This is a charming personal take on what most people think of as a charmless subject ' fungi. The author teaches in a university botany department. These days it's clear that fungi are actually more closely related to animals than they are to plants, but they have always been thought of as a vampirish offshoot of the plant kingdom, so to botany departments they go.

This is not really a primer on fungal structure and function, but it does manage to quickly give us a feel for the basics. Fortunately, it is possible to get to the fungal forefront, as it were, relatively quickly. These are fairly simple creatures, as creatures go. (Of course, the simplest cell is complex beyond our most complicated machines.) They are more colonies (or rugged individuals) than multicellular beasts, and most of the action centers in figuring out how they reproduce, and the cocktail of chemicals they use to go where no fungus has gone before.

In this book the author talks about a range of topics, such as human and animal fungal pathogens, how the different kinds of fungi make a living, fungal 'sex', poisonous mushrooms, and so on. But he also profiles some of the more eccentric (and productive) researchers in the field. In the course of the book, in many ways, he profiles himself as well. Our author turns out to be a thoroughly engaging sort, humanistic and unpretentious. You'll like him, and learn something about mushrooms, molds, and mycologists.

Wow! I never thought I'd enjoy a book on fungi this much. Parts of it are not a particularly easy read, but the information it contains is mind blowing. Forget terrorists; if fungi and mold decided to take out the human race it would be no contest.

We tend not to think of fungi as being a very important part of our world. We might occasionally have mushrooms on pizza or steak, we might notice fungi growing on an old tree or on something that has been kept too long in the refrigerator, but that's about it. In fact fungi has a vast influence in our world, from breaking down fallen trees in the forest to making our bread and beer. Have you ever wondered how dandruff was formed? Guess what plays a major role.

The writer, who presents often bizarre information with wit and style, reminds us that one fungi, covering 2000 acres in Oregon, is thought to be the world's largest living organism. Even the more prosaic information comes to life in this book - I enjoyed his description of the speed a spore is catapulted from a gill.

Some of the most interesting sections are the mini-biographies of scientists who have researched fungi and added to our knowledge of them. There was Buller, for instance, a professor whose students called him 'Uncle Reggie', and Ingold who found a totally unknown kind of fungus in water. There are now over 300 species of Ingoldian fungi known and in fall you can find about 20,000 of them in every litre of brook water.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in the natural world. You'll need to expend a little effort reading the more scholarly parts of it, but you'll learn some amazing stuff about fungi, mold and the scientists who discovered them.

Well-written book on Nicholas II and the last days of the Russian Empire... The last Russian Tsar is shown in this book with sympathy and good understanding of the Russian history. The author has done a very good research of Russian and foreign sources, including many official documents and private diaries of Nicholas himself, his wife Alexandra and many top officials including Witte, Benckendorff, Durnovo and others. The author is a scholar of the Russian studies of the London School of Economics and his account is well supported by the thorough analysis of the political and economic situation in Russia in the last years of the Russian Empire 1880 - 1917.

The account of Nicholas is fairly balanced, he is shown as a decent man dedicated to his family, country and its people, but neither equipped with character needed to run the huge country, nor even trained for that. Despite the fact the author clearly sympathize with Nicholas and his huge burden; there are numerous accounts in the book describing Nicholas glaring lack of vision, lack of assertiveness and simply managerial skills. For example, after the World War I started in 1914, Nicholas II, the "chief executive of Russia", for several months continued to lead a life of the country gentlemen, riding horses, playing tennis, visiting relatives for tea.

For his credit Nicholas did in the end assumed the supreme command of the Russian army, but not until after it suffered several disastrous defeats. He was on the one hand, an intelligent and decent, but soft and indecisive man trying to play a role of iron-willed autocrat, and on the other hand a member of a leisure class, a country gentleman trying to play a role of a hands-on CEO of a huge corporation called Russia. As Mr. Lieven showed, Nicholas had honestly tried, but unfortunately because of his own mistakes and disastrous external circumstances failed in both roles. Despite that, to the author's credit the collapse of the Russian Empire and fall of the Romanov dynasty is mostly attributed to the inability of the Russian State to quickly modernize itself, rather than to other coincidental factors as the presence of Rasputin or tolerated by the Tsar widespread involvement to the politics of his family and relatives.

