I was reading it to find out some tips, yet it was a corny book. I didn't like it.

This book is more of a transcript of the 4½ hour long master piece of the documentary, but it's curtainly worth the money. Here you have all the still pictures from the hundreds of film Scorsese comments in his programme. A book for every filmbuffs bookself.

This extraordinary book on the last hundred years American cinema is an exceptionally well written, edited and researched document of the film, without any of the usual scholarly classroom didactics or conceited Hollywood self-congratulatory posturing. Scorsese's humble voice is evident throughout, and it is one of self-confidence, clarity and enthusiasm. It's a wonderful companion to the DVD.

I am an ASQ certified Black Belt and a Six Sigma Trainer in Germany. I expected a good help for instruction but I was extremely dissapointed. This Kit contains no cd or disc with powerpoint slides. The contents are very primitive and not very helpful in training any students with a little experience in quality management. The name Six Sigma Training Kit is in my eyes wrong because it contains nearly only basic quality tools found in better publications. This time the name "Juran" doesn't guarantee quality. For 10% of the price buy better Rath&Strong's Pocket Guide!

Overall, the quality of this book is adequate, provided you aren't expecting a thorough treatment. That, in itself, would've rated it three stars if there wasn't one mitigating factor - in reading this book, one could (easily) assume the Juran Group (or Juran himself) invented Six Sigma, and nothing could be further from the truth. (As best as I know, it was Bob Gavin, in 1988.)

Egoism drops the rating to two stars.

This book is a good basic overview - nothing more. Save yourself the grief (and money!) and buy the Pyzdek book instead.

Although the tools are not what one would consider core 6-Sigma tools (i.e., no control charts), this book is still a worthwhile training kit. Its main value is to provide a firm grounding in the basics for non-technical members of an organization that is implementing 6-Sigma. When used for that purpose the book gives the trainer or facilitator a clearly laid out syllabus for teaching what 6-Sigma means and why it's important to organizations from quality and competitive advantage perspectives.

In addition to providing a roadmap for teaching the what's and why's, the syllabus also covers a number of concepts and tools that will prove useful to anyone from admin assistant to line manager, including a good understanding of quality, cause analysis, powerful, but simple, tools (cause and effect, flow and Pareto diagrams and charts).

For the professional trainer or facilitator the book epitomizes what excellent training documentation should look like. The layout makes good use of white space, the writing is clear, and the use of tables and graphics enhance learning.

If you are a trainer or facilitator this book will dramatically shorten course design and provide you with solid training materials. It is not suited for advanced training in 6-Sigma techniques, however, but for the target audience I cited above it's perfect.

I have gone over this book in it's entirety and I must say that it's put together very nicely but the most important missing are the tapes. It would be excellent if it came with tapes.

The "Cantonese Basic Course" is / was published in two separate volumes. The ASIN # 4400012685 should be just volume 1. If you search amazon by the author's name (just click on the name) you will find volume 2, as well as the audiotapes. (ISBN 0879506792.) This book is the required text for Chinese 10A at City College of San Francisco.

I have audiotapes for learning Cantonese from 4 different "systems". The audiotapes with this textbook are the best by far. The actual methodology for teaching Cantonese is fairly clear. Cantonese is a tonal language with as many as 7 "tones" for a given syllable. This text is the only one of the four which gives a clear explination of the varous tones.

There are several different "printings" of this book. Be warned that the spiral bound volume 1 looks like a photocopy, and may be harder to read than the smaller sized paperback. The spiral bound version is also priced higher than the paperback version. I rate this textbook as a 3 out of 5 as the print job is horrible (for ALL the versions I have seen.) The text has been used for many years and is considered to be one of the best to learn Cantonese - so don't judge this book by my review.

This is a very good course to work from. Its vocabulary is the most useful for a beginning (and intermediate student), its explanations of both pronunciation and grammar are extremely well organized and easy to follow, and there are many excellent exercises and drills. Although this book quite clearly was originally intended to be used in a classroom setting, it is not difficult to adapt the exercises for self-study- since there is usually Cantonese on one side, and English on the other, just cover up one side- then, later on, review by doing it the other way around.

Two negatives: First, the book should be sold with tapes. There are other courses on the market which have audio support, so if you also have one of these, you can learn Cantonese pronunciation from them while using this course. "Colloquial Cantonese" (from Routledge) is a particularly good fit because it uses basically the same system of transcription found in "Cantonese Basic Course". Otherwise, the help of a native speaker will be needed, and from my own experience, many native speakers will be baffled by the transcription (which was originally developed at Yale). Second, the original State Department Course from which this was taken had thirty lessons, but this edition includes only the first fifteen. I would certainly give this book more stars if it contained the full course of thirty lessons.

