This collection of articles and exercises provides "cutting edge" resources in the work/family and work/life areas. The articles cover everything from flextime to recognition of the work and family issues faced by expatriates. This information is becoming more and more important in organizations throughout the world. A glance at the annual Fortune or other magazines that focus on the best companies to work for indicate the attention being focused on these issues. Interestingly new graduates are now asking these questions about the companies they are considering working for--and companies that ignore this may find themselves less able to hire the professionals they need (and the market for these folks continues to get tighter). The guide is expensive, but collecting up the work captured within it would be incredibly time-consuming and the coverage might not be as thorough. Although it is probably intended more for a human resources professional or teacher conducting training or informing employees and managers about work/life issues it could be a useful guide to assess your own ways of balancing and integrating you work and nonwork life. There could be application for a parent or church group to use the guide as well. If you hired a consultant to inform you on these issues and/or a trainer to conduct this training it would cost a lot more and you would have to bring them back again and again. One thing that was not addressed in the guide was what I will call "family friendly backlash" found in books like The Baby Boon, but I think this guide moves beyond this controversy by focusing on work AND life, not just work AND family. It is important to recognize that these are not just issues for people with small children, but issues that impact all working people.

This excellent book fills the gap for the novice and college student on the ever growing Internet. In short it covers; Internet Basics, E-Mail with various software, Browser Basics, Searching and getting Information on the Web, Advanced E-mail and Communication Tools. Importantly, it provides valuable information on improving ones research capabilities on the Internet for class presentations and papers. This 272 page comprehensive, easy-to-read instructional book is well worth the price.

This book was a great resource when I was learning C++ as a Computer Science student. While some books teach new students procedural programming and then re-teach object oriented programming, this book starts out teaching object oriented programming by looking at real world models. I would recommend it to anyone NEW to programming.

On the first page of Irish Ice we meet Justin Patrick Flynn, tired, troubled, and very, very drunk. We tag along with him for the next 300 pages as he embarks on a chaotic journey with enough sensual glee and existential angst to make Leopold Bloom look like a couch potato.

One thinks of Leopold Bloom, the great wanderer, outcast, and cuckold of James Joyce's Ulysses, because the opening of this engaging first novel by W. Brian Perry echoes the opening of Joyce's masterpiece: two friends intoning Catholic ritual-influenced cadences as one struggles to awake and go, Justin to a husband-wife union with a woman named Manda, Stephen Dedalus to a father-son union with Leopold Bloom.

Along the path with Justin we meet a slew of colorful characters - the book is crowded with them - who take us through the twists and turns of romance, the secrets of eccentric families, the history of unhappy nations, the cloistered world of a confessional, the recesses of a rectory, the maneuverings at a retreat (of advertisers, a different though equally devout religion), and into the past, where more family secrets are revealed.

As a backdrop lies New York City in all its glittering diversity, even up into the Catskills, by bus, car, taxi and lots and lots of subways, a stopover for a dinner with a volatile Mediterranean family and to an ethnic bar in the Bronx, followed by an Irish wake where stories are told and songs are sung (lots of stories are told and songs sung in Irish Ice) and vast quantities of alcohol are consumed (as much singing and story-telling as there is, there's more drinking, often simultaneously and with even more gusto).

Oh, I left out the fist fight at Justin's wedding, where the bride's ex-lover is a guest!

Like fellow Irish writer Joyce, Perry constructs, beneath the drinking and carousing and nearly nonstop sexual high jinks, the symbolic underpinnings of love and hope and the search for faith and family in a godless, modern world.

The "ice" theme is sounded time and again, like a bagpipe's bellow, along with the themes from Catholic liturgy such as fire and blood; it was Joyce himself who famously declared, "Once a Catholic always a Catholic," and Justin Flynn is always a Catholic, regardless of how irreligious he may act or think he feels. One might say that all of Irish Ice is the story of a man coming to grips with who he is, acknowledging the fact that he was once Irish and Catholic and will always be a Irish and Catholic. (The second line of Irish Ice is Justin's best friend O'Reilly intoning, "Arise and walk ... Your sins are forgiven!" - but Justin is a long way from arising, or from walking, in any sense of the word, and an even longer way from forgiveness.) Irish Ice is infused with Catholic ritual and Irish tradition. Among its other treats, the book offers a glimpse into an Irish Catholic milieu that was fascinating to this non-Irish, non-Catholic reader. It is, finally, a deeply religious book, the same way its protagonist, Justin Flynn, is a deeply religious man; neither on the surface shows it much.

