I was given this book to read as part of my studies. It is useless information that you could get from your drunk grandmother on any given Sunday! It is nothing more than a retort of common sense, and a CEO's bragging about individual company's accomplishment out of context, with no real information or solutions offered.

I was particularly dismayed at Middle-school level comments such as "Our work with clients and with the analysis of markets suggests that growth energizes those firms and management groups that creates outstanding shareholder value." It's classic rhetoric that makes Dilbert's life a living hell, and shows just how headless large corporations really are.

An intellectual epic of the management movement in the global marketplace. A must read book for any business leaders who wants to gain market share, acheive product differentiation, increase shareholder value, manage KM or ride the wave of ecommerce. An insightful bilbilography backed by 29 prominent top executives in the international arena. The collection of articles provide a useful resource for MBA students and a valuable information tool for case studies.

The authors clearly have presented us top wisdom from these business leaders. The stories are fascinating and the ideas I got from the business leaders was numerous. Well done.

I also recommend a book my company uses successfully for its leadership development program - it has worked well with new and existing managers: "The Leader's Guide: 15 Essential Skills."

Comprehensive and detailed book that covers it all. Drawings of the greek temples of Agrigento, Selinute and Segesta. Maps of what the sites would have looked like. Explanations of the dozens of layers of history and conquest that is Sicily's legacy. 319 pages of well layed out information in a region by region basis. Good overview of transporation options and how to get to the more remote sites. Minimal hotel information. Good color map section in the back. Did not need to buy the local english guides with this one along on the trip.

Comprehensive and detailed this 319 page book covers it all. Sicily is a gold mine of history and with this book you can follow along at the most involved historic site. We used it during all 14 days we spent in Sicily and found that we did not need to buy the english site guides while there. A lot of drawings that show how the greek sites would have been layed out and the structure of the temples. Of great use in Segesta, Selinute and Agrigento historic sites. Highly recommend for the traveler that likes detail!

Ann A. Estill writes:

This scholarly feminist anthology offers essays on several topics where feminist thinking casts new light on old thinking and writing...As with any anthology, readers are drawn to some topics more than others, but all will be rewarded with well-researched material to aid them in the never-ending task of seeking to be informed feminists.

Excerpt from a review in "Theology", July-August 1999.

As someone who struggled to get feminist theology taken seriously in Cambridge in the 1980s, I was delighted to find that this volume contains lectures delivered in a series called "women's voices in theology" which began almost ten years ago, and is clearly still going strong.

This series continues to offer a platform for the wide range of disciplines and interests which cluster under the broad umbrella of feminist theology. As such this volume offers a window into the state of the subject today. It is clear that a lot has happened in the last decade....Extremely illuminating work continues to emerge from the interface between gender studies and both biblical studies and church history.

Feminist theology continues to engage in a competent and often original way with the "high theory" of philosophy and social theory.

Linda Woodhead Lancaster University

The enclosed CD-ROM is for PC only. With a MAC version, my rating would be five stars.

The Big Blue Book is back. This time around the cover has a close-up photo of olivine laths in a barred olivine chondrule, and at 689 pages, is bigger and better than ever. There is a listing of 22,507 authenticated meteorites up to December 1999 which also come on a CD-ROM.

The origins of the Catalogue go back to 1847 with a listing of the 62 meteorites of the British Museum. Subsequent periodic updates were issued and in 1923, George Prior, the Keeper of Minerals of the British Museum, issued the first worldwide Catalogue of Meteorites. The well-known 4th edition, edited by Graham, Bevan, and Hutchison was published in 1985.

The 5th edition not only has ten thousand more meteorites (including such recent discoveries as the Martian Los Angeles meteorite or a Saharan EL4-5 called Grein 002), but it also reflects the multitude of changes that have taken place in the field of meteoritics in the past 15 years. Type 3 chondrites now have petrologic subtypes (3.0 to 3.9), enstatite chondrites are now distinguished as EH or EL, there are new carbonaceous chondrite groups, CH, CK, and CR, as well as the new groupings of acapulcoites, brachinites, rumurutiites and winonaites. The SNCs are now described, perhaps with a bit of British understatement, "probably from Mars". There are also various stylistic changes like dropping the ordinary chondrite terms "bronzite", "hypersthene", and "amphoterite", replacing them simply with H, L, and LL. However, the overall format is the same as the 1985 edition and readers of the latter will be right at home with this one.

Another new feature to the 2000 edition is the listing of tables of Antarctic meteorites, meteorites from the Nullarbor region, Australia, meteorites from Roosevelt County, New Mexico, and over 1500 meteorites recovered from the Sahara Desert.

Even some of the citations have changed. For example, the TKW of Nakhla is now 10 kg, due to the research of Kevin Kichinka (Meteorite! Aug. '98) down from the original 40 kg and the infamous phrase, "one of the stones killed a dog", now reads, "one of the stones reputedly killed a dog". Divnoe has been upgraded to an "ungrouped achondrite", and although this reviewer thought it was actually a brachinite, Alan Rubin informs me that Monica is correct. Gao and Guenie have now been amalgamated into the one fall denoted Gao-Guenie. The recently found Nadiabondi individuals have maintained their status under that name even though there was some speculation they might be associated with the Gao-Guenie fall. Apparently not.

