Again, we have doctors against the government.
"Toxic Metal Syndrome" is so annoyingly repetitive that I could not even finish it. I was really hoping to find something more in line with a classical dissertation in the third person, but instead this book comes off with condescending and scolding overtones. I apologize if that seems unhelpful. I do not blame the author so much as the editor. "EDTA chelation" is used so many times it is practically beyond counting. That phrase, in addition to the alleged link to Alzheimer's disease is so overused I wonder if the doctor's emotions were overshadowing his professed knowledge of the English language. Opinions aside, we are told at the beginning how knowledgeable our authors are with both their subjects and their "writing abilities," but specific references are missing (footnotes and endnotes). I am an author and an editor myself. When a conclusion is made to EDTA chelation based on "many reports," the "many reports" are not cited. We are only given a list of sources without needed links to the specific allegations. I need to check out references before I believe anything as assertive as being poisoned with the effects of various metals. We need specifics, not generalities. No longer are we going to take your word for it. Duly noted that mercury and lead has its noted drawbacks, yet the authors are presuming as if they had originally discovered them. What really irked me, however, was the doomsday thinking that if we don't have our silver fillings removed we are going to become victims of insanity or premature death. Opinions not based on fact which directly challenge the FDA on such issues as the safety of silver fillings, are, in fact, unfactual.

Many of the references actually used here are decades old. This is acceptable in some cases, but not when asserting something as important as the authors believe. This book needs an immediate rewrite to include the exact references to which they are referred, and to remove the repetitions and slanted opinions that reduce credibility. The conclusion, however, is perfectly clear, albeit unfounded: metals found in "toxic" levels in the body are cited to be the cause of such ailments as uncontrollable anger and senility. One case cited the autopsy report in which a certain metal was over 20 times higher than normal, which led the individual on a shooting spree. Okay, which autopsy report? Another passage says that our brains "absorb" vapors given off by silver fillings (amalgams). Well, what about when we breath in an out? Doesn't that act as an "exhaust"? If we can't check out the references, we cannot logically believe the conclusions. I'm not going to do anything this book says. Then, when I'm 100, I'm going to prove the conclusions wrong just by my mere existence. Fearmongering amongst an already paranoid society has no place in the trusted realm of nonfiction. But before I get to be 100 by not changing what I know to be kosher according to government standards, where's my red pen?

this is a very good book that is dealing with the treatment of chelation-therapy in degenerative-neurologic diseases,such as altzheimer,parkinson,dementia,etc....the explanation on the mechanisms of how the toxic metals get absorbed in the brain, and make their damage is very much acurate and interesting.there are healing nutrition recipes, plus suplements and the chelation-therapy,-all explain very clearly,and there are a few real case histories that gives you (the reader) something to think. it is a very interesting and practical book on the subject, and the chapter that dealing with altzheimer is particularly amazing. i recommand that book very much.

For the Belgrade ("Serbian") variety of the language, this is the best dictionary available. Alas, that's not saying much. Benson seems to rely on literature more than the living spoken language, which may explain the many outdated and archaic forms that are presented without being so identified. Just one example: frka is glossed as "snort, snorting of a horse." But in modern Serbian, that would be frkanje, which Benson does not list. (The modern meaning of frka is "ruckus, fuss, ado"; again, omitted by Benson.)

But the one failing of this dictionary that I find unforgiveable is the abuse of the word "see." It is so common to look up a word in Benson only to find nothing but an instruction to "see" some other entry that we have a joke among Serbian translators: Benson induces "see"-sickness. And the worst of it is, often the entry you're told to "see" is an inadequate synonym for the word you need.

If Benson has a strength, it is in its meticulous attention to accentuation. You won't find that in any other English dictionary.

For a beautiful language that is out of the way for most English speakers, Morton Benson produced a classic I wish everyone else in foreign langage dictionary publishing would emulate. (I've been dreaming since 1993 of a Benson-quality analogue for Romanian...)

Are there flaws? Sure. The "see the other entry" habit a previous reviewer mentioned is time-consuming and often requires a great deal of thought when deciphering the meaning of, say, similar verbs with the same roots but different prefixes. Also, I would've liked to see more explicit definitions of verbs frequently converted to their gerund form, instead of having to arrive at my best "guess-timation" in some not-so-easy situations.