I felt like I had entered the twilight zone. A fawning tale about the highest ranking foreign spy in American history that fails to even deal with the now universally accepted truth that Hopkins was a Soviet Agent. How this book could have been published subsequent to the release of the Venona documentation is a mystery that can only be explained by the fact that the publisher is The Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute Series on Diplomatic and Economic History. Your grandfather was a traitor, Ms. Hopkins deal with it.

I'm writing this "review" to bring some clarity to the previous reviews. Supposedly, according to the book the "Verona Secrets," Harry Hopkins was a spy. However, please note that this declaration seems to be the opinion of the far right. (Note the reviews on Amazon.com for the "Verona Papers" as well as the conservative internet zine NewsMax.com .) On the other hand, any knee-jerk hero worship is equally suspect. So draw your own view! But not from this book - its emphasis is pre- New Deal!

The reader from PA is a quack. There is no evidence, Venoma included, that proves Hopkins a Soviet spy! There were many in the Roosevelt Administration, especially in the Treasury Department, but among those closest to FDR Hopkins was not a spy.

Hopkins' book is excellent and should be read in conjunction with the works by McJimsey, Tuttle, and Sherwood.

When I purchased this book I thought I was in for a treat. Being an avid reader on political/social issues, I have been treated to many great books. This is not one of them.

From the first page the book bogs itself down with many, many obscure words, and places them in sentences with many other obscure words. In the first 20 pages you will frequently ask yourself: "What in the world did I just read?". I found myself often re-reading pages over and over again to figure out exactly what the author's point was. Unfortunately, after 60 pages I gave up on trying to extract a point, and set this book aside.

Remember that pseudo-intellectual crowd from college? You know the ones...they rattle off endless strings of words that were pulled from deep, dark pages of a thesaurus, in an attempt to make themselves seem more intelligent. The essays in this book are all pseudo-intellectual babble. No insight. No challenging thought. Just pure ego stroking.

You may be saying: "The reviewer might...not have the capacity to handle material like this." Unfortunately for the author this is not the case. I have read everything from Homer to Shakespeare and Lao Tzu to Hemingway. I have a deep appreciation for literature, writing and critical thinking. I love good analysis spread across pages using elegant and clear text. This book is not clear. This book is horrid and unreadable, and virtually pointless.

If you want to get better acquainted with you thesaurus, please buy this book. If you want to learn about 'Law in the wake of Clinton', seek out other authors because you will find nothing decipherable here. The essays are not written to be read, they are written to impress. Obscure prose serves no one, for the meaning in context is easily lost. Be prepared to read, re-read and lose interest.

If you want a good book on life in the post-Clinton era that is well written and insightful, read 'The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America' by Philip K. Howard. It will motivate you to learn more. 'Law in the wake of Clinton' will will only cause eye-strain and brain drain.

I'd have to take exception with the review below written by Steve Shaw. This book is not filled with big worded, mumbo-jumbo as he suggests. He may be good at reading Homer or Shakespeare. But apparently, he understands little of legal analysis, which is precisely the subject of this book.

That said, perhaps the book is not for the average reader. I have a law degree, so I find the legal analysis to be easily readible. Others may not.

But as a critical thinker, one certainly comes away from this book wanting better, less biased analysis. Some of the chapters are very well written and very well argued.

Others, however, are downright sloppy ... not worthy of a first year law student. One particularly poor chapter is written by none other than Ted Olsen - President Bush's Solicitor General (the person who aregues on behalf of the U.S. Government before the Supreme Court). This is disturbing, as it demostrates that Bush appointed a Solicitor General who so clearly has an ax to grind against Clinton, that his bias blinds him to the many gaps in logic in his own analysis.

In fact, Olsen's chapter is so poorly reasoned, I'd go so far as to suggest it was intentionally misleading. If Olsen wins any cases before the Rehnquist court, the "legal realist" will have much case law to support their beliefs.

The same critique particularly can be lobbed against the poorly written chapters by John Yoo and Daniel Troy, those others are also lacking.

But the initial chapeters in the book are both well written and well reasoned, which in some ways only makes the contrast with the mentioned chapters more stark.

One only hopes that after the Bush Presidency, the Cato Institute similarly puts out a book on "The Rule of Law in the Wake of Bush." For if the arguments are applied consistently and without bias, readers would come to learn that Bush is far more like Clinton than Al gore ever likely would have been! If Bush is held to the same standard to which the Cato Institute holds Clinton, then intellectual honesty would demand that they conclude that President Bush is doing far more damage to respect for the rule of law than his predecessor.

