Mr McMurran has written a very thoughtful exposition on the foibles, follies and fools that he encountered in a very successful life. His career was technical but the events and lessons learned are applicable to any business. The lessons he draws from his real life experiences are instructive and insightful. I highly recommend this book to anyone already in, or thinking about entering, management. And it was fun to read! Thomas Cox

Comments on Marshall McMurran's " If It Weren't for People Management Would Be a Science" from a Canadian who has managed successfully to steer clear of technology but gets hooked by books. You have achieved a major triumph here, Mr. McMurran. You have pointed your pen not only for America but for the entire world. You have been closely involved in the American technological revolution and found the courage to tell it like it was, warts and all. "Good rarely happens..." "It was vital that the technical and human elements played in harmony..." Are you listening to this wisdom, you price fixers? you global moguls? "Many changes...were about to bloom along with the California poppy..." Assuming you weren't referring to the new growth industry of opium in your state, Mr. McMurran, it's another example of your wonderful facility to talk facts in metaphors, making this book accessible for all of us who really should know more about technology. Thanks from Sheila Reid in Manitoba Canada.

Since reading Illustrated Guide to Taping Techniques I have learned many different techniques used to tape a wide range of body parts and injuries. The information in this book is far more valuable then the money I payed for it. In addition to being very indepth with the tapings it also has sections that describe on what injuries the taping should be used and how to tell which taping to do before you apply any tape.

Illustrated Guide To Taping Techniques is a very thorough and complete sports taping manual. It covers all taping, from the basic preventative taping to the more advanced injury specific taping. What I like about the book is that while it is concise, you do not have to be a physiotherapist to understand it. It gives easy to follow instructions along with labelled pictures of the techniques. This book is a must for anybody working as a sports trainer or remedial therapist and is very reasonably priced. I give this book my thumbs up and it certainly goes into the most used book pile in my collection.

This is William Marshall at the top of his form, writing once again about the police officers of Yellowthread Street in British Hong Kong. Chief Inspector Pfeiffer, Inspector O'Yee, and Auden and Spencer are challenged this time by a locked room mystery, a mysterious assignment for O'Yee "from Headquarters", and by a congenial set of brothers who are into fantasy fulfillment as psychotherapy. Marshall skilfully weaves the three stories together; all 3 denouements are superbly done.
I can regularly be seen on the D.C. Metro, when reading a Marshall book, with my eyebrows way up my forehead, as Marshall either turns the tension up yet another notch, or describes some of the most bizarre scenes in crime fiction. This time, my facial muscles hurt from the scene with Spencer and the seagulls. Not to be missed!
Marshall is one part Ed McBain's 87th Street police procedurals, one part Janwillem van de Wetering's Gripstra/De Gijr existential police procedures in Holland and elsewhere, and one part Frederick Forsyth, in terms of the suspense involved. With ingredients like that, how can you miss?

If you have not read any of Marshall's Hong Kong Police stories you have missed a real treat. Hard to find, but worth the effort. Makes you want to put Hong Kong back in the hand of the Brits today just to ensure the continuation of these characters. Wow!

Before discovering "Introduction of Electroacoustics and Audio Amplifier Design" by Dr. Leach, my knowledge of speaker design was limited to a handful of formulas and some tabulated data. I have found this text to be the most important "missing link" among my resources for designing speakers.

This text develops models for the acoustic, mechanical, and electrical elements that are all present in electroacoustic devices, such as speakers, microphones, and amplifiers. It is presented in a very methodical and thorough manner, complete with clear qualitative discussion and the mathematics to go with it. The math used in the text involves logarithms, complex numbers, and some calculus.

This book has enabled me to effectively design speaker enclosures, vents, and crossovers. It is very well written, and has proven to be very useful. I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand electroacoustic systems design in more depth. It would also be an excellent complement to any audio engineer's library.

Most books on loudspeaker design just don't provide the design equations to support the qualitative descriptions, but this book, an outgrowth of a college course on audio engineering, has the supporting math needed to design audio products. Years of teaching experience are evident from the qualitative descriptions which are factual, not wordy. Work with this book, chart out the equations, and you will well on you way to a solid educational foundation required to competently design loudspeaker components, speaker boxes, crossovers, microphones and amplifiers.

John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court written by R. Kent Newmyer is a biography about the fourth Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Marshall. This is not just an ordinary biography, but a biography with feeling, deep understanding andcomprehensive knowledge of Marshall.

This book is, by far, the most extraordinary biography, and paints a portrait of Chief Justice Marshall, the man, with perception and details , at the same time the author does an exhaustive biography of the jurisprudence of the Marshall Court.

