporary art, music and more.

Readers that enjoy literary correspondence should also see One Art (the letters of Elizabeth Bishop).

The Light of My Life is a spiritual autobiography of Donna Howard's commune with God and the Angels. This engaging book (she credits GOD as a co-author)skillfully written, takes you on an excursion with entertaining vignettes. With snap-shot glimpses of the fifth dimension, you delve into a spiritual realm reminiscent of Carlos Castaneda's books: The Eagle's Gift, Tales of Power, The Teachings of don Juan...etc. The difference--and it's a BIG difference--is that Donna Howard innocently portrays her sojourn, with shockingly breathless passages, like rollercoaster ride video-footage. She is a shrewdy observant participant, and yet remains humble. You become co-creators, with Howard along with her cat, in the parallel universe (beyond time and space). Transend and await her next publication.

For anyone who thought they knew what being a police officer was all about, this book will enlighten and surprise you. With completely candid stories and adventures, Sgt. Monta gives you a play by play on what it is like to walk in his shoes for a while. As an officer that has worked under and with him, I can honestly say, he deserves applause for all his dedication to the police family.

To keep going as a writer over the years, at least in the minor and non-commercial genre of American poetry, you have to tell yourself some version of Mark Twain's trans-Atlantic cable: "The reports of my death [as a poet] have been greatly exaggerated." Robin Magowan is an American surrealist poet of genuine imagination and linguistic risks who has kept writing over the years with a consistency of tactic and concern that might be called obsessional, wish-drenched fantasy from one point of view and the signature of an authentic style from another.

A special listening is at the core of this poetics of the syllable and the transcendental image. For "God still moves in the sound of the long 'o,' as Dylan Thomas once suggested; and although a half-century of deconstructive semiotics (and worse) have taught us to be much more cautious about such enthusiasms for the logos and the mystique of verbal and religious presence, such assumptions and risks of intuitive language and the inscape of imagery are at the core of Robin Magowan's poetry.

Magowan's Lilac Cigarette in a Wish Cathedral, as its wonderful title for this project suggests, registers a poetry of risk-fulfillment, tracking extremities and delicacies of sense and wish, mountain journeys, desert flights, movements into and out of the primacy of ecstatic fulfillment that haunts the Greco-Roman tradition as this comes down to the United States via a "whit manic" incarnation that haunts our little streets and huge continental hungers. He works this through the Emersonian sense of abandonment and solitary quest, which seeks "ravishment of the intellect by coming nearer to the fact" of self-loss and the desacralization that is the fate of commodity culture.

This is a singular collection, suggesting a life-long discipline in the poetic image and the path of heightened language, a highly wrought and prolonged "derangement of the senses" a la Rimbaud that has taken Magowan from Greece to Tibet and back it its quest.

The last poem in Lilac Cigarette in a Wish Cathedral (wherein, as Richard Howard aptly puts it in his trenchant introduction, "the hierophant smokes his lilac cigarette in a wish cathedral" that is each poem) is entitled "O," and moves from the crooning and screeching plea of a Whitmanic voice, "O my rooster's urge/ to spring voice loud" to the cranked-up ecstasy (bleeding sound into picture) of "dawn flushed/ crimson screaming o."

Pain and pleasure as elsewhere bleed into the mix, the poet lost into the rooster's urge to give rebirth to the whole mounting and morning landscape. In "Miniature," this transmutation of local scene into the mystique of poetic/ religious presence is effected not so much through the visual as through impactions of the aural, what Hopkins called the "inscape" of leaping vowels: "The pleasure of sounds innocently grasped/ A peacock in the eyes of the rain." This twisted and torqued little haiku of a poem depends on the "e" becoming "I" becoming "a" as much as upon the image transformation. The poem enacts, in "miniature," the mix of hearing and sounding that becomes the aesthetic medium of the "wish cathedral."

In a time still dominated by the locality of image (as in Williams) and the play of skeptical wit (Stevens, and his heirs like Ashbery), Magowan had always pursued something else, something closer to Breton or Michaux and the sources of magical incarnations in European surrealism as a kind of interior Orphic line. Magowan's book thus opens in Greece, and seeks the ecstasy of dance and music as tactic of self-loss. Later, "Orfeo" courts this lineage, where the poet (ancient to modern) descends to mount, "goes in a gorge/ Of pluming, spraying song." No gods or muse arises to help the sense of abandonment and self-loss amid the murmuring of deadly presence, "just a wingbeat to guide/ Murmurous wasp center, alone."

Since there is no description of this audio book, I thought I would add one.
This is a Collector's Edition of *3* Linda Howard romances (abridged). All That Glitters, Loving Evangeline, and An Independent Wife.
I took a chance and ordered this not really knowing what I would be getting, and I am so glad I did.