Good coverage of all relevant topics. A full-service document for controllers. It will be on my desk for years to come

Defending graphic design as a full fledged profession just got a little easier thanks to the continuing efforts of Steven Heller. An ambitious writer whose work is having a monumental effect on the formation of graphic design into a definable profession, Heller continues in this vain as editor of a broad collection of recent articles from the AIGA Journal.

The selection of writings in Design Culture cuts a broad path , touching on corporate identity, design as culture and design education. If you are practicing graphic designer who is beginning to feel unsure about the direction your work is taking, take a break and read a few selections from this book - it will remind you of why you entered the profession in the first place. If you are an educator in the field of graphic design, Heller's compilation provides ample sources for use in spurring debate in the studio environment. And if you are a design student you must buy it! Failure to read this collection during your first year in school may permanently skew your view of the profession. Desktop publishing vs. graphic design - there is a difference and Design Culture will give you insight into what is it.

Design Principles was written by a collection of authors specializing in diverse fields from computer scientists, theoretical biologist, pathologist, chemists and neurologists. The book began as a workshop held at the Sante Fe Institute in 1999 by the same name. While it is not a collection of abstracts and papers from this workshop, it did serve as the motivating factor to write the book. Design Principles starts with a description of the immune system that serves as a basic introduction both to the topic and to the biases of the multiple authors. Steven Hofmeyr offers a "gentle introduction to the immune system for researchers who do not have much background in immunology." (p.3) The chapter is titled "Introduction to the Immune System". Right off the biases of the book are exposed as Hofmeyr has a Ph.D. in computer sciences with a focus on information detection and distribution. Hofmeyr does an excellent job describing very complex biology without assuming that the reader has a background in either immunology or systems. While the author is gentle in his presentation the chapter is very dense with information which one hopes will be reiterated as one needs the information further in the book. Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in pursuing agent based modeling of biological systems. This book would be particularly interesting to those pursing interests in modeling the process of immunity. My final criticism would be that the title is a bit misleading as I would suggest that the book only gives limited mention and thought to other types of autonomous systems with the exception of Bonabeau's description of control mechanisms learned from social insects and Gordon's chapter titled, "Task Allocation in Ant Colonies."

As a student I found this book to be helpful in understanding the rationale behind the DRI's. All of the information is given for specific age groups, which makes quick references easy. Review of scientific literature is good, and the authors included certain limitations of the data.

Oswald and Friedrich have given us a wonderful source book for doing congregational planning. But in addition, they have given strategic planning consultants and facilitators in many fields a concept that opens new horizons in strategic planning. The idea of discerning, rather than planning, future direction says that there is a way we ought to go and our job is to find it. This concept, when coupled with systems thinking and organizational learning (see for example Senge, _The Fifth Discipline_), provides a way of reframing the strategic planning process. The exercises, while generally unsuited to the board room, can be adapted to that environment with a little imagination, once the planning consultant creates a safe place for those invovled in planning to access the part of their mind capable of discernment.

Drugs on Trial is an excellent but highly specialized account of pharmaceutical experimentation in the eighteenth century. Through extensive case analyses of three specific topics, Maehle demonstrates that eighteenth-century physicians and scientists not only produced a very large number of case reports but also carried on a large number of pharmaceutical experiments of different sorts. Tests were conducted "in vitro," on animals, and in some cases on human subjects. Maehle shows that this experimentation "did contribute considerably to the theoretical understanding of drugs." The book includes some discussion of the methodological and ethical issues these experiments raised. The three topics discussed in detail are: medicines to dissolve urinary stones (lithontriptics), Peruvian bark (cinchona, which contains quinine) and opium. For those (few) readers who have reason to be seriously interested in the topic, this monograph offers a readable, clearly written, thoroughly researched and reliable guide to a subject that has not previously been adequately investigated.

This nicely illustrated "dictionary" is a excellent starter into the french language. In the same style of the old kindergarden books that show you your first words the Eli Dictionnaire Illustre Francais associate an image to the french word or expression. If not a real dictionary ( not a list of words in alfabetic order with a concept attached) this book is a easy way to the increase the french vocabulary. Since it does not have pronuntiation notation some knowledge of french is required to take real advantage of the book.As a last word have to say that if true that is not what I was expecting by the moment I set my order is also true that it was a nice sorprise to get what i got.

As a chronic pain sufferer for the last 15 years, learning about what might be causing my pain, how to reduce the pain, how to minimize its affect on my life and perspective, and how to eliminate the causes of pain have been a top priority. In my search, I have found relatively little help from the medical profession. They are sympathetic, but primarily good at eliminating potential causes of pain through diagnostic testing. The pain goes on. My road has led me through many alternative ways of diagnosing causes of pain and treating it. The lesson for me is that pain has many contributing causes and a wide range of things you can do to help.

Having learned that much in 15 years, I was pleased to see these same lessons spelled out in Erasing Pain. Not only that, but the authors have taken 77 categories of diseases and described their causes, typical pain associated with them, and outlined some potential forms of relief.

