I have read this book and I feel that it is rather dissapointing. I was hoping to find a collection of great e-mail jokes, and I did find a collection of jokes but it just was missing that special something. Hopefully there will soon be a book that lives up to my expectations in this subject area

I think that other guy must be humor-impaired. This is the funniest collection of email jokes I have ever seen, other than in my email!

I was subjected to this book as a requirment for an Engineering Management masters degree course. I've seen a lot of textbooks in 7 years of college, but this one has got to be the most frustrating! There are MANY typos, not just mispellings - but problems done incorrectly. Also, many of the chapters are taken from other text, so there's not a good flow to the book. You'll probably only buy this book as a requirement for a class, but beware!!!

We were required to buy this textbook for our Engineering Economics class at UT-Austin. I found this book helpful as an introduction to business. It gave us quite a number of examples and review questions to help us understand the major concepts. Even though the book may have contained a little too much information, I really liked it since I learnt a lot from it.

I would have appreciated knowing that this book was centered around a focus on Christianity and "family values". I assumed this was a self-help book. The author is a pastor's wife in a Christian community that understands feminism as aggressive and castrating! The book is geared towards helping women be good wives and mothers, including weight loss. The implicit values make it a narrow resource for me. I found it to be very supportive of roles rather than people.
I had hoped to learn more about being driven or controlled by anxiety, etc. as I live with perrenial stressors, such as the murder of a grown daughter. This was not the book for me and I regret buying it.
Please let us know if a book is Christian focused or is written for members of a specific religous orientation!!

To say that I am not an avid reader would be an understatement. But when my husband flippantly tossed this book at me and dared me to read it, I grudgingly complied.

Through the words of the Barbara Sullivan, I saw very clearly something in myself that I had never seen before: I wanted to control circumstances and situations in my life that were really out of my control.

As I read, my heart started to soften and I realized that I had to let go. As I relinquished control in my marriage, my husband started seeing changes in me that he never thought possible. As I gave him the freedom to be himself and not the way I "wanted", we started growing closer. He then began to make changes in himself because now he didn't feel pressured.

The fact is, this book was largely responsible for saving our marriage. Read it with an open mind and an open heart.

This book is far too dense to be read by anyone (like me) without a thorough background of recent Chinese history and politics. Even though I am comfortable with pinyin, no way could I keep straight the constant barrage of names zipping by. No explanation is ever given for various Chinese political terms, many of which were not familiar to me. And there is no historical narrative present to unite the material and keep it interesting.

If you are just an average joe/joan like me who wants to know more about China, don't waste your 28 bucks on this book.

This book, written by one of Hu Yaobang's staff, shows a very different picture of the players during this period of time than in books penned by western China Watchers. While Deng appears to have truly been interested in political as well as economic reforms, the hardliner coalition in the Chinese Communist Party was able to use his paranoia of personal attacks against him to veer him away from Hu Yaobang's progressive programs. Had he been able to see through the machinations of the hardliners, China might have been farther along in its modernization than it is.

I think the most interest aspect of this book is how it portrays Hu's successor, Zhao Ziyang. Western authors portray Zhao as a reformer. However, Ruan Ming shows us a schemer that is more interested in pushing Deng to the wayside and garnering full authority for himself and his "new elite". In 1989, the West saw a tearful Zhao supposedly working in the interests of the student protestors, symapthizing with their demands for democracy and reform. However, Ruan Ming shows us that this was a merely a tactic in his ongoing struggle to build power for himself within the party.

Overall, I think this book should be required reading for anyone interested in the inner workings of China's government. For once we have an account from a former member of China's government. I feel his account has painted a picture of China's key political players stripped of their masks. We are given an excellent example of how divided China's government is and how that relates to China's ability to develop into a "First World" Power in the future.

This is a rather complex book for children and I'd advice parental guidance. Perhaps taking your children out to look at the night sky and teaching them about the various aspects.

As a child, my father, brothers and I would sometimes fall asleep out on our porch in Africa as we looked out into the pitch night sky.

There is a brief introduction and then a section on the tools of the trade. There are four maps for viewing the star locations in the Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter.

Sections 2 through 5 contain 17 Projects which include:

Phases of the Moon
Occultations of Planets and Stars
Features of the Moon
Measuring Lunar Mountains and Craters
Eclipses
Relative Sizes of the Planets
Scale of the Solar System
Mercury and Venus: The Innermost Planets
Mercurial Mercury
Venus, the Evening and Morning "Star"
Venus, the Brightest Planet
Mars
Jupiter's Cloud Bands
Jupiter's Moons and Great Red Spot
Saturn's Rings and Moons
Pluto's Orbit
Meteors, Comets, and Auroras

With all this detailed information, don't forget the simple pleasures, like wishing on a falling star. ;)

Planetwatch is a very good book with many interesting experiments, from tracing the moon to viewing Jupiter. The experiments range in level from beginner to expert. I like many of the experiments, but even the beginner ones are sometimes very complicated for anyone that has never tried astronomy before. It is still a very good book, though. It shares a lot of information about the solar system and makes you aware of what possible things an amateur astronomer could see. Overall, it is a very good astronomy book for beginners and advanced alike.

