Non-commissioned officers (NCO) are the backbone of any effective military force. They are the primary trainers, disciplinarians, and are closely associated with the welfare of the troops and the execution of battle commands in the front lines. Backbone Of The Army: Non-Commissioned Officers In The Future Army comprises the contributions of academics, officers, and non-commissioned officers as they examine the future of the army and NCO recruits, as well as implications for education, training, doctrine, organization, and comparative assessments from allied armies. Backbone Of The Army is a seminal work and a very welcome contribution to military studies.

This is an author with incisive eye for the convoluted entanglements of human relationships and a rare compassion for the downtrodden. His stories create worlds that reverberate with a painful tenderness, humor and an engulfing sense of longing, expressed in exquisite prose.
It was a great surprise to finally discover one of his books on US bookshelves-I hope this brings more of Glover's work to the US.

....you must have this book in your collection...also if you are a FAN of the "vertical" flight or just curious of the history of this amazing all "doing an landing" jet. Many nice pictures and all history and cronology of the jets ever produced.

Definitely the most advanced book ever written on true astrology. It contains interpretations of virtually every combination of sign, house, planet, etc. possible, some nine thousand. Combine this with Baker's book Esoteric Astrology and you have the true keys to understanding astrology, and more importantly, how to apply it to your life and the lives of all around us. Baker has taken the works of Alice Bailey on the same subject and expanded it with correct modern interpretations, and in a manner that is easier to personally apply than Bailey's. Take Linda Goodman's works and those supermarket astrology books and throw them in the recycling bin. This is the one to read.

If this book is disappointing why did I rate it 5 stars? Well, it is because having studied the first edition I was expecting more updates in the second. It really is an excellent book, but I wanted the author to discuss the Brown-Douglas-Fillmore K-theory of operator algebras and give an in-depth discussion of the invariant subspace conjecture. I used this book for a two semester course in functional analysis and operator theory while a sophomore in undergraduate and found it very challenging. The presentation of the topics is very quick and the problems are pretty difficult, but you take away an appreciation of this important area of mathematics. Indeed, the theory of Hp-spaces and Toeplitz operators, which are covered in the last two chapters, have many applications in engineering and physics. The author does give an update on the problems he marked with two stars (indicating an unsolved problem) in the first edition, and references that discuss their solution. When studying the book, I am always amazed about how rich linear transformations become when they operate on infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces; but also how much the finite-dimensional results have generalizations in infinite dimensions. The theory of C* and W*-algebras is discussed in the book, and the presentation should be helpful to physicists who use these techniques, even though the presentation is much more general than one would find in physical theories. The explanation of the W*-algebra as arising from the enlargement of the functional calculus to an algebra of functions generated by characteristic functions; where the Gelfand transform is taken on a larger commutative self-adjoint subalgebra of the space of linear operators is one that is easier to remember and seems more natural than merely giving a set of axioms that a W*-algebra is supposed to satisfy. A very abstract discussion of index theory is given, and one that is pretty distant from the theory of integral equations, but with some work one can see the connection to these equations. Who knows, maybe a third edition with more of the author's insights?

This short book appeared shortly after the first edition of the author's book "Banach Algebra Techniques in Operator Theory" and extends some of the results therein, with particular attention paid to the theory of Toeplitz operators. Toeplitz operators are a generalization of multiplication operators acting on the Hardy space of square integrable functions with zero negative Fourier coefficients. The nontrivial nature of Toeplitz operators, in contrast to multiplication operators, arises from their definition as a projection from the space of square integrable functions to this Hardy space. Physicists and engineers are perhaps more familiar with Toeplitz operators in the guise of Weiner-Hopf operators, and the author shows this equivalence in the introduction. The reader of this book is assumed to be familiar with the elementary theory of Banach algebras, the spectral theorem in operator theory, and the elementary theory of Hardy spaces. The author reviews briefly what the reader is expected to know about Fredholm operators.

The first chapter is concerned with studying the invertibility of Toeplitz operators. The author is more general than in his book by working on square-integrable measurable functions on the unit circle with values in complex n-dimensional space. This makes things slightly more complicated, since it is then not true that a Toeplitz operator with non-vanishing determinant of its symbol and vanishing winding number is invertiable. The author shows that generically it is though, i.e. the collection of symbols for which the Toeplitz operator is invertible is a dense open set of functions from the unit circle to the the general linear group of matrices and when the index of the symbol is zero.

In chapter two the author uses Bunce's theorem, which states (loosely speaking) that the C*-algebra T generated by a commuting family of subnormal operators on a Hilbert space is *-homomorphic to the continuous functions on the joint approximate point spectrum, to study spectral inclusion theorems for Toeplitz operators. Necessary conditions for their invertibility and Fredholmness are optained from these theorems. These spectral inclusion theorems are generalized in chapter 3 to the matrix case, and give criteria for Fredholmness of operators with symbol in the direct sum of the Hardy space of bounded measurable functions and continuous functions on the unit circle with values in the n x n matrices.