Justin goes from sinner to saint - well, maybe not to saint, but at least to a good guy who will try to do what's right. He even turns down a drink.

He's obviously not the same Justin we met 300 pages ago. And neither will anyone be who accompanies him on his roundabout road to redemption.

Authors Perry and Ironside cut through the complexities of Israeli society to offer a clear and perceptive analysis of how Israel's past has shaped its present, a present in which deep, disturbing social divisions are coming to a boil. The starkness of these divisions emerges as the authors ask probing questions of Israelis occupying various positions on the Israeli political and social spectrum - Arab and Jew, secular and religious - and deftly weave their interviews, as well as memoir, together with their analysis. The authors' journalistic talents and experience are evident throughout the book, which reads like a good travel narrative. While the reader will feel like he has been taken on an entertaining journey, he will also take away a clear understanding of the extreme positions being staked out among Israel's people, positions that may tear the nation apart and leave some groups disenfranchised, unless Israelis can find a way to renegotiate the delicate balancing act that has kept Israel's quest for permanence alive for the past 50 years.

Perry does an excellent job of telling a disinterested life of each of the musicians he proflies, from Sachmo to Miles. The plates are great. Anyone looking for a biography on the great jazz musicians should definately buy this one.

Jonathan Edwards was without a doubt the greatest theologian America ever produced. That he was also without a doubt the greatest philosopher colonial America ever produced shows what theology was once upon a time in America. Obsessed with returning American churches to its more devout Calvinist roots, Edwards began the Great Awakening in America, only to find himself cast out of his own pulpit for daring to challenge the social order of his church. Edwards deeply investigated the concept of free will, reconciling it as no other theologian had with the doctrines of predestination and divine omnipotence. But Edwards was also a figure of the Enlightenment, and applied Locke's rationalist doctrine of the senses to his preaching style, creating almost singlehandedly the fire-and-brimstone approach used to this day to terrify poor sinners into repentance. Perry Miller, the twentieth century's most dominant American intellectual historian, here explicates the life of Jonathan Edwards as no one has before or since: on the merit of his ideas. Miller was an atheist who spent his life studying American religious movements; this was one of his finest works. Not to be missed by anyone interested in the history of American religion or philosophy.

This book provides a folktale or legend plus multi-faceted backgrounds for each of the 20 countries included in this excellent resource for professional storytellers, teachers, librarians and parents. Want to learn or teach more depth about these* countries? Get this book! If a criticism can be found, it is the incomplete LC/Dewey subject indexing which does not include storytelling of folklore as headings, it is definitely a significant element within the overall contents. Although this title is great for those seeking "a bit more" background information beyond the stories, this may be a hard-to-find item due to the incomplete subject indexing.

Although intended for students in grades 4-8, everyone will enjoy the accurate, concise and current information in this book!! In addition to the book's attractive graphics and layout design it is well organized for repeated uses and user friendliness. Much research, planning and attention to detail obviously went into creating _Keeping the Traditions_ as demonstrated in the table of contents, throughout each chapter (country), a general bibliography (in addition to suggested reading list in each chapter), and a thorough index which helps those interested in making comparisons among countries on a variety of topics. The writing flows in an easy to read style and holds a reader's attention from cover to cover or usage as quick reference resource. You will not just read this book once; you will find many reasons to repeatedly use this book as a cultural and storytelling reference.

*Nations representing nearly every continent (except Australia) and cultural region of the world are included: Canada, China, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Philippines, Poland, Russia, Senegal, South Korea, United Kingdom, and Vietnam.

Each chapter (a different country) follows the same format:

*Folktale/Legend
*Background [primarily physical & political geography topics]
*History
*Government
*Religion
*Education
*Immigrants
*Language
*The Arts and Sciences
*Foods [includes a recipe!]
*Recreation [popular sports/games]
*Customs and Traditions [holidays, festivals, cultural groups]
*Suggested Activities [includes 12 subject-related topics ranging from academic skills (writing, reading, vocabulary, math, social studies, geography) to more creative skills (music, art, drama/movement, dress, cooking) and is capped off with a culminating activity]
*Suggested Reading [short bibliography of stories and cultural information]

Take your time to read this book or flip through its pages. Either way it's a highly useful and informative book - for all ages!!

