I found this book to be informative as a guide to what I would find in Europe, but it received a poor grade in the field due to the poor organization. I had to flip through three sections to find a picture, description, and range-map for each bird. The maps were really too small for a US native to be able to tell which country was which, and the illustrations were consistantly exagerated to the point that you could only identify the so-called important features (which often were the same as important features of other birds) were all you could be certain were accurate to some extent. Even though I don't speak German, I actually found a book in German which was more useful to me than Peterson's. The German book, entitled GU Naturfuhrer "Vogel" (Birds), had accurate photos of every bird I saw on my trip. The maps in Vogel, although lacking lines seperating the countries, were much more identifiable to an American due mainly to size. After identifying the birds by the photos, I compared the scientific names to Peterson's, and was able to identify the birds with their English names (although usually the pictures in Peterson's looked nothing like those in "Vogel"). So as a field guide, Peterson's gets no stars, but for the descriptions and scientific names, it deserves a little credit.

This series may be o.k. for a class, but not for an individual effort. I've experienced four Korean language book/tape set (Francis Park's "Speaking Korean," "Colloquial Korean," and the series published by Yonsei were the others). Comparatively, the dialogue content and vocab are decent. The tapes, however, are horrid. On numerous occasions, the pauses for student participation in the dialogues are about half the length of time that would be necessary for a fluent native speaker talking at top speed (literally). In addition, MANY grammar points introduced in the dialogues were not covered in the books OR on the tapes. And lastly, the little extras that seemed to give the series potential when I perused the books at the store (the songs, maps, and pictures) received no mention in the books or on the tapes -- why did they bother to include them? One last note: check to make sure your book has all the chapters -- my first copy of volume three was missing chapters 7-11.

In conclusion, you can learn Korean with this series, but why bother when the tapes are worthless and you'll spend so much time looking things up in other books anyway?

Not a great deal of new insight here. I did learn a bit more than I knew, however, about Meade's failure to pursue at Gettysburg. Mr. Boritt is the editor and author of one essay; other essays are by four historians: Stephen W. Sears, Mark E. Neely, Jr., Michael Fellman, and John Y. Simon. (Alan J. Jacobs

This book has the worst photography I have ever seen in my life. It uses outdated, low-res photography. It is a decent visual reference, but half the POP's are not even that good. Save your money.

Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism, OUP, Oxford and New York, 1998, pp183, hbk

This book is full of interesting information on the Western integration of African and Afro-American motifs in sculpture, music and dance, but is spoilt by a number of faulty premises:

1) She assumes that Western civilisation went into decline in the twentieth century. But she presents no evidence that it did go into decline, other than it entered into a new relationship with African and Afro-American motifs. But why could not this hybridity be evidence for the opposite case: Western cultural dynamism? Lemke's cavalier assumption however is that adoption of hybridity is prima facie evidence for a declining civilisation. In fact, she should have spent more time spelling out the exact relationship between civilisational decline and hybridity in culture (if any). 2) She assumes that cultural hybridity with primitivism was an entirely new phenomenon in the West at the turn of the 20th century, but in fact such hybridity has been a long-standing tradition in Western arts and culture (from Ovid's Metamorphoses to the Gothic revival). But, even if she is right and hybridity is new to West, she hasn't explained why the West came to adopt it now. 3) Likewise, Lemke concludes her book by asserting that, though Westerners used African and Afro-American motifs for their own dubious reasons, her 'cross-over aesthetics' have undermined the West's colonialist mentality, racism, etc. Unfortunately, she provides no evidence to sustain this incredible assumption apart from her bald assertion that the 'new' hybrid culture was responsible for this change. 4) She is very critical of the way other people use the concept 'primitivism', and also the concept of 'the other', but she proceeds to use both these terms frequently throughout the book without ever clarifying what she means by them herself. She also is inadequate in explaining what she means by 'modernism' and how she means this to differ from 'progress', which it is ordinarily associated with. 5) Her accusations of racism against other people are also confusing. In particular, her reasons for discriminating between the 'racist' Nancy Cunard and 'anti-racist' Pablo Picasso are not spelt out clearly enough. She seems to assume a lot about Picasso's motives without ever justifying them sufficiently well for him to be distinguished so dramatically from Cunard. 6) She complains of other people's lack of scholarly knowledge about art (William Rubin, p44) but she makes a number of basic errors in art history that the OUP proof-reader should have spotted at least: a) 'Erich' Nolde: it is Emil (p39) b) Jean 'Buffet': it is Dubuffet (p45) c) American public 'appalled' by 1913 Armory show...[and] it is a well-known fact that the American public was hesitant to accept formal artistic innovations(p146). But this was not so 'well-known' to the Armory's leading light, Marcel Duchamp (who exhibited his famous 'Nude descending a staircase' there), who moved to America in 1915 and built his whole career there on the strength of his Armory reception. d) Also on page 146: 'Picasso moved on to create an increasingly abstract art from the 1920s'. What, even more abstract than the analytic Cubism of 1909-12? Not so. Among his early 1920s work, classically representative portraits in the style of Ingres featured heavily [not forget his Guernica (1939)].

