This is far and away the best book on compulsive eating I have read. Every paragraph contains a nugget of wisdom, a motiviational statement that shoots straight to the heart, or an insight that will leave you breathless if you share this affliction.

If you have a problem controlling your eating -- if you eat from stress, from boredom, from emotion, or if you just find it difficult to resist temptation, or stop when you start ... you HAVE to read this book. Rather than start ANOTHER "diet" next Monday like you always do, grab a copy of this book and start a new way of life.

[for civil/mechanical engineers] This is the classic Metcalf and Eddy wastewater design text. It was superceded by a 'second' edition by Dr.G. Tchobanoglous (chew-ban-oh-gloss) that split the text into two volumes, one on sewage collection, and the other on treatment and re-use. There is now an even newer 'second' edition of the treatment volume, but the 'first' edition of the collection volume remains current. Note that this classic contains design information on older technologies (e.g. Imhoff tanks) that was omitted in the later additions, but are still quite useful to have for designing systems in less developed situations. My dad gave away his copy and I have missed it ever since.

Reading this book was refreshing. If you liked reading "The Hding Place" by Corrie Ten Boom, you will love this book!

Together, the images and words of Robert Eddy and Kathy Eddy share with every caregiver wonderful expressions of gratitude, joy and comfort, speaking in love of the challenges, satisfactions and grief involved in such important work. If you or anyone you know is a health-care worker, or someone who takes care of an elderly parent or a sick family member, or if you are in any sort of ministry, this book will bring fresh humor, great ideas and inspiration through its beautifully paired photos and writings, with beautiful songs, too! A book to dip into for refreshment once a week!

A very relaxing read. Never before have I read a book of true life that was so well-paced and soothing. Harris writes as the river flows: gentle to rough, lucid to terse. With a great sense of personal respect to the reader, "Mississippi Solo" is ther perfect read for anyone who wants to take a vacation in the theatre of the mind. An excellent book for travellers and a must have summer read.

I bought a copy of this book after my own canoe trip down the Mississippi. It was fascinating to compare the experiences of Mr. Harris to my own.

The writing is perceptive, insightful, and entertaining. His observations of the people he met along the river, and himself, come across as very honest. He doesn't portray himself as a hero or an expert, but as the person he really is. His dedication to completing the journey is tenuous, but his appreciation for the lasting value of the experience is sincere.

His perceptions on racial issues were objective and refreshing. Although he had preconceived notions on what he might encounter, (a black man in Nordic northern Minnesota and later in the Deep South) he judged people based on how they treated him, and the vast majority of people treated him with kindness and respect.

His descriptions of the river, towns, weather and scenery are also enjoyable, and the hardships and joys are described with equal eloquence.

I was impressed how such a greenhorn of an outdoorsman would have the boldness to tackle such an adventure. My only disappointment with the book is when he skipped some parts of the river. It was his journey to make, however, and he is honest about any shortcuts he took.

In short, this is a great book. It is worth reading to experience the journey vicariously and for the writing itself. You won't be disappointed.

I found this book at a used bookstore while looking for travel books to read on vacation. What a great book! I'm fascinated by the water and enjoyed the description of his trip down the Mississipi river, but I enjoyed even more seeing how a person who wasn't an outdoorsman or even an experienced boater took on this adventure. His experience with people along the way made me feel at the end that I would enjoy sharing a campfire with him and most of the people he met. Except for the rednecks with guns that is.

Chogyam Trungpa (1939-1987) brought Tibetan Buddhism to our country as the founder of the Boulder Shambhala Center and Naropa University. In the Foreward to this new edition of his book, Trungpa Rinpoche's student, Pema Chodron (WHEN THINGS FALL APART, THE PLACES THAT SCARE YOU) writes: "When I took to heart the teachings presented here, a curious change slowly began to take place. I became far more open to the pain of myself and others; far more open to laughing and crying; far more able to love and accept and see my interconnectedness with all beings. As the years go by, I gradually become more and more at home in the world with its inevitable ups and downs."