Lieven offers a different perspective of the usual account of the devoted family man and "puppet of history." The author goes beyone the familiar recounting of the path to the Ipatiev House with his richly detailed explanation of the reasons why the last Tsar and his family were brought to their inevitable end.

I should preface my comments by explaining that, while I have plans to pursue a Ph.D. in political theory, I am currently a mere undergraduate!

At any rate, I too found much to like in Professor Rescher's text. He provides a much welcome counterpoint to those who seek to imbue consensus with a normative value that it just may not possess. (See especially the new works in international relations theory that make extraordinary claims for 'global civil society'...) As a student with substantive interests in environmental politics, I find his outline of objectivity to be valuable. (Consider for a moment the problems of pursuing a poststructural environmental politics!)

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I found Rescher's criticism of Alasdair MacIntyre's "Whose Justice - Which Rationality" somewhat ironic. For just as Rescher complains that MacIntyre "needs to take a deep breath and move forward...", in my view so does Rescher.

As with his "Plurality: against the demand of consensus" (from which Professor Rescher liberally borrows in "Objectivity"), I find that Rescher's text ends just as it really starts to become interesting.

Rescher's treatment of pluralism between societies is useful. A helpful addition, though, would have been a treatment of pluralism within societies. Rescher's pluralism seems to lead one directly into the quintessentially liberal problem of the limits of toleration. It would have been beneficial for this reader had Professor Rescher followed his line of analysis to the end and addressed this issue.

Still, the measure of a good book is not the degree to which one agrees with it but rather the amount of thought that it provokes. For this reader, Objectivity was time and money well invested.

Nicholas Rescher, probably the single most prolific author among contemporary philosophers, here provides a sturdy defense of objectivity based on the primacy and inevitability of practical reason.

His concern here is with _epistemic_ objectivity -- that is, "not with the _subject matter_ of a claim but with its _justification_." What such objectivity calls for, he contends, is "not allowing the indications of reason, reasonableness, and good common sense to be deflected by 'purely subjective' whims, biases, prejudices, preferences, etc." As he is at pains to show, objectivity does not rule out personal values and commitments; indeed, if it did, there would be no hope of our achieving it, as "[t]he 'God's-eye view' on things is unavailable -- at any rate to us." On the contrary, being "objective" is a matter of proceeding, he says, "how we _should_ -- and how reasonable people _would_ -- proceed if they were in our shoes in the relevant regards."

Objectivity hinges on rationality -- as a matter not simply of logical coherence, but also "of the intelligent pursuit of circumstantially appropriate objectives." From its requirements follows a sort of "rational economy," the principles of which are very obviously objective and universal although they may (and do) have different applications in different situations.

On this foundation, Rescher takes on a host of contemporary critics of objectivity -- anthropologists, historicists, sociologists of knowledge, personalists, feminists, Marxists and class-interest theorists, post-modernists, and social activists. He finds that each attack on objectivity involves a misconstruing of what it is all about, and devotes the remainder of the volume to showing why this is the case.

Space will not permit a summary of the following ten chapters, in which Rescher deals by turns with various sorts of relativism, places cognitive objectivity on a ground of ontological objectivity, and argues that the "self-reliance of rationality is not viciously circular" -- objectivity and rationality are self-supporting in a _virtuously_ circular fashion.

As always, Rescher's presentation is clear and cogent. It will be of interest to a wide class of philosophical readers, and also to one other class I shall single out for special mention.

Pseudophilosopher Ayn Rand was pleased to name her own pseudophilosophy "Objectivism," in the incorrect belief that she had actually arrived at a genuine understanding of objectivity. In fact she had done no such thing, and Rescher's work on one particular sort of objectivity is a sure cure for readers who have been infected by her own subjectivism.

(I'm singling the Randroids out because somebody is going through all my reviews and clicking "Not helpful" on any in which I say anything negative about Rand. Click away, you objective Objectivist, you!)