The inclusion of a CD-ROM makes this edition of the CM so much more useful than previous editions and more in keeping with modern databases. Once it is installed on your computer you do not have to put the disk in again as it resident on your harddrive ready to use. You can search for a single entry, or use the data fields to do more complex searches, like finding all CM2 carbonaceous chondrites from Australia (Adelaide, Lookout Hill, Murchison). Filling in the search form is easy and you do not need a manual to run it. You do have to remember to select "valid" from one of the drop down lists as otherwise you get doubtful returns as well. The search speed probably depends on the speed of your computer: my 600 MHz Gateway took about 10 seconds for multiple searches, but was virtually instantaneous if searching for a particular meteorite. The CD-ROM also has more analytical data and more complete reference citations for the researcher than the book itself.

Of course in any work of this great magnitude, there are a few misprints/glitches, but I won't dwell on these. There are some people who would go to a concert by Heifetz and listen only for the wrong notes (if any!)

It is entirely fitting that there are meteorites named Grady (p.220). This book represents a prodigious amount of human endeavor, and the meteorite community owes Monica Grady an enormous debt of gratitude. If you are a serious amateur or a professional, you will want to have this book.

This history of the Irish in the army of Robert E. Lee is valuable, if only because the topic has been so little explored. In fact, the ambiguous loyalties of the Irish during the Civil War were covered up in the past by Irish Americans keen on garnering support for Irish independence by playing up Irish participation in the Union Army.

Irish in the South were staunch supporters of the Confederacy, for a variety of reasons. Catholics and Jews were more accepted in the South than the North, probably because their common whiteness was more important than any denominational differences from their Protestant neighbors. The Catholic Church was soft on slavery in general, and prominent bishops and lay Catholics in the South were vocal supporters of the peculiar institution. For example, Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney, author of the loathsome Dred Scott decision, was a good Maryland Catholic. The average Irish labourer, North and South, dreaded the potential competition for low wage jobs that would arise from emancipation. Irish intellectuals, such as the rebel John Mitchel, sympathisized with the South as a weak, agrarian underdog trying to free itself from the domination of a ruthless, capitalistic, imperialistic Yankee/Puritan juggernaut, thereby recasting the war as a variation of the ancient Anglo-Irish struggle. Mitchel also rationalized the institution of slavery as humane, compared to the prevailing feudal system in Ireland which had allowed the starvation of millions.

The lot of the Irish soldier in Lee's army was as bad as his Northern counterpart. Confederate officers seem to have been as profligate of the lives of their Irish soldiery as their Northern counterparts, although the grim butchery of the Civil War knew no ethnic boundaries.

O'Grady is particularly insightful on the battle of Fredericksburg, debunking the many myths which have arisen regarding the Union Irish Brigade and its less than heroic commander, General Thomas Meagher.

Despite its many strengths, O'Grady's book does have serious flaws. The narrative tends to break down into a somewhat dull retelling of the individual careers of Irish Confederates. There are a few odd digressions. Notably, O'Grady gushes at length in praise of the narcoleptic, semi-sane Stonewall Jackson in tones more suited to an infatuated schoolgirl than a dispassionate historian, for no particular reason, except perhaps for Jackson's distant Ulster ancestry.

This is bound to be a controversial book, because it says what a lot of today's Americans of Irish descent would like to brush under the rug: That yes, there *were* Irish Confederates, and that they were committed officers and soldiers, passionate in their reasons for fighting for the South.

This book puts Irish participation in the Civil War in its proper historic context. At the time, the Irish who lived in the North were the victims of the worst kind of bigotry--they were systematically cut out of employment opportunities and otherwise damaged by a nasty, nativist, "Know Nothing" campaign against immigrants. In the South, many Irish were also near the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, but they were not loathed just for their Irishness, and there they had a chance to better themselves.

The book also makes the point that for the Irish on both sides, the war was not about slavery or racial bigotry. Irish Union soldiers weren't abolitionist liberators. Many were swept into the Irish Brigade by the charming harangues of their homeland hero Thomas F. Meagher. Others were simply trying to assimilate into their new country or were fighting because they couldn't get out of it. Irish Confederate soldiers were mostly non-slaveholders who fought *not* to support the peculiar institution but because they believed the mostly agrarian South (like agrarian Ireland at the time) should be self-governed, not dominated by puritanical Northern industrialists (who seemed an awful lot like the puritanical English industrialists).

The author convincingly builds these points and then tells the rest of the Confederate Irish story, battle by battle and officer by officer. This book is a thoroughly researched, interesting and well-written work of Civil War scholarship that actually finds something new to say about a much-rehashed war.