Given the stellar legal backgrounds of its contributors, I purchased this book expecting it to be more about the assault on the rule of law that has taken place over the last thirty years than about specific misdeeds of the Clinton Administration. To my surprise, these essayists do an exceptional job of addressing both issues.

As Pilon states in the introduction, the book explores the legal assault taking place on the ideas of limited government and individual rights. He explains that leaders can violate their Constitutional authority either by pursuing a legitimate end that is unconstitutional or by violating people's rights. He then introduces the thesis of the book-that members of Clinton's Administration worked to expand Presidential or congressional authority while oftentimes receiving only token opposition from many Congressional Republicans or members of the Supreme Court.

Some of the authors focus on steps taken by Clinton's staff to encroach upon congressional regulatory initiatives. For example, in his essay on "legislating via executive order," Douglas Kmiec points out that although Clinton did not break the record for most executive orders issued, he frequently refused to cite statutory authority for his actions. Kmiec explains that the Supreme Court has traditionally been willing to review questionable orders and that Clinton has, at times, done everything he could to find ways to reenact initiatives that were struck down.

James Wootton offers a similar analysis of the Justice Department's support of "regulation by litigation." Specifically, he focuses on how the department worked to impose liability on selected industries by weakening traditional legal rights over time. He concludes by pointing out that even Robert Reich eventually felt compelled to express his distaste for Justice's efforts to circumvent the democratic process.

The highlight of the book is clearly Senator Fred Thompson's discussion of how the inability of our political institutions to hold Clinton accountable for his role in the fundraising scandal of 1996 was so severe that it led many Constitutional scholars to question the efficacy of our legal system. He does an excellent job of explaining how the failure to apply the law to the highest-ranking officials in our nation has contributed to the cynicism people feel toward the democratic process. However, he concludes by offering a beacon of hope: "Perhaps it is true that we have begun to rely too much on the courts and legal processes to resolve matters that are best left to the political process, because that is where such issues are ultimately resolved in a democratic society. As frustrating and disheartening as it is to see a breakdown in the rule of law, we know that in the end the American people will have the final say. And we will always have the kind of government and rule of law that we deserve."

Pilon's collection contains stellar analyses of ongoing efforts to undermine the rule of law as well as abuses by Clinton's senior officials. It contains a powerful indictment not just of Clinton's supporters, but of all those who feel that our legal institutions should be trampled to abide by the unfettered will of the majority. It should be read by anyone interested in how our legal institutions are being sabotaged and what can be done to stop it.

This one will not keep you up at night unless you teach writing. The awkward constructions and clumsy exposition look like the kind of work which would be handed back by your Composition 101 professor. I'm still not sure how this PR man turned alleged detective found out whodunit. The ending was thoroughly unsatisfying. The willing suspension of disbelief just never happened. What can I say? Don't bother!

Bert Swain is a public relations specialist at Westside General Hospital who has solved two previous murder cases at the hospital. His reputation for sleuthing is well known throughout the hospital, but for once this backfired. Dr. T. Gordon Stokes, the director, forces Bert to help his sister, Anne De Villiers, who has been threatened by an unknown assailant. Reluctantly, Bert accepts the case. He soon visits an ecological think tank where Anne is the chief. Suspects spring up all over the place, including staff members and opponents to the institution's research and position of several controversial social issues. As he struggle to contend with his fiftieth birthday and his teenaged daughter suddenly assisting him on his investigation, Bert also must deal with increasing violence and the potential use of deadly force. If he fails to uncover the identity of the culprit(s), someone(s) will be soon dead. The third Bert Swain detective story is an interesting tale that will thrill fans of the amateur sleuth investigation sub-genre. The mystery is okay, but it is Bert struggling to contend with a major mid-life crisis ( turning fifty) that turns COUNT YOUR ENEMIES into a novel, way above the typical sub-genre tales. Harriet Klausner ----

The book is *so* interesting. Full of good information and great pictures. But where is the index that let's us find our way through all that material? What a shame. Without an index the book let's me down. I can only give it 1 star.

It is a very good book on what it is like to be a Midshipman but especially a plebe. I have family that went to the Academy and told me how close the book was to the actual thing.

The staff of the American Genealogical Research Institute have compiled an easy to understand primer for the beginning genealogist in the How to Trace Your Family Tree.