The authors work at the Rusk Institute in New York City where a holistic approach is taken to the patient's pain. This includes looking at emotions, psychology, social needs related to ailments and disabilities, as well as how the patient's life environment may be contributing. One man in pain was jogging with a large dog on a leash. When he stopped taking the dog along at the doctors' suggestion, his pain eventually went away.

The book is designed to help patients in pain communicate with their physicians. "We believe that the medical profession treats patient pain very inadequately, sometimes badly." "Most doctors are poorly trained to deal with the phenomenon . . . ."

To make the material more accessible, it is in a question-and-answer format. The questions are the ones that patients in pain answer the most often.

The book also gives the patient new ways to communicate about pain, including how intense the pain is on a scale of one to ten and its exact analogy in other experiences with pain that are widely occurring (burning, stinging, raw, sensitive, throbbing, or sharp as some examples).

Best of all, the book is very open to exploring alternative therapies, and explains why they may work.

In my case, one cause of pain was in a place where I felt no pain. People in pain typically only notice the source of pain that is most intense at the moment. I have very flat feet, and needed orthotics. With them, my back stopped putting pressure on my sciatic nerve and most of my leg pain went away after some chiropractic treatments. After eliminating many sources of pain in this sort of indirect way, I finally got to the point where I could feel the pain in my feet. With self massage, I can get a lot of relief from that pain. Exercise, reading, music, and meditation all help (as the book suggests they usually do).

My only complaint about this book is that it definitely over does describing what can be treated at the Rusk Institute. Much of the beginning of the book reads like a marketing brochure for the institute. Although it is good to know about the credentials of those who are writing a book, I prefer books that do so much more unobtrusively than this one. I graded the book down one star for this. On pain-related content only, this is definitely a five-star book.

If you have pain and cannot go to the Rusk Institute, definitely read this book and apply its lessons. It could make all the difference in how much pain you experience!

May you live in pain-free peace!

This guide is a must for any emergency manager looking for help in designing and implementing exercises. It provides a step-by-step description from exercise development to post-exercise evaluation. Any emergency manager who is serious about planning well-executed drills should add this book to his/her resources.

This book is intended to be a teaching text "which does justice to the breadth, diversity, intellectual vibrancy, debate and difference currently to be found in feminist geography." To encourage readers to do more than passively absorb information, the authors insert questions and activities at the end of most sections, asking the reader to stop and reflect and question, in short, to do something for a bit. In addition there are boxes, similar to sidebars, position to identify key concepts and highlight particular information. Finally, autobiographical testimonies are smattered throughout the book, in line with the feminist goal of situating the author in relation to her work. The book is committed to the premise that a focus on gender relations "greatly improves geographical analyses. It also attempts to make clear that feminist geography is so diverse it would be incorrect for any one book to claim to fully encompass the field. Gender itself is defined variously, depending on the context within which it is situated, its definers, and mitigating factors such as race and class. What the book intends to offer is the notion that because feminist geographies are so diverse, we must all of us keep thinking and adding our contributions, without which geography simply ceases to be, literally speaking, geography. At first glance, Feminist Geographies seems an attempt to add to and draw attention to gender and geography, an effort it performs both subtly and brilliantly. However, both by virtue of the way the book is structured and its incessant command that we should think just a little harder/broader/more creatively than we thought before, its net result is as transformative as it is additive. For instance, although the book takes up the same argument against the public/private dichotomy as other feminist geography texts, it also suggests greater movement yet: "Given the embeddedness of dichotomies like that between home and work...it is perhaps not surprising that feminist geographers have paid them so much attention. This attention has certainly been one of feminist geography's main contributions to feminism more generally. However, we would like to...suggest that perhaps feminist geography needs to push its diverse interests in the complexity of gendered geographies even further. Thus perhaps feminist geographies need to consider starting with non-dichotomous frameworks of analysis. What is needed then...is a non-dichotomous way of thinking about space and place." Clearly, such a move would transform the fields of both geography and urban studies. As the title indicates, the authors are committed to inclusion of difference and diversity--to this end they continually ask the reader to explore her own perceptions and conceptions about various discussed subjects, and remind us of the contested nature of and diversities within feminism, particularly feminist geography. The book itself includes a wide range of feminism, feminists, and brief reviews of feminist texts both in and out of geography. Chapter three includes a brief section on postcolonial feminist theory, "a large body of work which explores the interrelationships between identity, knowledge and power," especially as situated within the historical and geographical context of the colonialization of the Third World from the 16th century onwards. Although much to short for my tastes, it was a relief to read an urban studies text that contextualized itself within a geography that includes rather than peripheralizes/otherizes the Third World. The inclusion of diverse theories is important both because they offer an important and alternate perspective on existing geographies, but also because much of the newer poststructuralist theorizing going on within feminism is built on the back of this work to include a postcolonialist perspective. (I was sorry, however, that one of the earliest of these theorists, Gloria Anzaldua, was not given credit for her pioneering work on borderlands, work that in great part led us to this point.)