Most other gripes remain the exclusive business of literary experts. (Particularly gripes about the real or imagined separation of Serbo-Croatian into separate, non-hyphenated languages; most of these arguments have more to do with nationalist projects on angry tangents than logic or linguistic history.)

For serious non-native students of the language like myself (a political scientist), I have yet to see anything remotely close to the Benson, let alone better, although there may well be a few out of print rarities in used book shops in the former Yugoslavia.

Very few dictionaries of any non-major foreign language go into the grammatical, let alone regional, detail that Benson does in the entries themselves (particularly past tenses and participles) and a wide range of expressions (even though it is not intended to be a real phraseological dictionary). He also includes an excellent, quick and dirty reference of cases and grammatical endings for nouns and adjectives in the back (nice, you can leave your textbook photocopies at home). The preface contains several rules concerning verb behavior that I have found immensely helpful.

This Benson is frequently found as part of a 2 volume set, one volume on Serbo-Croatian to English, the other volume as the reverse (English to Serbo-Croatian). They're rather large in size and pricey, but *worth every penny* if you have any sustained need to understand Serbo-Croatian beyond a short tourist trip. My copy is rather battered and overly thumbed, but rates as important a place as my underwear in my backpack on every trip to Serbia. (I even bought a backup copy in Belgrade--much cheaper, but also on cheaper paper). Look around for deals offering both volumes together--I think I got mine in 1995 directly off Cambridge UP for not much more than the current price for one (90 dollars).

There is also an earlier version of the Benson produced in the early 1980s, I believe--smaller, going from S-C to English to back, in one much more portable volume, but it does not have the grammatical details so vital to the bigger Benson, and it certainly falls far shorter on the number of words. Every teacher I know recommends the "big Benson" for the serious student.

I just wish more publishers served language students with the quality of the Cambridge UP Benson, instead of foisting cheap, frustratingly useless junk on starved niche markets, like Hippocrene routinely does. You can *always* find better than a Hippocrene in the new or used book shops of the target country, and if you're going to visit anyway...buy it there.

As the other reviewers have pointed out, there are flaws with this dictionary, but there are flaws with any dictionary that is printed. Especially in today's world, we cannot expect a "Serbo-Croatian" dictionary to please everybody. Most people will not agree that Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian are the same language. It is impossible to list every single difference between the different dialects of former Yugoslavia. I have studied and taught this language for over ten years, and there are too many differences to be pointed out in a dictionary. You must understand that this dictionary was written when there was a "knjizevni" serbo-croatian language. That is the language that this dictionary is based on. If you cannot live with that, then you need to find a different dictionary, or better yet, sit down and create your own.

Denn's text is much shorter than most introductions to fluid mechanics, but he seems to have left out all of the material that would make the topic interesting and accessible to the novice. The topics are well-ordered and have a logical progression, but almost all of the explanatory matter is missing. It is extremely difficult to get a conceptual understanding of fluid dynamics by looking at page after page of variable manipulation. In addition, the index is so incomplete as to be useless; most of the terms one would look up are not listed, or point only to the page where it was cursorily defined.

That said, this book can be salvaged for a class by a professor who is skilled at conveying concepts (rather than just equations.) I also suspect this book would be useful as a reference for those who have already learned the fundamental material. However, I recommend that the novice look elsewhere for a satisfactory introduction to fluid mechanics.

Denn's book is an excellent introductory text for chemical engineering fluid mechanics. The book starts off with the basics of dim-analysis and proceeds into macro and then micro problems. This is a very logical ordering and allows the student to see the subject from a broader perspective instead of getting bogged down in the systematics of the problems themselves. A careful reading is definitely needed to get the most out of the book, though. And the section on turbulence is a bit unclear. Overall, though, a good book to keep for many years to come as a chem eng.

"Process Fluid Mechanics" is a very satisfactory introductory text on chemical engineering fluid mechanics. Denn shows the basics of fluid mechanics in a concise, mathematical, and theoretical manner. A must-have for any beginning chemcical engineering fluid mechanics class.