Chapter 4 is interesting, for it discusses to what extent one can study Toeplitz operators by localizing the symbol. They can't be since square-integrable Hardy functions are not localizable, but Fredholm operators are. The author proves this in the matrix case using localization techniques from C*-algebras. The proof involves looking at the center of the quotient algebra of Toeplitz operators modulo the compacts, which happens to be larger than the continuous functions on the unit circle.

The author studies Toeplitz operators with piecewise continuous symbol in chapter 5 by using the localization techniques of chapter 4, and gives criteria for when Toeplitz operators are Fredholm with this type of symbol.

Chapter 6 considers Toeplitz operators with almost periodic symbol, which initially is a study of Weiner-Hopf operators. The author shows that such an operator is invertible iff the symbol is invertible and its "mean motion" is zero. But if one removes the second requirement, and asks to what extent the operator is "nearly invertible", one needs a more general notion of what it means for an operator to be Fredholm. Interestingly, the author briefly shows how this is done, using the theory of von Neumann algebras. The index theory for these von Neumann algebras gives an appropriate definition of Fredholm operator, this operator acting on a certain von Neumann algebra "factor".

Things are more abstract in chapter 7, wherein the author considers the extension of C*-algebras. The problem he is concerned with is the extension of the compact operators by the continuous functions on the unit circle, i.e. the determination of the C*-subalgebras of operators such that these subalgebras modulo the compact operators are isomorphic to the continuous functions on the unit circle. The extensions are shown to be classified by integers corresponding to indexes of Fredholm operators.

Toeplitz operators are considered on multi-connected domains in chapter 8, which involves extending the notion of the Hardy space on the unit circle to one on an open connected region in the complex plane. The author shows how to construct a measure on this region in order to get the appropriate generalization. The simply invariant subspaces of the square integrable functions (with this measure a probability measure on the boundary of the region) for the algebra of functions continuous on the boundary of the region and holomorphic on the region. The author sketches briefly what happens for the theory of Toeplitz operators in this context, and to what extent this theory can be related to the theory of Toeplitz operators on the unit circle. As it turns out, many of the results in the unit circle case carry over to this more general one.

In the last two chapters the author studies Toeplitz operators on polydisks, where the symbol is continuous. The Toeplitz operators are defined with respect to the boundary of the polydisk. The criteria for Fredholmness is complicated by the fact that the commutator ideal contains non-compact operators. The author shows how to deal with this in detail. He then generalizes the techniques for proving Fredholmness of Toeplitz operators to arbitary operators in C*-subalgebra generated by Toeplitz operators with continuous symbol having range in the m x m matrices. It is readily apparent in these chapters how difficult it is to compute the Fredholm index of these operators.

I love this book. I've heard this author speak. She published her first book "Eggs in the Coffee and Sheep in the Corn" in her early eighties. She won the Minnesota Book Award and received rave literay reviews for that book. This is her second book and it is as good as the first. She herself is filled with energy and joy - so are her writings. In her mid-eighties she is an inspiration on how life should be led - both intellectually and physically. I am in my early fifties and she is living proof that I have decades ahead to look forward to.

This is simply a picture book of a bunch of baseball games with some organization and text fill. The games are organized by century (18th & 19th), and by type (player-endorsed, non-endorsed, card, action and coin-operated). There's a bit of baseball history, but what you'll want this for is the attention to historical detail in the games themselves. There are hundreds of games photographed in a reasonable (if not exceptional) amount of detail; most of the text is just a description of what's in the pictures. Many versions of popular games are compared, with information on how to tell the versions apart, which will be invaluable if you're a collector. For some reason there's four pages on Cadaco, but neither APBA nor Strat-O-Matic get a look in, nor do more contemporary games from 3M or Sports Illustrated or Avalon Hill. Don't expect a forty-dollar art book with prose that'll entertain you into the night. The printing quality, photo quality, and text-quality are only so so. I'm still waiting for the book that compares how the different games are designed strategically and how they play. This one's aimed more at collectors.

I have been a sculptor in clay for many years and do casting of my work in pewter. Recently I decided to take up wood carving as well. The first Tom Wolfe book I read I borrowed from a friend. It was this book. It is easy to understand and Mr. Wolfe takes you thru each step. It was so helpful in learning to carve with pen knives I had to buy my own copy to keep as reference and will use it for many years to come. This is a wonderful book for beginners and great for long time carvers as a reference. He uses simple terms and easy to understand directions. The first carving I did following his direction is beautiful and sold for $90.00!

Now in an updated and expanded second edition, Douglas Parker's Basic Public Speaking continues to offer the reader with an informative, accessible, succinct, and practical "how to" manual for acquiring skills, expertise and confidence in addressing the public from small informal groups to large, auditorium filled, formal gatherings. The informative and "user friendly" text is laced with humor, tips, tricks and techniques that will improve and strengthen any public speaking performance no matter how inexperienced the reader. Indeed, their is much of value within the pages of Basic Public Speaking for even the more experienced public speaker -- especially when moving on to new and unfamiliar venues for public speaking including media events and the technologies of teleconferencing.