Amazon sent me this by mistake. What I really wanted was the NEW Penguin Opera Guide, which is vastly superior with twice as many pages and higher quality paper with lots of B&W photographs. It also weighs a ton compared to this lightweight. Make sure you get the new edition, unless you want something lightweight to take with you to the opera. What is here, however, is fine, just not nearly as complete as the new edition.

Let's put it simple. If it is not in Viking, you have to do quite specialized research to find it.

This is the fourth time I am buying this book. Being a non-native Philadelphian, I wanted to know more about why the City developed the way it has. I was amazed at the information contained in the book. As an example it explains why the City neighborhoods have such narrow but deep lots. Since first reading the book ten years ago I have given copies to several co-workers. If you want to understand current Philadelphia and its culture this is a must read. The book was written by several Philadelphia professors, each examining a period of History.

As a recent transplant to Philadelphia, I wanted to become more familiar with the history of my new home. Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, edited by Russell F. Weigley, is an exhaustive but readable (and extremely enjoyable) chronology of the events that shaped the City of Brotherly Love.

One beneficial characteristic of this book is that it is an edited volume. Various authors contributed pieces on the reasonably short time period of their specialty. These chapters form a temporal progression, from the founding of Pennsylvania by William Penn in the early 1680s to the beginning of the Reagan Era. Within the chapters, though, the organization is generally non-linear, moving through various topics ranging from politics to the arts to the problems of running a large city controlled by various political machines. No single author could have produced as comprehensive and balanced of a history of Philadelphia.

One of the other neat things about this history is that every few chapters there is a picture of the city skyline.

People who aren't from (or don't currenty live in) Philly might find the details of this book hard to follow. The locations of important events and structures are given by street addresses-- often with street names no longer in use.

I haven't read this book in a number of years, due to the fact I cannot find a copy. However, since I read it years ago, the story and title have stayed with me--which is a clear sign of a good, thought provoking book. The story takes place in a future where nuclear war has occurred and the birthrate has dropped off, so that scientists are looking into cloning as a solution. Particularly, the cloning of people from the twentieth century. The test group has been created from some genetic material that was recovered from the WWII period. This is the "Rag, bone and hank of hair" that the story refers to. A boy of the future is sent in to interact with this test group of two children and a maid. These three have been conditioned to believe they are living in WWII England. They are provided with false memories and stories and have no idea that they are in a far-flung future. The boy interacting with them undergoes a profound change of character as he works with them, coming to understand something of the nature of humanity, and himself.

What struck me most about this was the power of story and belief upon human experience, and how this ultimately shapes the startling ending of the story. The perceptions we have at the beginning are dramatically reworked by the last few pages. And the story provides some food for thought. With cloning becoming a real possibility in today's world, some of the questions raised here might not be so far off base. I found it to be an excellent SF read, with some wonderful accounts of what it would be like to be in England during WWII bombings. I'm hoping to get a copy one of these days so I can reread it. Hope you can find one too!

Happy reading! ^_^
--shanshad

This book is thrilling, exciting, and fast-paced. If you like any of the above then I recommend you to buy this book. At whatever price, it is a great book to any collection of Sci-Fi books in any household. It is about clones after a nuclear accident in Europe. A super-smart 12 year old is going to live with the "Reborns" to get them accustomed to the 2070 style of life. But a nice surprise is in store at the end.

An interesting book on the politics of defense spending and its relationship with grand strategy and domestic politics. Tedious at times, and often unbalanced as to proving the grand point and instead focusing on partisan minutae, this book is still interesting to consider; you have to commend Lambert for his exaustive research behind the common assumptions. He did major work in the primary sources.

The point is that much of the arms race theory before WWI is not genuinely correct. The motivations for the growth and posturing of the British Navy prior to WWI had less to do with fear of Germany -although using that fear was an effective tool- than with a naval revolution by the Admiralty's First Lord, Sir John Fisher. It is an intersting foray into the dynamics of defense spending politics, and how that ultimately impacts capabilities and strategy.