This book was quite ridiculous. Although I applaud the author on his efforts, the book was among other things boring and without depth. The story somehow tries to paint Monica as highly intelligent, sure of what she wanted and able to speak her own mind. But she is also supposed to be lost, confused, and have low self esteem. Am I the only person who sees the contradiction here?

I honestly picked up this book simply because it was in the library and sounded interesting. I am not truly interested in either politics or gossip. Although I knew information about the Lewinsky scandal (who didn't?), I never defended one side or the other. I don't think Lewinsky is an evil women who should be burned at the stake. I also think that some people are too quick to criticize her without considering the fact that we've all done something we aren't proud of in our lives. I think she was truly in love with the President and that she didn't try to set him up. However this book goes way too far in trying to make her sound innocent. Any decent person will own up to the fact that they have done something wrong. But this book made Monica into the hurt little victim, without taking any responsibility for her own actions. The thing that bothered me the most was that no one ever considered Hilary or Chelsea seriously in the story. Monica somehow seems to almost completely write them out of the picture as if the family didn't matter. Of course she does mention that she followed Hilary's actions so she could know when the President would call her. For someone who is so intelligent it is surprising to me that she never considered what effect it would have on other people (namely the Clinton family) if she and the President actually did get married, something she often daydreams about in the story. Does she expect to just lovingly become Chelsea's stepmother? Although the author tried to avoid this he truly ended up making Monica sound extremely neurotic.

In life there is usually no black or white area. Most situations can not be interpreted as completely right or wrong. All people live in a gray area, meaning sometimes they do the right thing and other times they don't. In this book we apparently meet the first person who doesn't, because Monica Lewinsky lives totally in the white area. I wish I had picked up a book with much more depth.

This is book intended to garner sympathy for a thoughtlessly self-centered young woman who did not know enough to keep her mouth shut when it counted the most: whenever a man has his pants unzipped and whenever a secret is best kept to yourself. This person still does not seem to understand the gravity of the situation she helped to cause, namely, the impeachemnt of the President of the U.S. and the betrayal of his friends, family, constituants and collegues. All she does is whine about the treatment that she was subjected to as a result of her tawdry fling. She still misses her "Handsome", the man who used and manipulated her and then discarded her like yesterday's newspaper. One has to wonder what it would take for this girl to get the picture that all the men she's known so far have used her for one thing only and yet, she inexplicably longs for them and remembers them fondly. Monica needs to find some way for men to relate to her other than her "comfortable sexuality." Monica is a very beautiful girl who is not fat and undesirable. Her opinion of herself is seriously flawed. She needs to impose a vow of chastity upon herself before she destroys any more lives of wives, children and unborn babies. I write this review as a pro-choice advocate and a person who can no longer stand to look upon the face of Bill Clinton. I think Monica should learn a lesson from Joe Di Maggio and just keep it to herself. I, for one, would not like to travel the length and beadth of the earth being known only as "the queen of the BJ". This book did not change my perception of her one bit.

I found this book an interesting read. The acts of the OIC and Linda Tripp were fascinating -- imagine going through an emotional crisis, confiding in someone, only to discover later that your friend has been secretly taping you for months! Also interesting was the way that either the OIC and Linda Tripp distorted the story -- helped, in a large part, by the media. In addition, Clinton, with all those phone calls, played a larger role in the "affair" than we realized, although he was certainly not as interested as Monica realized.

But I have some problems with Morton's sweeping generalizations. He characterizes Monica as "honest". I do think she is warm-hearted, but honest?

Monica needs to stop defining her entire self-worth in terms of relationships with others -- particularly married men! And if she does decide to continue this sort of behavior, she should truly not talk about it, instead of telling all her closest friends, and telling Clinton she hasn't told a soul.

Actually, when you think about it, she and Clinton both "betrayed" each other. Clinton could not satisfy Monica's deepest emotional needs (although no one could, because she is far too needy) and she did not satisfy his main requirement of secrecy.

There are many more up-to-date reference books on the Domestic Pet Ferret. It's an add to my Ferret book collection only. I recommend researching all books available before deciding to be owned by Ferrets.

While some of the information is unique to this book (like the part about ferret sounds and body language) there are some alarming errors (a ferret should NEVER be housed in an aquarium!). Use it as an additional reference, but not your primary one. You should have several different sources to refer to anyway.