In his 179-page book, Trungpa teaches us how to know ourselves through meditation. "Meditation in the beginning is not an attempt to achieve happiness," he tells us, "nor is it an attempt to achieve mental calm or peace, though they could be by-products of meditation. Meditation should not be regarded as a vacation from irritation" (p. 46). While we may believe we are free to pursue our dreams, achieve our goals, and satisy our desires, Trungpa shows us how we are instead enslaved to our habitual patterns and negative emotions such as self-absorption (pp. 23-28), paranoia (pp. 28-29), passion (pp. 29-32), stupidity (pp. 32-35), povery (pp. 35-37) and anger (pp. 37-40). "We must be willing to be completely ordinary people," he observes, "which means accepting ourselves as we are without trying to become greater, purer, more spiritual, more insightful. If we can accept our imperfections as they are, quite ordinarily, then we can use them as part of the path. But if we try to get rid of our imperfections, then they will be enemies, obstacles on the road to our 'self-improvement'" (p. 44). And in this highly-recommended book, Trungpa teaches us how to cut through the barriers separating us from the rest of the world.

G. Merritt

This is the sequel to "Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism". Are you gay? Are you a crossdresser? Do you cheat on your taxes? Did you hit one of your children? The point of Trungpa's teaching seems to hammer agin and again at the main human condition. That we are afraid of being human. We are "embarassed" at being human. One woman was reported as having choked to death in a restuarant. Why? Because she was too embarrassed to cough! Through his behavior and his teachings, Trungpa kept hammering this message home at his students. "The Myth of Freedom" takes us from the beginning of the Hinayana Journey (in the Tibetan sense, not to put down Theravada Buddhism which is also called 'Hinayana') all the way to the Vajrayana teachings where there is direct transmission from the Spiritual Guide. Trungpa goes through the technicalities, but you must remember that these are lectures to his students. I shared the same block as Trungpa. He was giving a lecture in LA in December 1980. I was too embarrassed to go inside. I might stammer when I met him. I might "goof up" (as he called it). Maybe I would say something "stupid". I was embarrased. I was embarrassed until his teachings sank in. Then I began to loosen up. Unfortanately, I went back to my "cocoon", as he called it. I've read this book three times. You will love it! Just don't balk when you read other books on Tibetan Buddhism where there are very many rules. The message of Trungpa was "Stop being embarrased about yourself!". And he showed this example by indulging in the worst behavior imaginable. But, yes, you can sneeze in front of a group of people. You can leave your zipper down accidentally if you are a male. Or don't put on a bra if you are a female and then find that you clearly "see" through while you give a lecture! According to Trungpa, it this embarrassment which he referred to as "negative negativity". He pounces on this concept throughout this book and his others. Negativity is alright in itself. I get angry. But then I am embarrassed for BEING angry. So I gulp it down or explode. If we accept the basic negativity, feel it, then this is negativity. But if we shame ourselves for having it - then this manufactures even more anger or Negative Negativity. Which can eventually result in being a mass murderer. Everything is being projected outside on the world. You are not "eating your past" so to speak. This is the message of the book. BUY IY! And buy "Spiritual Materialism". Thannk you (mispelling intentional).

Incisive teachings by one of the most influential Tibetan Buddhist teachers in the West. A central theme: giving up our hopes that meditation will bring us bliss or tranquility or make us better or wiser people or otherwise serve our ego's purposes, and realizing the liberation that is right here within our pain and confusion and neurosis. Trungpa's "Cutting through Spiritual Materialism" seems to be more widely known and more often recommended, but I like "The Myth of Freedom" even better, and I think it's a more suitable book for folks who are new to meditation. (Also recommended: "The Wisdom of No Escape" by Trungpa's student Pema Chödrön.)

This is the best introduction to latest probabilistic sequence analysis methods. However, the book suffers from somewhat convoluted writing and organization. More importantly, it lacks a broader theoretical overview of the different methods. The methods are presented as a bunch of tools without enough critical assessment of their effectiveness or the relative strengths of their underlying theoretical models. I would have welcomed more discussion of how they all fit in a bigger probabilistic picture... what are the different simplifications and assumptions made for the sake of simplicity and computation?

I picked up this book at the recommendation of a number of colleagues in computational linguistics and speech processing as a way to find out what's going on in biological sequence analysis. I was hoping to learn about applications of the kinds of algorithms I know for handling speech and language, such as HMM decoding and context-free grammar parsing, to biological sequences. This book delivered, as recommended.

