Please take my review knowing this: In 1976, I earned admission to Sophia University's "Year In Japan" program. My self-directed preparation came from a 1950s lesson book, but an excellent home stay arrangement allowed me to update my antiquated vocabulary and jump from beginner to intermediate level classes after one term. Of course, language skills atrophy without practice, as I discovered on subsequent, short trips to Asia. Recently, I was motivated to resume serious study.

Languages evolve, so I was a bit put off by the "February 1990" copyright date of Barron's "Mastering Japanese: Hear It, Speak It, Read It, Write It," but at least, I thought, it would be an improvement over my 1970s texts. I was wrong. Barron's merely wrapped a new cover on a 1963 university text. As for reading and writing Japanese, the introduction (p. xv) clearly states, "This textbook is concerned only with spoken Japanese." Everything is written - seemingly by typewriter - in one of the Roman alphabet schemes long since abandoned. The introduction also makes it clear that the text was designed specifically for classroom use, rather than "at your own pace, in your spare time" as claimed by Barron's.
In short, this is a repack of old material. I commend the textbook's admonition that each lesson "requires many hours of class work supplemented by outside study and, if possible, laboratory work." No one should pretend that it is easy to learn Japanese. A downfall of many, more modern courses, is the claim that learning can be quick and painless, a claim "proven" by teaching a large vocabulary of Japanese words adopted from English. Barron's "Mastering Japanese" does not do this. But if one is going to put forth hours of effort, one should invest in a course that teaches contemporary Japanese. This is not it.

if you want to learn japanese FAST than you really should buy this book. Trust me because i have bought many books and i have gone to many language classes just to learn how to speak japanese. so what im basically saying so far is that ya mid as well spend ya money now because as soon as you start trying your never gonna stop looking for a useful source to learn japanese, because it really is a complicated language and it is so very different than english so you need to find a easy way to learn japanese. So like I said you might as well get it over with and spend about 60 dollars on a book but seriosly, it a lot better than just trying to look for a good japanese book when it doesnt seem to be very helpful.

Comprehensive compilation of forms. Too many construction industry forms. If you want to stand at the copier every time you want to use a form, go ahead and buy the book. If there was a CD-ROM included with the book, I would have found it much more useful.

Improve every aspect of your project managment with this unique idea book. A lot of actual samples and documents are compiled for daily use in the management of projects, like forms, checklists, reports, charts, etc. These are shared by the members of PROJECT MANAGEMENT INSITITUE. It is easy for you can get started or to improve your current documentation.

The book was targetted to social scientists. The reviewer is from physical sciences. Thus this review may be biased.
Either the authors tried not to confuse novices in statistics with too much theory/math, or they assumed the readers are fluent with statistics but are tyros in SAS. The book included as little formula and derivations as possible. I find it is hard to understand what is really going on and why the procedures do things in those ways. It reminds me certain cook books. If you are desperately 'hungry', this might be a good one for you. However, if you want to be a chef, look somewhere else.
I am not sure how social scientists will feel about this book. As a statistician, I think this is definitely NOT a book for those who are comfortable with mathematical derivations, i.e. most mathematicians, statisticians and physicists.

You do not need to be a social scientist nor use SAS to find this book helpful. I am not a social scientist, and often use other statistical software. Still, I use this guide more than any of my other statistical textbooks and reference books. The authors do an excellent job of explaining how to perform and interpret a variety of statistical tests. For SAS users, there are many example programs and instructions on how to write and interpret these. If you regularly use statistics in your schooling or career, this book is a must have!

There is nothing to study about japanese comics. It doesn't matter whether Havard professor studied comics or any fifteen years old boy studied comics. You don't need to know everything about Japanese history, in order to understand comics. it's part of the pop culture. This book tries to over-analyze everything. Don't waste your time. Don't wast your money.

in the infinite wisdom of the previous reviewer it was noted that this book is not about japanese comics. it is of course about comic writing and dazai osamu is a prime example of that. if you want to read 'comic' books then stick to marvel or d.c. or you may even try that japanese stuff, oh what is it, i believe it is called manga or something. if you want a scholarly book dealing with the 'comic spirit in modern japanese FICTION' then you should get this book.

This is an attractive and useful book and worth the price.

However, for those hoping to get anything even vaguely approaching the detailed and absorbing AIA Guide to New York, which meticulously notes even fairly minor old buildings, be ready for disappointment. This is more akin to a tourist picture book than the AIA's New York City effort.

This book is not so interesting at First.However, If you are a candidate,this helps you great,esp,Auditor's Report.This shows typical types of reports.Futher more, at pratical field,you may use this book fully helpful. Up dating is half a year,You must check this Out!!!

This book contains papers presented at the V. Gordon Childe Centennial Conference held at the Institute of Archaeology in 1992. While the book does deal with Childe's theoritical archaeology, it also addresses his early life before embarking in archaeology.

Contributors to this volume are Bruce Trigger, Michael Rowlands, John Mulvaney, Leo Klejn, Kent Flannery, and Colin Renfrew. Trigger's and Renfrew's essays are forceful pieces on why archaeologists should stilll read Childe today. They also strip away the myth of him just being a 'Marxist' archaeologist; their essays demonstrate his theoritical contributions are much richer than that. Flannery takes a much more aggressive tone and is critical of Childe for his lack of interest in the New World and critical of his theories and models. Attacks like these should best be launched while the author is alive in my opinion. The essay by Mulvaney looks at Childe's life before archaeology, and Klejn's essay deals with a letter from Childe to Institute of Archaeology in St. Petersburg.

The target audience of this book is not clear though. While centered on Childe, these essays present a variety of facets concerning his life and works. Overall, its enjoyable and intellectually stimulating reading.