Although I liked the companion book (Training Your Pet Ferret) more, this is an excellent concise guide for someone who knows nothing about ferrets. This is not a book for anyone who has even a working knowledge about ferret behavior. But then again I haven't found a good guide yet that goes in depth into ferret matters for those of us who know the basics about them, but would like to know more.

The book does not give you any more information than your diabetic counselor will. There is more filler in this book that is unrelated to gestational diabetes. There also is some contradiction in it as well. Don't buy it.

When you have Gestational Diabetes, you are basically going to find all your information from your Doctor and Diabetic Counseling, there really isn't any one book that tells you anything more than you already know. I thought this books Chapter 5 on Food, Food, Food was helpful. It allowed me to make up my own menus following their guidelines on what to eat. It was pretty much the same guidelines I got from my nutritionist but my nutrionist never gave me as many choices. I would recommend this book to someone with Gestational Diabetes, because of that chapter, and it does give the same information as your Doctor.

I was recently diagnosed with gestational diabetes at 29 weeks of pregnancy. My initial feelings included fear of the unknown. My doctor had sent me to see a nutritionist to discuss my diet. I found myself overwhelmed and afraid after my initial visit with the nutritionist. I found this book to be an informative guide to gestational diabetes and the risks associated with it. I feel more in control by further educating myself with the help of this wonderful book.

Ryne Douglas Pearson, give me the name of your writing teacher! Boring and clumsily plotted, with the wit and charm of the Sears Robuck catalog. If I had something better to do the day I read this junk I would have never have bothered to finish it. The protagonist of this book is an African-American but in the movie he's played by Bruce Willis. Shame on you Ryan for allowing the character to be de-raced by Hollywood.

An autistic child gets a copy of a puzzle the FBI cryptographers planted into a Genius-level magazine. Basically, the kid sees the puzzle, solves it in about a minute, and then does what the puzzle solves into: instructions to call a number listed and tell that he solved the puzzle. When he does, he's targetted for "removal."

Putting the FBI into a tailspin of potential disaster - who is this person who called and cracked the code? And what will the man in charge of what is now a 10 million dollar mistake do to this child? The tension begins to rise... Enter Art Jefferson, who is the one man who might be able to keep this autistic child alive long enough to get him to some sort of safety.

It has a good rising tension throughout, and definitely the last side of tape two is just a race of danger and bullet-dodging and so forth. Very well done. I didn't expect some of the last few twists - though quite a bit of the plot I did see coming - and the ending quite satisfied me. I liked it... though I'd love to know why the book/audiobook FBI agent was a huge black man - and the movie had Bruce Willis. Why do they do that?

Anyway - well worth the time, and the abridgement wasn't half bad. The only real frustration I had was that Joe Morton tried too many accents (his Japanese is borderline offensive stereotype), and that sometimes you were on name overload - there were a lot of characters to this one, and by the nature of abridgement, you didn't get into a lot of their heads. Quite often I was thinking, "Wait, who's this guy again?"

'Nathan

I am a big fan of Mercury Rising. I read the book first and then watched the movie both where very good. I hope that the movie and book give people more awareness to Autism! And I am proud to note that I am an Autistic myself.

Morton Benson has produced some fine dictionaries, but this isn't one of them.

There's very little help with irregularities. For example, I would expect, that if the present tense of a verb isn't formed by swapping "-ti" in the infinitive with "-m" etc, that there'd be some kind of indication of this. Otherwise, you look up a verb in the English to S-C secion, and you have no idea whether you're using it right. There's no indication of when a noun is not of the "expected" gender (that is, female nouns ending with consonants, male nouns ending with -o or -a, etc). There's no indication of verb aspect (svrs^eni i nesvrs^eni vid), which frankly, is really important for a speaker of English. Often, only the perfective (svrs^eni) form, or only the imperfective (nesvrs^eni) form is given. Consequently, it's far too frequent that one can look up a verb in the S-C to English section and just not find it.

Also, although one would expect from the title of the book that it's going to be helpful with Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian, it seldom gives an indication of which word is which. The best you can expect is occasionally to see (W) next to the Croatian form, a convention that's not actually explained anywhere in the book. If several words are listed, there's no way to tell which is commonly used in Serbia, and which is commonly used in Bosnia. As I would like eventually to speak and understand the Bosnian dialect, this is pretty useless.