As the title implies, "Biological Sequence Analysis" focuses almost exlusively on sequence analysis. After a brief overview of statistics (more a reminder than an introduction), the first half of the book is devoted to alignment algorithms. These algorithms take pairs of sequences of bases making up DNA or sequences of amino acids making up proteins and provide optimal alignments of the sequences or of subsequences according to various statistical models of match likelihoods. Methods analyzed include edit distances with various substitution and gapping penalties (penalties for sections that don't match), Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) for alignment and also for classification against families, and finally, multiple sequence alignment, where alignment is generalized from pairs to sets of sequences. I found the section on building phylogenetic trees by means of hierarchical clustering to be the most fascinating section of the book (especially given its practical application to classifying wine varietals!). The remainder of the book is devoted to higher-order grammars such as context-free grammars, and their stochastic generalization. Stochastic context-free grammars are applied to the analysis of RNA secondary structure (folding). There is a good discussion of the CYK dynamic programming algorithm for non-deterministic context-free grammar parsing; an algorithm that is easily applied to finding the best parse in a probabilistic grammar. The presentations of the dynamic programming algorithms for HMM decoding, edit distance minimization, hierarchical clustering and context-free grammar parsing are as good as I've seen anywhere. They are precise, insightful, and informative without being overly subscripted. The illustrations provided are extremely helpful, including their positioning on pages where they're relevant.

This book is aimed at biologists trying to learn about algorithms, which is clear from the terse descriptions of the underlying biological problems. The technical details were so clear, though, that I was able to easily follow the algorithms even if I wasn't always sure about the genetic applications. After studying some introductions to genetics and coming back to this book, I was able to follow the application discussions much more easily. This book assumes the reader is familiar with algorithms and is comfortable manipulating a lot of statistics; a gentler introduction to exactly the same mathematics and algorithms can be found in Jurafsky and Martin's "Speech and Language Processing". For biologists who want to see how sequence statistics and algorithms applied to language, I would suggest Manning and Schuetze's "Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing". Although it is much more demanding computationally, more details on all of these algorithms, as well as some more background on the biology, along with some really nifty complexity analysis can be found in Dan Gusfield's "Algorithms on Strings, Trees and Sequences".

In these days of fly-by-night copy-editing and typesetting, I really appreciate Cambridge University Press's elegant style and attention to detail. Durbin, Eddy, Krogh and Mitchison's "Biological Sequence Analysis" is as beautiful and readable as it is useful.

I am a physicist and had some interest in what these bio informatics actually do. I must say I am impressed both in the rigor and sharpness of the probabilistic reasoning. This book relies heavily on probability theory (especially hidden Markov models) and is clear enough to be read without a sharp pencil. Don't get me wrong it is not simple enough to be good late night bedtime entertainment. The biological and chemical background is also easy to grasp.
The authors are obviously very active in the field they describe. Their self citations seem absolutely reasonable.

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Though it has been some twenty years since I read this book I have found it impossible to forget, a book that changed what I know. It would be, I imagine of interest to students of engineering and flight as well as a cautionary business tale. Though it is a nonfictional account of the jumbo trijet race is often reads like a whodunit and occassionally rises to the heights of great literature,e.g. describing a 747's take-off roll as " a cathedral in motion."

First published in 1976, and out of print fairly soon after (accidents fade quickly from public memory) this book is an exceptionally comprehensive and researched work focusing on the Turkish Airlines DC-10 crash of May 1974.

How did 346 people die such a tragic and somewhat brutal death in a forest just outside of Paris?

This book not only answers that question specifically in terms of the structural failure of the airliner, but perhaps just as importantly discusses the events leading up to the crash, and why and how it could and should have been avoided.

I must give full credit to the (British) Sunday Times Insight team for producing what I consider one of the most exceptional works of Journalism of the 20th century.

Most Engineering Students and indeed Engineers will find this book absolutely fascinating. Students of ethics might find it of considerable interest as well, as should the general reader.

*Destination Disaster* is a remarkable book of the politics in the (wide-body) commercial-aviation industry, and an accounting of the political warfare between McDonald Douglas and Lockheed Aircraft to gain acceptance of their designs during the early competition for wide-body commercial aircraft. One company, McDonald, pushed hard in Washington to prevent the technically more-advanced L1011 from being accepted in the commercial airline industry, only to see its candidate, the DC-10, later prove to be a safety nightmare. It is a spell-binding account of the troubles that ensued. In the end, Douglas' effort helped prevent acceptance of the L1011 for large-scale orders, and the plane ended production far too soon due to lowered order rate.

This out-of-print book is a must-read chronical of what happens behind the scenes in the highly competitive airline industry. It is well researched and written.