I must admit I have run a small buisness for 15 years, and do most of my estimate work by hand, or by computer. I never had a source to draw national information on pricing of labor and materials. Keep in mind I am still learning to use all the information in the book. The CD-rom is all the information in the book and more! So you can edit all the infomation to fit into your area and or your style of buisness. Keep in mind that this is marketed as a book but I have found that the computer program has and, will save me hours. In turn it will make me more effective at making money. It has a video tutorial that is great at helping you do your first estimate. I would say if your in this buisness give this a try you won't go back.

Why can you not get the 7 edition? I need the 7 edition. Few will buy the 6 Ed since its so out of date? This is an inmportant book in the field.

The pages of this book consist of four parts: a Biblical passage, a "commentary" on the passage, a piece of art, and a commentary on the art. I put "commentary" in quotes as it is more a response to the Biblical passage - a poem, reflections ...

The art ranges from work that derives from Western sensibilites, to tradition "high culture" Eastern works, to folk traditions. For example, the passage from Isaiah "they will rise on wings like eagles" is accompanied by a New Zealand poem including the lines "Lord, Holy Spirit, / You are as the mother eagle with her young" The art is a Taiwanese brush painting of an eagle. The commentary on the painting includes a statement from the artist on her gratitude to God for her artistic talent.

A particularly effective piece is "The Angry Christ" painted by an artist from the Philippines and accompanied by a poem from Indonesian.

The book is based on a sensibility similar to Jo Milgrom's work "Handmade Midrash". I highly recommend it.

Insolated in my room, reading Six Days of the Condor by the glow of my muted television, occasionally looking up at the scrolling headlines and seeing such words as, troops return from Iraq today, it made me think. Is this splendid novel truly fiction or is James Grady warning us about big government? A political out cry imbedded in the center of a tome palatable for the burgeos. This text made you realize not only that one-day we will run out of life's necessities and then even the puissant and affluent will be vulnerable to it's ramifications, but to what means a government might go in order to keep food and water in the bodies of their sheep. Today it is the oil that fuels our machines, tomorrow maybe the nutrients that are vital to fuel our selves. A riveting story juxtaposed with an enticing message makes Six Days of the Condor one of my new favorite volumes. Reading this story in the present day is crucial. Before we doom ourselves to a quite evident fate, let us just think about the other possibilities. A good friend will tell you when you are doing something wrong, so America should consider James Grady a confidant.

I first read this book in High School and got caught up in it. I have read it a second time and still think its great. I didn't care for the movie all that much. The book is written very graphically and it kept me interested the whole way. I read it as an assignment for a book report the first time and loved it. The second time was just for fun. There are only a few books that I have read cover to cover that I thought were worth it. This was one of them.

I first read this suspense and spy novel sometime in the mid-1970s, while living in Utah and working for the federal government. The picture it paints of a murderous renegade network operating within the Central Intelligence Agency is both frightening and plausible, and is delivered by author James Grady in a tight, well-developed thread of events that spins way out of control as the protagonist tries to figure out who is at the center of the bloody plot and why he and his cohorts at a special studies institute sponsored by the Agency are targets. This book is extremely well written!

The level of paranoia as well as the multiple levels of deceit and deception described in the book seemed outlandish at the time, but given the temper of the times, it somehow seemed much more plausible in the backwash of Watergate and all that was revealed about the machinations of the so-called "invisible government" then. The hero's ability to parse together the facts and learn and adapt as he progresses makes the novel work especially well, and one can relate to his growing frustration as he realizes there just may not be any way out alive. And between the margins of the paragraphs are some intriguing questions regarding the role of secrecy in an open and supposedly democratic society that add a measure of intellectual acumen and "gravitas" to the tale.

So popular was this novel in the bookstores that very quickly after it was turned into a screenplay and filmed as a revised story under the title "Three Days Of The Condor" starring Robert Redford, Fay Dunaway, and Cliff Robertson. This novel makes an absorbing way to escape the humdrum of everyday life with a stunning tale of murder, mayhem, and betrayal. I highly recommend this book. Enjoy!

As long as it sticks to New World vultures, this is a good reference. When it comes to Old World vultures, though, this guy simply doesn't know what he's writing about. He claims, for example, that the Bearded Vulture is incapable of carrying tortoises aloft (which it does regularly), and that the Asian Black Vulture is the largest vulture in Africa (it is the second smallest, out of nine species). I find it disturbing (if not surprising) that the Sierra Club would fund such a poorly researched and blatantly inaccurate volume. Anyone looking for an excellent reference on Old World vultures should check out The Vultures of Africa, by the South African Vulture Study Group.

Why judge a book by the standards of something it is evidently not? 'Vulture' is the most gorgeous collection of photos of these birds that I know. The book itself is beautifully laid out and designed. This is an ode to vultures rather than a comprehensive work of reference about them, and although it is regrettable that there are some errors in the text, they are few in number and are compensated by Grady's obvious love for his subject and his writing skills. But buy this book for what it is: a celebration of the beauty of a much-misunderstood group of birds.

I learned much about my favorite bird-of-prey. Giving information about Of both types of vulture (Genus Accitciprid and Cathardiae). Many people have discouraged vultures, not knowing that there smaller cousins had the same habit. Mr. Grady gives plenty of detail for these large scaengers of the air.