Lastly, this dictionary gives an impression of having been written "in a hurry". There are lots of little details that aren't quite right. Couldn't they even have put the pages in the right order?

If freight costs between NZ and USA weren't so prohibitive, I would have returned this book to Amazon. It's rather a waste of space on my bookshelf.

I wouldn't comment on technical & pedagogical aspects of this book (nouns,declensions,adjectives etc.) other reviewers have amply elaborated on. As a native speaker of Croatian, I can see this book as (at best) an effort to give reader some basic stuff to linguistically get by in what used to be called "Serbian or Croatian diasystem" (funny phrase). I also found this dictionary funny- luckily I didn't have to learn from it.
But- as some reviewers pointed out, this is a basically Serbian dictionary. I don't intend to nitpick, but a few things have to be addressed:
-Croatian and Serbian are different standard languages. Bosnian is in the process of standardization, and will certainly achieve the stable norm in near future.
-there was not, ever, a "Serbo-Croatian" standard language. The same with "Portol" (Portuguese and Spanish), "Hurdu" (Hindi and Urdu), "Czechoslovakian" Czech and Slovak) or "Bulgaronian" (Bulgarian and Macedonian). These are similar languages which crystallized out of basically the same linguistic "prime matter"- as is the case with Swedish and Danish or Finnish and Hungarian. But to describe them as "variants of a language" (British and American English analogy is frequently (ab)used) is sheer nonsense.
-Croatian and Serbian differ in:
1. script (Latin and Cyrillic)
2. grammar and syntax (ca 200 different syntactic rules)
3. morphology (Croatian is a purist language, Serbian not. Moreover, even "internationalisms" like organize are different: organizirati in Croatian, organizovati in Serbian. Bosnian language tends, in this respect, to overlap with Croatian- but not entirely, since it was subject of forced Serbianization in past 50 years and more).
4. vocabulary (ca 20-30% of everyday vocabulary is different. The thesaurus of an average high school graduate is ca 40,000 to 50,000 words. Draw the conclusion).

So, this dictionary will, at best, make you an "expert" in "pidgin South-Slavic". If this is enough- buy it. If you want more-avoid it.

I've bought the paperback-version of this dictionary, so it could be that the hardcover (?) version is much better and more complete.

First of all some positive remarks: * It's a handy (though pretty heavy) dictionary; simple font and layout, but very readable. * A large amount of words and verbs.

If you want to look up quickly the meaning of a word, or if you want to understand the basics of a text, this dictionary is an excellent match. But if you're looking for more; for more phrases, examples of pronunciation or daily communication, or perhaps the basics of Serbo-Croatian grammar, Morton Benson's dictionary won't be very helpful.

* SERBIAN & CROATIAN. It's called "A dictionary of Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian standards", but basically it's a Serbian dictionary with the Croatian variation in brackets. Another thing which can be very annoying are the endless references to the Serbian spelling: zvijezda > see zvezda = star, or: lijep > see lep = beautiful, pretty.

* BOSNIAN. Most people in Bosnia speak 'ijekavski', the Western (or Croatian) variation of a language we called in the past Serbo-Croatian. Though I'm not an expert on this field, Bosnian Moslems have their own linguistic variation, some call it a dialect, some call it slang, others call it a real language, which seems to be a mixture of the ijekavski- dialect and a lot of Turkish loan-words. But there's no trace of this Bosnian to find in Benson's dictionary, just ijekavski (Croatian) and ekavski (Serbian) are present. (Which doesn't mean that Benson's dictionary should be useless if you have to deal with Bosnian people, newspapers or internet-sites)

* VERBS. Benson's dictionary contains a lot of verbs, but... not a word about regular and irregular verbs or about feminine, neuter or masculine endings in the past tense. So if you for instance would like to know the meaning of 'je bila' (she was), this dictionary won't help you any further.

* NOUNS & ADJECTIVES. Here the same thing, like feminine, neuter and masculine declensions, which are characteristic for Slavonic languages, are completely ignored. Though it's a dictionary and not a grammar-book I think that at least some grammatical basics should have been mentioned. Like for example: kuca (f) = house, polje (n) = field, muz (m) = husband, or jak (m), jako (n), jaka (f) = strong.

