Simply a great book to "start" your research. Excellent bibliography, and very very important contributors (those who have made the history of CM). I have bought another couple of books on this subject, however this is the most balanced one. Make sure you read the book by Bregman and Fastl & Zwicker (if your a tech head) once you're finished with this one.

Original version published by Paul Fessler in H-Net Book Review for H-GAGCS listserv

An academic's recommendation of a book as a "good read", however, can often be regarded as suspect by undergraduates and general readers. Perhaps our overexposure to dissertations and monographs have perverted our sense of what constitutes an enjoyable and easy to read book. To counteract such biases and perversions, I asked my wife to read Hauser's book. This book passed my wife's test. If only all books published by academic presses could boast such accessibility.

Originally published in Germany in 1950, My Farm on the Mississippi was clearly written for a non-academic audience. In this brief, very accessible book, Heinrich Hauser, an opponent of the Nazi regime and wartime German refugee, turns his three years from 1945-1948 on a Missouri farm near the German-American community of Wittenberg into an engaging adventure story. This book caught the eye of Curt Poulton, a historical geographer and translator at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, who translated this work into English. Poulton argues that Hauser, as a German living among a German immigrant community in the wake of World War II, offers invaluable commentary upon this 1940s "postimmigrant America" where immigrants' native language and customs were still alive.

In 1939, Hauser, a prolific writer of fiction and non-fiction, escaped from Germany with his Jewish wife and two children. After unsuccessfully trying his hand at farming in upstate New York and then at city life in Chicago, Hauser and his wife yearned for the romantic fresh air of the proverbial American heartland. With no prospects or firm destination, Hauser set off for St. Louis and points southward in an old 1928 Packard in search of his dream farm. South of St. Louis and just north of Cape Girardeau, Hauser and his wife began passing signs to "Stuttgart", "Dresden", "Altenberg", and "Wittenberg". In Cape Girardeau, Hauser spotted a "Dr. Schultz" and paid this German-speaking physician a visit to inquire about the region and the German-sounding places. Working through the German-American subculture, Hauser soon bought a farmstead south of the town of Wittenberg, Missouri on the Mississippi floodplain.

Hauser recounts how his wife Rita and son Huc struggled to make the farm a working proposition for the next three years. Most of the profits, however, were used to provide care packages and other aid to their German friends and relatives back home. During the rest of the time, his family survives horrific floods, raging forest fires, and a comic shipwreck. During the summers, his son Huc devised plans and adventures such as making a boat with an outboard motor in ways reminiscent of a Little Rascals episode. By 1948, however, low crop prices and homesickness convinced the reluctant Hausers to return to Germany and abandon their Missouri farm.

Nevertheless, Hauser offers a useful window into this German-American society on the banks of the Mississippi. As Hauser notes, it is this region's rural isolation that permitted its German culture and language to survive both World War I and World War II and beyond. Hauser knew he was among his own kind when he saw women working the fields---a practice Americans generally avoided. In the local bars, these German-Americans would add salt to modify the sweet American beers like Falstaff and Budweiser. When the war in Europe was over, Hauser's family celebrated with a crowd of itinerant German-American lumber workers playing "schottiches" and singing songs such as "Am Brunnen vor dem Tore" and sea tunes like "In Hamburg da bin ich gewesen". Also particularly interesting (and useful for immigration and ethnicity courses) are Hauser's recollected interactions between these German-Americans and the nearby African-Americans.

Just as Alexis de Toqueville's Democracy in America offers an outsider's critique of early nineteenth-century America, Hauser's observations present a valuable perspective of postwar America, its rural traditions and ethnic relationships. Hauser is an "outsider/insider" within the postwar German-American community. Though an outsider as a recent German refugee, he can speak the language (both linguistically and theologically). This allowed him to enter into the culture and bring a unique perspective to bear upon it.

Because this book was originally written for a German audience unfamiliar with many aspects of American society and culture, Hauser's narrative is particularly instructive to an American audience today. For many undergraduate students in particular, Hauser's emphasis on the basics of everyday American life proves more fascinating to American readers today than when it was originally published. Approaching the daily life of the post-World War II America from the cultural distance of a foreigner is in many ways similar to the approach of today's readers and students separated from that cultural landscape by the passage of fifty years. Thus, Hauser's cultural observations, which may have seemed less interesting to an American reader in the 1950s when the work was first published are met with a much different perspective.

Without Poulton's sparkling translation, however, these observations would have lost much of their power to English readers. Poulton's work arouses comparisons to other recent and notable translations such as W.C. Kuniczak's translation of Heinrich Sienkiewicz's monumental Trilogy beginning with the novel "With Fire and Sword" (popular Polish nationalist fiction written during the late 19th century-a useful assignment for courses dealing with 19th century European nationalism, by the way). Poulton remains faithful to Hauser's intent to provide his readers with an adventure story. So dependent upon narrative flow and colorful description, this value and attraction of this work would have been irreparably harmed by a poor translation.

Readers interested in this approach should also see the superb collection of immigrant letters in News from the Land of Freedom by Kamphoefner, Helbich, and Sommer (Cornell University Press, 1991).

This book is a must read for anyone interested in the scientific study of consciousness. Neurochemicals, as well as emotion, are the two long forgotten aspects in the field that might do much to see how the puzzle could be put together. But this book has merits on content as well. It is the most comprehensive review of how brain chemistry relates to consciousness. Granted, this relation is unclear (causation, modulation, colouring, facilitation?), but what is true is that consciousness is to most the result of brain activity (and hence, neuron activity), and that neurons comunicate and are heavily modulated by a variety of chemicals.