This book consists of 11 Chapters and a bibliography. Procedures for the genealogist range from organizing genealogy research findings, beginning research with living immediate family members and various sources for research including printed sources, local records, state records, federal research sources and the miscellaneous records of churches and cemeteries. Also included is a chapter on heraldry and final chapter on hereditary, patriotic and genealogical societies.

Thoughout the book, there are no endnotes or footnotes for each of the chapters. There is, however a bibliography at the end of the book presumably listing all references used in compiling this primer. Without the endnotes and footnotes of each chapter, it is difficult to understand where the material has been drawn.

All in all, How to Trace Your Family Tree is a good example of a genealogical reference guide that is useful for beginning genealogists. For those who are advanced in the research, this book offers little value.

I would recommend it as a quick reference guide for those who are just embarking on the genealogy research.

Gordon S. Harmon
Springfield, MO
May 26, 2003

For someone interested in tracing thier family tree, this book is a good starting point. It explains how to get started and where to go from there. There is a great section on how to use your family members for information. There are also sections on where to find family records. The charts they include, however are very small and need to be reproduced in order to be used. Overall this book is worth reading if your thinking about digging into your past successfully.

To start a career in clinical biostatistics field, with minimal computer background, this book is a great help !

I purchased this book because I needed to do a large number of logistic regression runs for my dissertation. It does an excellent job in going through all the SAS code you need in order to write good logistic regression equations. However, I was disappointed by the very limited discussion surrounding the application of the models. Fortunately, it does provide useful references.

The book is useful because it goes beyond the SAS user manuals in explaining how to program logistic regressions and what SAS's output is describing. However, if you do not already have a good understanding of logistic regression, (i.e. you had one lecture on it in your research methods class) you might be better off with something along the lines of Logistic Regression Using the SAS System: Theory and Application by Paul Allison. (I have no affiliation with Dr. Allison.)

I don't like to pan something this badly--- But the Barron's Mastering Italian has to be one of the most useless language programs I've ever used. This is particularly disappointing given that their German Series is perfect.

The first 1/4 of the book is devoted to the minutia of vowel sounds. It has no examples to speak of, and the tape that accompanies this book actually uses wrong answers intentionally!!! Thus, if you play the tape in your car without benefit of having the book with you, you will actually have incorrect examples played over and over. This obviously leads to confusion.

Again, I've used the German, French, and Spanish versions of this series. The Spanish is also disappointing, but the Italian is so horrible that even it looks great.

If you buy this, you are libel to frustrate yourself and actually run the risk of losing interest in Italian.

Sorry, I wish the news were better.

With great delight and anticipation, I picked this book and its accompanying tapes from the dozens available for two reasons. First, from personal experience I know the programmatic method, developed by the State Department's Foreign Service Institute (FSI), is effective. In a 20-week full time course in Spanish at FSI 30 years ago, I emerged knowing Spanish grammar cold, not from memory, but automatically. The course drilled Spanish sounds, words, and meaning into my brain, so that I could speak Spanish without having to think about it or strain to remember grammatical rules. Second, this course has more tapes than others, more drill.

Now that I have finished working through the 18 hours of tapes and 600 pages of workbook, I am still very pleased with the foundation in Italian that it provided. Its greatest strength is in pronunciation. You can learn to speak Italian sounding like an Italian. If you speak with correct pronunciation and intonation, Italians will understand you, and you can expand your knowledge by conversing. It's possible to speak a fair amount of simple Italian fluently. This course covers the present tense of verbs, including most or all common irregular verbs, singular and plural of nouns and adjectives, some uses of pronouns, agreement between nouns and adjectives, days of the week, numbers to 20, forms of addressing people politely, and more.

It's important to bear in mind, however, that this book with its tapes covers only 10-20% of the 20-week FSI course. There is much more to learn, particularly all the other verb tenses. If you are trying to learn Italian on your own by tape, it's a good idea to continue with another course that provides dialogues to memorize or practice with verbs. The only dialogues on these tapes refer to the telephone.

I like this approach precisely because it offers a lot of work to do. That doesn't mean it is unflawed. Typographical errors are much too frequent. The authors assume no previous knowledge of grammar and create their own from scratch. Nouns and adjectives, for example, are lumped together as "genderables," and the subject of a sentence becomes a "verb governor." I found their grammatical terms annoying and unhelpful. Treatment of pronouns is piecemeal and not drawn together coherently in one place. Italian for "the" is left incomplete. There are no verb tables, not even for the present tense, and within the confines of this course, not enough practice exercises using verbs. The basic problem, I suspect, is that the authors have simply published the first 30 chapters of a much longer course, thereby cutting it off in the middle. It could be much more valuable as a self-contained course if the authors redesigned it to stand alone.