* CENSORSHIP. I've never used or bought an American dictionary before, that's why I was kind of shocked when a friend of mine told me this story; You won't find any vulgarities or abusive words in American dictionaries for the morality's sake, even if these words are common used in all kinds of circles. I thought: "Long live this country of freedom and democracy, aj, boli mi kurac!" And if you want to know what that means, better don't buy Benson's dictionary ;-)

But if you're just looking for a huge list of words, then Benson's dictionary is real fine, vjeruj mi.

The typeface of the book is courier and appears to have been originally written on a typewriter and then photocopied. This is a nuisance. The notation they use is terrible (thanks to the typewriter). More importantly, the explanantions and proofs of ideas and theorems are not good at all. I think the book was copied directly from some professors lecture notes (for a course he has taught 30 times already) which makes every thing very cryptic. Good luck learning anything from this book.

Evan Morgan was unduly hard on this book. True the typsetting is bad, but its not unreadable. I learned a lot from this book. It develops matrix group theory from very few prerequisites. I have one complaint: the problem sections seem unrelated to the chapters, but all in all I learned a lot from this book and found it very helpful.

Now hold on just a minute. A couple of things just out front: the material this book covers as concisely in one volume is not to be found elsewhere (as of December 2001). So that by itself is one of its strongest features. As for the typeset, yes it is not in a fancy TeX format with pretty commutative diagrams that most of us are used to in this day. It was not uncommon in the late seventies to have lecture notes or conference proceedings of deep importance (and the material here is) rushed to the publisher, and in the haste not too much effort being spent on the presentation. Perhaps that's off-putting to some people: particularly undergraduates or new graduate students who've not met this material before. However, if you're familiar with basic properties of Lie groups, differential geometry and some basic topology then Matrix Groups will be a pleasure to read. As for the more than occaisional errors in the original edition, this second edition is very well corrected, and has an additional chapter on root systems. Honestly, this really is a remarkable book, particularly in its uniqueness as a short and beautiful introduction to GL(n,K) and its Lie subgroups: amalgamating in with them aspects of topology (compactness, connectedness), differential geometry (tangent spaces...etc) and beyond. So if you're looking for nice TeX presentation (gothic notation and the like): you might find it difficult to enjoy the material in the is volume. But is that doesn't bother you, I recommend it very srongly.

I enjoy some of the conspiracy theories involving the Rothschilds. Of course I stop well short of anti-Semitism. Just fun coffee shop conspiracy talk give me a break. I bought this book for a buck at a used book store hoping to find a little more dirt on the famous family. There was some dirt but it is glossed over with phrases like "but he was the black sheep of the family" and "a ruthless but brilliant business maneuver" etc. etc.
I am usually reading more challenging material so I was surprised how fast a read it was. There is important history here but it is so steeped in blatant flattery and celebrity worship that I felt a little ashamed for having read it - kind of like how one feels after watching Entertainment Tonight. Well that is an exaggeration. There has to be a better history of the Rothschild's out there but if you see this one for a dollar at a used bookstore I won't recommend against picking it up.

There are very few families in history that have managed to maintain a tradition of excellence over several generations -- "Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations" is the rule. The two notable exceptions to the rule are the Medici and the Rothschilds.

I purchased this book thinking that the author would provide some insight into how the Rothschilds achieved their long-standing record of success. Unfortunately, Mr. Morton is merely a sycophant, apparently incapable of providing the kind of detailed analysis the question calls for. Instead, he constantly marvels at how this family of rag merchants from Jew Street in Frankfurt ended up hobnobbing with the crowned heads of Europe. That is certainly an accomplishment of sorts, but absent any kind of descriptive analysis, it is little more than fodder for People magazine. Indeed, one can argue that the recent decline in the family's fortunes is due to their emulation of European aristocracy.

A far better book on the same topic is the two-volume set, "The House of Rothschild" by Niall Ferguson. After reading Mr. Morton, it is both refreshing and illuminating.

This is a very well written history of the Rothschilds. I recommend it for those interested in a strong overview of the family.