This is a major revisionist interpretation of British naval policy as conceived and carried out by Admiral Sir John Fisher as First Sea Lord between late 1904 and early 1910. In fact, there appears to be hardly a single conventional assumption about Fisher's policies, and the policies and technical flexibility of the Admiralty during this period that is not subject to reconsideration in the book.

What I found most interesting was the startling - to me - degree to which senior British naval officers readily accepted the potential for torpedo-armed submarine and destroyer flotillas to change naval warfare, and the amount of effort they were willing to put into devising ways to use this revolutionary potential to reinforce British naval supremacy. The book is filled with descriptions of British investment in submarine technology and the ongoing discussions between naval officers of ways to adapt that technology to British needs.

According to the book, Fisher's planned great revolution in naval warfare was not intended to be the Dreadnought battleship that his name is still commonly associated with. Instead it was to be a British fleet made up of a combination of battlecruisers with Dreadnought-scale heavy armament, great speed, and excellent gun laying based on analogue computers, designed for overseas force projection; and a submarines and destroyer flotillas designed and deployed for protection of Great Britain and such other narrow seas where they could be used to bottle up potential enemy forces. This assertion is thoroughly backed up with detailed quotes from personal letters and Admiralty memos and position papers, plus the evidence of how Fisher spent funds available to him.

The plans of Admiral Fisher and others in the British Admiralty were developed in largely hostile political environment. The British government during this period, and the opposition political parties, were intent on reducing British naval expenditures, and not at all interested in developing the ability to expand British ability to project naval force overseas. Therefore, Fisher and his allies had to act largely in secret, while disguising their true goals from most of their political masters.

This book has a lot of trees in its forest. I did not find it easy reading, and I would not recommend it to someone with only casual interest in British naval history or the history of naval technology. To fully understand appreciate the book's thesis and scope, the reader must be willing to delve along with the book's author into British domestic politics, British foreign policy, and a host of technical issues beyond those mentioned above. I personally found it difficult at first to fully understand why, given that Fisher had much of the Admiralty behind him, and that Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty from 1910 up to 1915, also had great faith in submarine and destroyer flotillas to control narrow seas, the Royal Navy didn't manage to make the changeover desired by Admiral Fisher. The way I finally understood it, it comes down to one basic fact, Fisher, Churchill and their allies in the Admiralty simply did not have enough time. Not enough time to educate and prepare the politicians and the British public, not enough time to nurture the necessary submarine building industry in Britain or in one of the Dominions, and not enough time to guarantee a completely united front in the Admiralty needed to quickly push through such radical change in naval policy. Given that it was less than a decade between Fisher's appointment as First Sea Lord and the outbreak of WWI, that is probably reason enough.

I had to read this for a class that was taught by Kort himself. The book covers a lot of Russian history from the last days of the czars to Yeltsin. If you ever want to know some general history about Russia, then read this book.

Like probably everyone who has read this, I bought it for a class. However, this book is unlike every other textbook I've read, in that it's actually *fun* to read. I'd probably have read it on my own had I known about it before.

i had to read this book for school, usually the books at schoolaren't very good, but this book was the best book i have ever read! it's about a girl who went with her family to a cabin in the middel of nowhere. there is a boy with his family who are really crazy. END

This book makes you feel everything the character is feeling. I don't recommend this book to people who don't like people getting killed in stories, besides those people I recommend this book to everyone!

This is a great dictionary, but how much information do you really think fits into such a small book? I found it useful for my purposes as an undergraduate student, but I'd personally like to own one of those big fancy sociological dictionaries.

While there are other dictionaries out there that do a better job, for the price of this dictionary it is a great reference for Introduction to Sociology students. Definitions range from a few words to a couple of pages. Usually gives a reference to an author connected to the term and other concepts that might be important to the term. Still there are key concepts missing (for instance a definition of methodology) that make this book problematic. This book is not written from a particular standpoint, but at times the definitions are classical.

For any student of sociology, this is a welcomed addition to textbooks. The dictionary is also a good addition to the library of someone who just enjoys reading sociology books. It has a bit of a British flair because of its authors, but is really a well-rounded and insightful reference book.