Its good to see more and more books on the philosophy of consciousness are coming out, but even better when some of these actually make sense. In this last group I would place books by phiilosophers like the Churchlands, Owen Flanagan, Tye, Papineau, Metzinger, Robert Kirk,Fred Dretske and sometimes at least, Searle and Dennett. Now I would add Perry, for his no-nosense philosophy is a clear example of a defence of materialism that does not hide behind the trenches and waits for dualism to retreat, but actually demolishes their arguments while moving forward on the coherence of materialism itself. And so, in this book, Perry defends antecedent physicalism and takes on the zombie, knowledge and modal arguments, while in the process laying out a theory of mental content and epistemology that can account for some problems in materialistic theories, and can show why some arguments againt it are flawed.

In antecedent physicalism, qualia exist but are purely physical, and Perry tries to account for qualia in purely physical terms, at the level of diferent types of content and knowledge. This is the root then of his attacks on the zombie, knowledge and modal arguments. He first shows that these 3 influential arguments all rest on a fallacy that Perry calls the "subject-matter assumption", the view that extra subject matter content has to be provided when the content is not fully determined by some knowledge. Perry shows that no extra subject matter is needed when the content can be fixed by reflexive content, which is a new way to access (gain knowledge of) the same subject matter content. Reflective content is sort of what idexicals do, and has certain truth conditions that are satisfied in specific situations. If I say, "Perry is a philosopher", and Perry says "Im a philosopher", the subject matter content is identical, that is, perry and that he is a philosopher, but when Perry says it, his statement has a reflexive content whose truth conditions are satisfied iff the speaker of the statement is in fact a philosopher. (this is a crude and simplistic and probably flawed interpretation of perry, but it will do).By making the distinction between contents, Perry goes on to show how the 3 arguments can be shown to not challenge physicalism.

Now it would be good to point out that Perry shows us only a way to defeat the arguments, for many ways can be found that do the same. For example, the knowledge argument (knowledge of the physical facts does not allow you to know what red looks like, so red qualia is not physical) can be put away by simply denying the premise, by saying that knowing is not the same as having, that qualia is knowing-how not knowing-that, that objectivity does not work the way the argument suposes, that knowing the physical facts of qualia and having qualia are different ways to access the same physical phenomenon, or that the knowledge gained is of a kind that does not present trouble for physicalism. Perry shows that this last argument works against all three arguments, and states the new kind of knowledge as the reflexive content as opposed the subject matter content of the knowledge in question.

So just because one knows all the physical facts, this does not mean one has all the physical contents, that is, refelxive content is missing, and such (physical) content is gained by having the qualia, and thus the argument fails. Perry similarily explains the apparent contingency of mind-brain identity, and using his knnowledge content analisis shows that the argument does not present problems for physicalism. The zombie argument (I can imagine a physically identical world without qualia, so qualia are nonphysical) is likewise flawed, but for many more resons. Perry shows that the zombie argument beggs the question in an important sense, and actually is an argument to differentiate between epiphenomenalists, fuctionalists, emergentists, dualists and physicalists, but does not show that physicalism is false. If PHysicalism is right, then it is in fact not possible, logically or otherwise, that the world be physically identical but without qualia, which are physical as well. DEpendence on what can and cannott be imagined to draw metaphysical conclusions is quastionable at best.

Of course I have left many things out. Perry is quite thurough however in his points, and one should not judge his arguments by what I wrote here, or the reading I made of them. I think that the three arguments are flawed, even for reasons independent of Perrys points, and find this just another way of showing how bad the arguments are. But I still learned a lot on differeces in content, and found Perry's epistemology very interesting, and it looks like it could solve many hard problems for materialists. Ultimately the book is valuable because Perry shows materialists do not have to fall on emergentism or functionalism, but can remain identity theorists, while still holding a coherent and, well, the most plausible views, on the miind-body problem.