This book is an excellent read. I highly reccomend it to all people interested in the video game business. It is very engrossing. Like most people, I enjoy the Tetris section... However, the book is slightly biased. The author does show some distaste towards Nintendo (the previous title was "Game Over: How Nintendo zapped an American industry, captured your dollars and enslaved your children"). He also includes some odd statements about Japan conquering the world through this little NES. But other than that, a truly great book.

This book is absolutely fabulous. David Sheff succeeds in giving a vivid history of one of the greatest game companies. It captivates the reader with it's suspense. I especially liked the stories on how Nintendo won various lawsuits, how the different games were developed, how they got their names(especially Mario)and the company's struggle with negative press publicity. Brings out clearly American's obsession with video games and their original apathy towards the same. Hiroshi Yamauchi, Minoru Arakawa and the other founders are not only profiled in their professional capacities but also the struggles in their personal lives are well brought out. The author's quickness to point out when Nintendo was wrong and his sense of humour are uplifting. The book is an absolute must have for anyone interested in the world of business.

If you are looking for a good book with an in-depth detailed analysis of the biggest and most recognizable company in the history of video games, than this book is for you. Definately a must-read, and even a bible of sorts, for the hardcore gamer.

If you are looking for tragedy and a dark bloody drama then I recommend Macbeth with no reservations whatsoever. On a scale of 1-5, I fell this book deserves a 4.5. Written by the greatest literary figure of all time, Shakespeare mesmorizes the reader with suspense and irony. The Scottish Thane Macbeth is approachd by three witches who attempt and succeed at paying with his head. They tell him he will become king, which he does, alog with the aide of his ambitious wife. Macbeth's honor and integrity is destroyed with the deceit and murders he commits. As the novel progresses, Macbeth's conscience tortures him and makes him weak minded. Clearly the saying "what goes around comes around," is put to use since Macbeth's doom was similar to how he acquired his status of kingship. He kills Duncan, the king of Scottland and chops the head off the Thane of Cawdor, therefore the Thane of Fife, Macduff, does the same thing to him. I feel anyone who decides to read this extraordinary book will not be disatisfied and find himself to become an audience to Shakespearean tragedies.

Noble Macbeth and the story of his decay due to the seduction of the forces of darkness - I liked it. The play sets off with an impressing scene, the chant of the three witches, a perfect use of language, I dare say. It takes only about a page and I knew it by memory after two times reading. We used to quote it during the breaks, and actually still do so sometimes. "When shall we three meet again...and so forth. After this promising start the language gets quite hard (I'm not any native form Enland, the US or any other english speaking part of this planet). One can follow the action though and every five or six pages there's a reward for your patience, at least for anybody who likes the power Shakespeare's language is able to display in their good or best moments: "Have we eaten on the insane root?" and the likes. Of course there's also the famous "It is a tale, told by an idiot...". It's for these moments, where Williams knew how to transfere a feeling of one of his caracteres into the realm of a universal significance, that I enjoyed the play...

Shakespeare's shortest and bloodiest tragedy, MACBETH is also possibly the most serious. Macbeth is a warrior who has just had his greatest victory, but his own "vaulting ambition," the spectral promises of the three weird sisters, and the spurring on of his wife drive him to a treason and miserable destruction for which he himself is completely responsible. The ominous imagery of the fog that hovers over the first scene of the play symbolizes the entire setting of the play. Shakespeare's repeated contrasts of such concepts as fair and foul, light and darkness, bravery and cowardice, cut us to the quick at every turn. MACBETH forces us to question "what is natural?" "what is honor?" and "Is life really 'a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/ Signifying nothing?'" Few plays have ever illustrated the torments of Guilt (especially how it deprives one of Sleep) so vividly and stirringly.

I have read this play curiously as a child, excitedly as a teenager, passionately as a college student, and lovingly as a graduate student and adult. Like all of Shakespeare's writing, it is still as fresh, and foreboding, and marvelous as ever. As a play it is first meant to be heard (cf. Hamlet says "we shall hear a play"), secondarily to be seen (which it must be), but, ah, the rich rewards of reading it at one's own pace are hard to surpass. Shakespeare is far more than just an entertainer: he is the supreme artist of the English language. The Arden edition of MACBETH is an excellent scholarly presentation, offering a bounty of helpful notes and information for both the serious and casual reader.