I purchased this book based on previous experience with Fodor's books. The categories were helpful for a quick determination of the type of facility. The descriptions however seemed more like advertisements from the various facilities rather than informed experiences from the writers. The rates were not up to date and there are no web sites listed. Unbelievable for a travel book published in 2000!

I can't tell you how often I have used this book in the year I've owned it. It describes every major spa in the US and Mexico so well. The categories is uses to classify are great. I've sent copies to several friends so we can plan getaways together. Even if you just want to fantasize about going to a spa, it's a great reference.

This book is okay if you're into community theatre, but I found that it consists mostly of cutsie little stories about their most cherished performers, who have long since left the stage. This group would do better to publish a book that summarizes their G&S style rather than focus on their "accomplishments" and nothing else.

A very interesting look at a musical theater company. Would that more cities had groups like the Lamplighters.

The book purportedly tells the story of classical music in America, how Old World traditions were transformed and revitalized, and how concert music came to interact with popular trends. I flipped to the chapter on film music, and to his credit the author makes some very defensible claims for the genre, at it's best, as being the equivalent of incidental music written for plays, or even singspiel music composed by Purcell, Telemann, Mozart and others. (Opera would be a little more of a stretch, since the film composer cannot ordinarily manipulate the "libretto" -- in this case, the screenplay -- where he would be able to, in the case of the genuine article.)

However, despite these commonsensical claims and pleas for critical tolerance, the author doesn't seem to know very much about his subject matter. He's got the "sense" right, but his facts are all wrong. I read maybe a dozen pages and, over the course, found at least four factual errors. He claims that Erich Wolfgang Korngold quotes thematic material from his score to the "Sea Wolf" in the slow movement of his String Quartet No. 2 (when, in reality, it is the Quartet No. 3); he claims the same composer's Symphony in F#, while reminiscent of his film music, is comprised solely of original material (when, in fact, the melody of the slow movement was lifted from his score for "The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex;" and the finale uses a motif associated with the Maria Ouspenskaya character in "Kings Row" -- something I have never seen mentioned by any annotator); and that Dimitri Tiomkin wrote the score for Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound" (it was actually Miklos Rozsa, who won an Oscar!). On top of it, I suspected his claim that Victor Herbert wrote the score for D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" was equally false, but THAT I had to double-check. The score is mostly a hodgepodge of pre-existing classics, like "Ride of the Valkyries," anyway. As it turns out, I was right -- it was written by Karl Breil. In any case, it's not my job to research these things. You'd think Yale University Press would hire a fact-checker.

Breil aside, I could have written the chapter off the top of my head, virtually complete, right down to the historical dates, and not made so many errors. I don't know if it was sloppy note-taking or faulty memory, but the book never should have gone to publication in this state. What if someone comes across this thing in a university library somewhere and takes it as fact? We'll have all these theses on film music that reiterate the heinous error that Dimitri Tiomkin wrote "Spellbound!"

For a good general survey of American music, you might try Wilfred Meller's now-classic "Music in a Newfound Land," or even H. Wiley Hitchcock's "Music in the United States." However, film music is a weak link in both studies. For that, I would refer you to "Film Score: the Art and Craft of Movie Music," by Tony Thomas. Thomas highlights most of the major composers, and many of them contribute in their own words. It's an interesting read, and you learn a lot about the unique challenges faced by the composer in Hollywood.

The influence of American culture on European composers has been extensive, shaping the course of music history. Author Jack Sullivan, a faculty member of Rider University in New Jersey (of which the famed Westminster Choir College is a part), has traced this connection in an illuminating book which should give Americans pause when considering their own cultural history. Though Sullivan's point of view is one of exploring how Europeans drew on American sources, what becomes increasingly clear to the astute reader is the lack of enthusiasm Americans had and continue to have for their own creative history.

In a first chapter, which is alone worth the price of the book, he traces the route of African-American sorrow songs from the Black experience back to Europe through Dvorák and Delius to Debussy and to the Afro-British composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor, who was considered by most Americans to be the greatest composer alive a century ago.

We learn that many of the ideas of W. E. B. DuBois grew from Dvorák's defenses of his assertion that the basis of American music should be Black Spirituals. The Czech composer's letter to the New York Herald were often quoted by DuBois (sometimes credited, sometimes not) and are here quoted by Sullivan.

We also learn the impact on Delius of hearing songs from the African-American shanty towns in Florida's orange plantations as they drifted on the air to the porch of his house. Simple though it is, the photograph of the house where Delius lived in Florida carries with it a sense of the space in which he could hear songs from afar.

Other chapters elucidate the effect on European composers of Poe, Whitman, the landscape, cities, and jazz and pop music. Sullivan's research is strong, his ability to connect disparate facts is engaging, and his writing is clear and lucid. Wonderful anecdotes occur throughout the book.

For anyone who (like Sullivan) writes program notes or is interested in the roots of much 20th century European music, this book is a must. I found it difficult to put down and refer to it often as I write articles and reviews.

Paul Somers
Editor
Classical New Jersey Society Journal
classicnj@home.com