John Marshall, (1801-1835) was appointed to the Supreme Court by John Adams as he was leaving office. A last minute appointment and second cousin to Thomas Jefferson, Marshall served in some of the most formative years that the has ever seen. Marshall wanted to bring the court into the central picture of the government and reigned in the court from the fringes of government, Consolidating the authority of the court making the Supreme Court the final arbitor when it came to constitutional.

John Marshall was a man equal to Jefferson when it came to the challenges of office and was equally skilled at the crafting law that supported the emerging American market economy. It was Jefferson and Marshall, however who symbolized and personalized the competing constitutional persuasions of the age and brought them into explosive focus. Each had taken a stand on the great foreign and domestic issues of the 1790's; each had conflated those issues into a dispute over the meaning of the Constitution. When fate and ambition made Jefferson president and Marshall chief justice, the institutional stage was set for what is one of the most creative confrontations in American constitutional history. At stake was not just the position of the Supreme Court in American government but the place of law in republican culture.

Can you imagine being there when Marshall was giving the oath of office to Jefferson... when the new chief justice administered the oath of office to the new president on March 4, 1801. With his hand on the Bible held by Marshall, Jefferson swore to uphold the Constitution, Marshall was sure sure he was about to destroy.

This book has an engaging narrative and you seem to read the information quickly and with ease, the author's prose is extremely well-written. As for the historical information it is spot-on even the court cases are found on a listing in the back of the book. Marshall was more than a chief justice, he was priciple in the forming a United States. Marshall's institutional accomplishments are found in this impressive study. For a one volume book... this is the most comprehensive... Marshall was the most representative figure in American law. This book is well worth the money ans should be in the library of all who study American History.

John Marshall, our nation's fourth Chief Justice, served from 1801 until 1835. He was appointed by President John Adams in one of the last and most significant acts of his administration.

Professor Kent Newmyer has written a comprehensive account of the great Chief Justice's career. The account is admirably researched and documented, drawing extensively on a new edition of Marshall's papers. It includes careful analyses of Marshall's leading opinions. Most importantly, Professor Newmyer gives a thoughtful discussion of Justice Marshall's place on the Court and on the importance of his vision of the United States for our history.

The book includes a good discussion of Marshall's role in the Revolutionary War, as a successful lawyer in Virginia, and as a landowner and extensive land speculator. But most of the book consists of a discussion of Marshall's career on the Court, his opinions, and the manner in which he shaped the Court as an institution.

While Newmyer admires his subject greatly, I found this a very balanced account. He allows that Justice Marshall did not always meet his own stated goals of separating law from politics and notes how Marshall's activities as a land speculator seemed to play a critical role in several of his leading opinions.

The discussion begins with Marbury v Madison and its role in the doctrine of judicial review. It continues with a thorough discussion of Marshall's role in the treason trial of Aaron Burr, through a discussion of the great opinions construing the Commerce Clause and Contracts Clause of the Constitution, through the Cherokee Nation opinions that Marshall wrote near the end of his tenure which established the foundation of American Indian Law. (Professor Newmyer considers these decisions Justice Marshall's proudest moment.)

The book considers Marshall's attitudes towards and opinions dealing with slavery. There is also a discussion of a series of polemical articles Justice Marshall exchanged with critics following the decision in McCollough v Maryland. Marshall's critics feared that he was giving too expansive a power to the National Government as opposed to the States. In fact, at the end of his career, Justice Marshall feared his life work had been overtaken by events with the rise of the democracy, a strong state rights movement, and the Presidency of Andrew Jackson.

Professor Newmyer sees Justice Marshall as a Burkean conservative in a new world. Marshall interpreted the Constitution broadly, yet flexibility to allow the development of individual, and national commerce and enterprise. Yet he was devoted to institutions and strongly inclined to accept the world as he found it rather than make it over in accordance with abstract principles (as he accused the supporters of the French Revolution of doing.) Newmyer writes:

Marshall spoke as a Burkean conservative, or as much of one as American circumstances allowed. He was repelled by reductionist abstractions as well as abstract idealims, even when it was couched, as was much of southern constitutionalism in terms of a mythical past. He worked from the 'given', accepted the world as it was, relished 'the disorder of experience" to borrow a phrase from Charles Rosen." (p.351)

Justice Marshall was not an original thinker, but he took the text of the Constitution, together with the Federalist, and molded it and the Court's interpretive role in a way that is with us today. He remains America's great Chief Justice. There is much for the interested reader to learn and to think through in Professor Newmyer's fine study of Justice Marshall.