My basic assessment is: Oh dear! How could a publisher with the reputation of the OUP have published this book? Is this an example of 'dumbing down'? However, it should have been published by a less august house, and be read, if only for its excellent material on Jazz and other facets of Afro-American culture.

Aidan Campbell (aidan@zola.demon.co.uk)

A useful book , but will have to be studied in detail

This textbook was used in my class at tech school. It is very poorly organized and written. I would recommend the air condition and refrigeration textbook by Whitmnan instead.

This reads like a PhD thesis. Woefully short on understandable and useable detail but chock full of references and long-winded explanations of their research methodology. Genersl texts on selling to senior management will give you better information at a much more reasonable price.

With a misleading title like that (and a price like that), this book is bound to disapoint the reader. The most shocking feature of this awful book is the quality of the pictures. There are far better books out there covering the same subject at half the price and 10 times the quality.

At best this book explains the fundamental operation of common motorcycle parts: fork action, the 4 stroke cycle, etc. It reads like an 8th grader's textbook and is not in depth enough to be put to any practical use. I bought the book blindly, expecting it to be in depth to some degree (it was THE textbook for MMI at the time, after all). What a dissapointment.

As a graduate of MMI, I know the book well. It was designed to supplement the lecture given in the first 6 weeks of school. It was written at a very basic level, since many MMI students have no prior experience (that's why they're in school), and students would be overwhelmed by too much technical information in the first 6 weeks of what is 13 months of training. The book is not useful as an informational tool for a non-student, and is priced high due to limited distribution (check the price of an average college textbook- same reason.) The book is the right tool for it's intended application (the MMI beginning student), but the wrong tool for anything else.

How the media distorts and misconstrues information is truly phenomenal...but is it really some vast "right-wing" conspiracy as Lieberman suggests, or is it fear on both political sides? Each political side seems determined to make the other look unjust, bigoted, and dishonest (politicians come and go but politics never change). As long as people like Lieberman blame and shame one side we get nowhere--it has yet to work in the Middle East. The media, in many ways seems more on the side of anarchy and sensationalism. I'm sure this author is a sincere idealist who feels that if people could just think the way she did the world would be a better place...or at least a "safer" one. Most people I know stick to their opinions no matter what the media or books like this one say.

According to Lieberman, a Columbia Journalism Review contributing editor, the "forces" in her book's title are a cabal of conservative think tanks like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. She maintains that by inundating news organizations with position papers, self-serving statistics, and talking heads, their operatives have insidiously shifted national debate rightward. Through four exhaustively documented case studies, she revisits the political right's plans to delegitimize both the American Association of Retired Persons and Head Start, "save" (read: cut) Medicare, and "modernize" (read: water down) the powers of the FDA. Scary and compelling, Lieberman's screed gives the lie to the notion of the "liberal media" even as it will be read by some as a product of that same mythic beast.