The book gives a good introduction to the major systems that irrigate the cortex with neuromodulators and neurotransmitters, like noradrenalin, serotonin, dopamine, acetycholine, etc. It is telling even here that most nuclei involved are in or arround the reticular activating system (raphe, meyenert, caudate), a structure long impicated with consciousness (even if only as a necessary condition of activation). There is a chapter on what is to me the most plausible quantum model of consciousness (but I remain sceptic), by N. Woolf, and proposes that acetycholine regulates proteins that bind to microtubules making these apt for quantum coherence (if this sounds complicated, it is).

The first section deals witj neurochemistry of memory, attention,spleep, dreaming, etc..., issues that obviously relate to consciousness in important ways. Attention for example, is to most essential to consciousness, given that unattended stimuli seem to not become conscious, whereas attended ones invariably seem to. Sleep is obviously a good paradigm for studying consciousness, given that it is characterized by changes in the conscious state itself. If we understood everything about sleep, we would be a long way into understanding consciousness.

The second chapter deals with how chemicals affect consciousness. Here I beliieve, anaesthethics are of primary importance. There is a chapter on anaesthesia, on neuroleptics, on drugs and plants that have them, etc.. Anaesthethics seem to abolish consciousness, so finding out why would at the very least tell us the necessary conditions for consciousness to occur. The papers on this section illustrate the role some neurochemicals might have in the regulation of the conscious state, as well as how when malfunctioning these can have effects on the conscious state.
The last chapter deals with brain diseases, (altzheimers, lewey bodies, schizofrenia, mood-disorders, autism), their probably chemical substrates, and how understanding them not only could bring relief to sufferers of these disorders, but illuminate the mechanisms of consciousness.

All in all, this is a wonderful book, and everyone that reads it will not think of consciousness again without including brain neurochemistry into the picture. It is clear that consicousness will only be fully understood when we have its neural correlates, its neurochemical correlates, its functional correlates, and a way to translate all this into a phenomenal language. This book is then an attempt into puting together one quarter of the puzzle. (For another half of the puzzle, see NCC by T. Metzinger, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness, by S. Dehaene,In The Theather of Consciousness by Bernard Baars. Unfortunately, the last quarter of the puzzle, qualia, lacks a good representative in the literature. try Humphreys How to Solve the Mind-Body Problem, or maybe Carrunthers, Phenomenal Consciousness.)

Only book that covered "Island and Continent" 3-D graphs analysis (I use TradeStation 4.0's optimization results and export the results file to Excel creating a table of profits, ROA's, Max-drawdowns, ect then graph them out in multicollored 3-d graphs).No one else (to my knowledge) has emphasized the importance of looking for stablity in parameters that are used in systems analysis. I'd never trust a system unless I saw big wide continents in both Profits and Returns on Account minimum....What good is a system unless you know that that the parameter's you're using really work...that they're not out of standard deviation and surounding param's also work! This will give the user ability to see what parameter or inputs not only make profits but where the safest and stable sets of parameters exist.Give me robust systems only please. Can't wait for his new book to come out.

I teach CIS at a community college and, as a result, read a lot of books. I had read the Schneider and Perry book on Electronic Commerce that came out last year and thought it was fantastic, but it was a bit over the heads of my students. This book, which is an adaptation and updated version of that Electronic Commerce book, is just what we were hoping to find for our courses. We are teaching electronic commerce in our Webmaster certificate program and in our Internet Business certificate program and this book has worked out perfectly.

The book is up-to-date, filled with excellent examples, and explains the business and technology elements of electronic commerce better than anything I have seen in any book so far for students at a beginning level. The explanations of complex topics like digital signatures and legal issues are exceptionally clear and understandable.

My students love the online companion Web site that includes links to every single site mentioned in the book (the site is located at http://www.course.com/downloads/newperspectives/ec/).

The book also includes great step-by-step instructions for creating your own e-commerce site at Yahoo Stores and at BigStep. Some of my students have used these chapters to create their own businesses on the Web already (and the semester isn't even over)!

All in all, this is an amazing book. I haven't seen anything that comes even close to it (and, as I said, I read a lot of books).

No Man Canyon was like a "Who Done It"... as good as any mystery I've ever read. You get so involved and attached to every character as Mr. Bales brings them to life for you. From beginning to end this was a book that you can't put down. Definately a "Five Star" book!

This is the best book for nursing students who don't have time to practice for their exams, especially if you are newcomers in USA

Written for those who already understand the causes of the War of 1812, this slim volume offers a balanced examination of the most significant naval action of the war. When Oliver Hazard Perry, commodore of the Lake Erie fleet, defeated the British on the water he prevented His Majesty's Forces from mounting a serious threat against U.S forces west of the Niagara. Without drowning the reader in a mass of details, the author provides the best descriptions of naval warfare and naval terms that I have ever read. Visitors to the Oliver Hazard Perry Peace Memorial at Put-in-Bay, Ohio, one of the lesser known national parks, would be wise to pick up this book as would anyone interested in life aboard a wooden ship during wartime.

In Outdoor Play: Teaching Strategies With Young Children, research coordinator and teacher Jane Perry provides the reader with keen insight into why outdoor play is a significant (yet frequently overlooked) aspect of a young child's emotional, social, and physical development. Perry analyses play within a framework of "initiation, negotiation, and enactment", showing how teachers can effectively support self-directed pretend play. Perry's superbly presented text also connects and illustrates theories of play and children's culture. Outdoor Play is very strongly recommended for students of child development, playground supervisors, and preschool through grade school classroom teachers.

Reminds us that we are spiritual beings having a relatively brief human experience before returning to our real & eternal home. Reinforces that spirituality is truely present in everyone and transcends all earthly religions. Many wonderful stories throughout the book to support the love and freedom that our beloved deceased have found. Death will kill the body but not the soul. We can grieve the ugliness of earthly disease and death, but we cannot grieve about the love present in the hereafter. EN