It is really hard to overstate the importance of Marshall Boswell's critical achievement here. His goal is to explain Updike's literary vision in constructing the Rabbit tetralogy, "a dialectical vision" which he calls "an interdependent matrix of ethical precepts, theological beliefs, and aesthetic principles-less a creed than a versatile formal device; it is, in effect the scaffold on which Updike has built the entire tetralogy" (p. 3). That goal is what distinguishes this book from the only other text wholly devoted to a discussion of the tetralogy, editor Lawrence Broer's Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike's Rabbit Novels (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1998). That work, helpful in isolated essayists' insights, lacks the coherent analysis and penetrating structural insights of the whole Rabbit mega-novel which make Boswell's book so valuable. Indeed, it seems fair to say that henceforth no commentator on the Updike tetralogy will be able to avoid coming to terms, up or down, with Boswell's carefully-wrought interpretation.
The four chapters analyzing the four Rabbit novels are really excellent examples of careful reading translated into readable prose. Students and general readers will find much of value in those chapters, each novel taken on its own terms, but also as expressions of the overall tetralogy vision. The Introduction lays out in careful detail the assumptions Boswell brings to this task. The key interpretive assumptions are taken from Kierkegaard and theologian Karl Barth-Kierkegaard providing the philosophical concept of mastered irony which presumes an author's vision "emerges indirectly via the unresolved tension produced by the interplay of that thematic dialectic" (p.4), and Barth providing the theological metaphysics of the "dialectic of evil, the concept of 'something and nothingness,' [and] the argument for a serenely unproveable God." According to Boswell, "An unsettling Manichaean vision, Barth's dialectical theology appeals to Updike for its worldliness and its intellectually elegant explanation for the presence of evil" (16).
Those who dissent from this reading will likely do so at the point where Boswell assumes that the vision of the Rabbit tetralogy represents the entire Updikean picture of personal human experience as religious. Withal, a very impressive book, indeed.

This is essential reading for anyone interested in John Updike. Boswell summarizes the Rabbit books, Updike's best work, and presents a dynamic analysis of their importance. Updike doesn't just build characters, says the author, but presents the inner mystery of the human condition from a cosmic, really a theological, viewpoint.

THIS IS A TRUE STORY THAT COULD HAPPEN TO ANYONE. FROM THE MOMENT I READ THE FIRST PAGE I HAD TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENED. MARSHALL WINN IS HUNTED BY THE MAFIA AND THE PRICE ON HIS HEAD IS RISING. THIS IS A MUST FOR ANYONE WHO LIKES TO READ.

I read it straight through. Fantastic true story. You've got to read this one. When you're finished you will want to read more by Marshall Winn.

The Leadership Investment is all about greater expectations for potential leaders in the corporate environment. Utilizing some of the better companies in the business world today, Robert Fulmer and Marshall Goldsmith offer concrete examples and guides for producing an educational program within your corporation that will increase productivity and loyalty. Globalization of the economy, increasingly complex technology demands, the need to drive corporate strategy, the Internet, and e-commerce - these are just some of the forces pressing today's managers, CIO's and CEO's. Clearly, the very concept of what it means to be any of the aforementioned is undergoing a radical transformation. Now more than ever, corporate leadership is being asked - no, required to master many areas. Training and education programs are a must according to authors Fulmer and Marshall. Drawing on research done with a number of well known corporations such as Johnson & Johnson, HP, GE, Saturn and the World Bank, just to name a few, old style managers are becoming extinct, if not outdated. Based on their research, the authors indicate that today's managers are being asked to substantially increase their participation in shaping the strategic direction of the company, to accepting more responsibility for initiating business change projects and to become more aggressive in introducing new technology into the organization. Corporate universities are a strategic force that any company big or small must invest in, if they intend their managers, CIO's, CEO's and employees to become new-economy leaders.

The Leadership Investment gives invaluable insights into the executive development and education programs of some of the best companies in the world. Each chapter delves deeply into the benefits of offering education programs, how these programs are set up in six of the world¹s top companies, and how the programs continue to grow and change with the times. These first chapters are a helpful guide to any company looking into setting up a corporate education program. Perhaps the most interesting sections of the book are the sections on leadership development firms and corporate universities, in that these sections reveal an alternative route to executive development. This book will be incredibly useful to any company in its efforts to set up a leadership development program.

Great and educational book. My son loved it and he does not care to read. This is a must for all out there.

Like the adult book of the same title, The Light and the Glory for Children examines evidence for America's Christian roots. The authors reveal a past that is not at all smooth. The challenges of settling this land and building a new nation are shown in their harsh reality. Equally, the faith that strengthened the people for these challenges is presented as inspiration for tomorrow's citizens and leaders. Review questions in the back of the book helped my children explore their own values and beliefs about their country. There could be no better way to raise responsible citizens than to have them investigate our Christian heritage through this book.

Long Shadows at Noon is a wonderful book of inspirational essays and poetry. The author writes with heart and humor, that warms the soul.

A great read. Marshall is a talented author who is both light hearted and deeply touching. A very enlightening perspective on life in general.