This is a charming little paperback. It features about 35 full-page and some smaller erotic images in all media. They are mostly black and white. For the person who requires a complete library on the topic, it is of course a necessity. However, it seems a bit pricey for the general reader considering how few images are included.

The Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM) Role Delineation Study is essentially a high-level introduction to the CAPM certification examination. It describes how the certification type evolved, and provides some general insight and guidance into the six domain areas covered by the exam. While going into further detail regarding the exam must be considered 'out of scope' for this PMI publication, a useful addition to this document would have been to provide some linkage between the domain tasks described and the Project Management Body of Knowledge.

Overall, this publication is a concise description of the intended audience for the certification, and does provide some helpful and useful guidance toward preparing for the exam itself, though it remains up to the certification candidate to fill in the details.

_Comparing Federal Systems_ offers readers a concise almanac of matters federalistic. While the book is a comparative work, Canada and its federal structure serve as the explicit fulcrum of comparison throughout. Constraining his analysis to procedural and prescribed formal characteristics, Watts provides a summary of the formalist extant literature on federalism that would be useful for graduate and undergraduate classes alike. Secession is a special topic, receiving treatment at the end--and Watts explicitly and implicitly deals with Québec separatism. Indeed, his very selection of cases depends strictly upon their relevance to the Canadian situation (p. 18). Watts' book is also a celebration of federalism's diversity across the globe. The tables within the first chapter illustrate the book's assumptions about the wide taxonomy of federalism.

For Watts, the critical tension underpinning the form of federalism, whether through creation or "evolution" (though "change" is a better and less value-laden word choice), rests between diversity and unity of a country. And this dichotomy is actually an echo of a federalist union's previous circumstances. If a country was previously coherent and centralized, the flavor of the subsequent federalism will retain vestiges of centralization, such as residual power in the hands of the central authority (Belgium, Spain). If a federal structure forms by aggregating previously distinct political entities, the opposite effect occurs: residual powers tend toward remaining in the constituent units rather than shifting toward the center. He suggests that, ceteris paribus, the degree of societal homogeneity (meaning presumably ethnic, religious, linguistic, etc. homogeneity) drives the level of autonomy in the units. Heterogeneity suggests power in the periphery and homogeneity suggests power in the center.

Perhaps a fitting book for the Halloween season, _Comparing Federal Systems_ is a veiled imploration for continued Canadian multi-communal federalism masquerading as social science. To be fair, it is part descriptive social science focusing on the taxonomy of federalism with its several competing tensions and part a largely unconcealed plea for the salvation of federal Canada. He begins his critical chapter on federations' pathologies with an important caveat, one that stipulates that the observed problems with federations stem not from the choice of federalism but from mismatching the type or form of federalism to the circumstances at hand. Québécois separatists are therefore misguided in their hopes to make Canada a "bicommunal" federation ("Québec and 'the rest'"), since previous attempts at confederal bicommunalism have failed due to essentially the impossibility of parity-leading to bipolar, contentious, "terminal instability." A mere pair of constituent units does not a federation make, especially when they are as disparate as "Québec and 'the rest.'"

_Comparing Federal Systems_ is not equipped to answer the critical question of whether federations in general, as a form, can serve as the deliverance for disparate societies (ethnic or linguistic) in general terms. The book uses a dual voice (anti-Québec separatism and cataloger of federation types), but neither of these voices can speak to the larger questions of whether to federate or not. It would seem likely to deduce that Watts views federalism as a successful mitigating factor for inter-constituent unit conflict through management of inevitable asymmetries, as his prescription for success lies largely along the lies of selecting the right form of federation to match the pre-existing situation.

As presumably most other naïve Americans who read this book, I came with preconceptions of federations and confederations drawn only from the American cases of the Articles of Confederation and the Confederate States of America versus the 1789 Constitution's union. This book was helped by the description of the spectrums of federalism, making it easy for a reader to conceptualize the place of various cases. The list of definitions within the initial chapter of the book gives broad parameters and emphasizes the need to classify federations and confederations on a scale rather than as a dichotomous grouping.
Too many competing sets of variables contribute to the degree of a federation's integration to use a simple binary scheme.
Readers will not find Watts' comparative treatment of bicameralism illuminative, however. The intra-house tension within bicameral systems varies from federation to federation, unsurprisingly corresponding to the level of power prescribed to the respective houses. Lacking from analysis is a coherent treatment of the tension that depicts how the variation in intra-house power allocation affects outcomes in federal systems.

There are few instances to dispute his methodological decisions, but his metric for measuring a given federation's level of "population asymmetry," per its constituent units, merits minor criticism. He uses the difference between a union's largest and its smallest constituent units as a measure of asymmetry (see p. 64 for table), but this measure lacks an ability to compare across federations of varying populations. Indeed, the world's Uttar Pradeshes and Zurichs can be disproportionately powerful within their unions, but Watts is concerned with the utter domination of a union by one or two powerful constituent units, such as Prussia, Jamaica, and Russia. I find it questionable that he uses an absolute measure of raw difference in population between largest and smallest units as his asymmetry measure to rank the federal systems instead expressing the asymmetry as a ratio-thereby making the measure more comparable across different sized federations.

Though Watts did not make it his mission to satisfy them, elite scholars will find little satisfaction with _Comparing Federal Systems_, considering its treatment on the subject is constrained strictly to formal and procedural aspects of politics, federations, and constitutions. Ignoring elite incentives and inter-elite relationships provide readers with a book that misses large causal elements behind both the form and rationale behind federalization.

Jeremy M. Teigen
University of Texas at Austin