This book give great insight into the political climate during the American revolution. Details of George Washingtons campaigns, were more interesting than I thought possible allthough parts are a bit boggged down by a little to much detail. This book gave me new insight on what Washington was up against. He did so much with so little! His political savvy and great leadership qualities are shown to us. Quite a bit diffrent from the history taught to me in the public school. I like the way Washington is revealed to the reader His story is a powerful reminder of; why we are American.

I had this book for my class which was taught by the author. It is an easy to follow, logical, step by step book that would assist anyone in the field of legal research and writing.

This book presents a wide range of lung cancer information in a format that is well organized and easy to read, even for someone without a science background. This is a textbook, and as such is not appropriate to answer all questions about lung cancer but rather presents several topics in-depth. If you are a lung cancer patient or family member, you may find some helpful information but do not rely on this book as your only source of information.

A proto-kafkaesque novella that masterfully paints the picture of a miserable life as a Parisian prostitute around the turn of the century. Marthe can be likened to the complement of the Underground Man in Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground.

There is not much of a plot to describe. Marthe is introduced as a teenage "worker in fake pearls", rolling ground oyster shells and foul chemicals together into beads. Her health failing, she finds refuge in the red light district.

A beautifully miserable story.

This book is somewhat mistitled -- it is more about software project estimation and management than about quality or metrics. But as the estimation practice lead for our software development group I found it insightful and valuable.

The heart of the book is an empirical function relating effort (cost), schedule, and system size, based on thousands of actual software projects. The projects cover a huge range of sizes and come from a variety of problem domains. This equation, together with a Rayleigh-distribution model of staff build-up during the construction phase of a software project, allows prediction of schedule and effort for a given system size, normalized productivity, and staffing pattern.

The value of this model is that it is shown by the authors to be applicable over a very broad range of problem domains and system sizes. It at least has a chance of modeling nonlinear effects such as the "mythical man-month" (total effort goes up fast as you increase the size of the team). And with only two free parameters (process productivity and staff-up rate) it is simple enough to be fitted to your own historical project data without a lot of re-analysis.

A lot of the book is devoted to graphical and pencil-and-paper application of the model, which is not really necessary since an implementation of the model ("Construx Estimate").

The only reason that I did not give the book five stars is that it is a bit dated -- it describes a waterfall lifecycle model, as was probably used by most of the projects in the calibration set. But I think it is still valuable as a source of quantitative guidance for software project estimation.

Why or why not submit to (techincal) battery in the name of better health? Because intervention always works? Because we patients deeply want to believe intervention will help? Because providers want us to believe it will help? Because it's faster? Because it's better?

This book lays out the pieces of medical choice-making in the context of the probabilities that underlie all desision making. It suggests that principled gambling is seminal to medical choices and makes suggestions, via numerous clinical vignettes, of how medical practice needs to change so that patients and practitioners can make better choices rather than those based on blind faith, short-term clinical efficiency, and shamanistic egos.

In short, this book deconstructs the mechanistic (know-it-all) paradigm of medical practice and replaces it with a probabilistic (don't know it all) paradigm that would, in most cases, be fairer and kinder to all.

Medicine would be a better place if the suggestions in this book were adopted.

After watching the Prince of Egypt with my children, we had to go out to buy some of the picture books about the movie. My daughter (and son!) ask me to read Miriam's Gift again and again. My pleasure!

This is my newest read in Putnam's series on the history of aviation. It is a worthy addition, up to the standards of the 3 previous volumes I have read. There are many interesting photos of aircraft, engines, and airports, many with a UK slant. Surprisingly, the chapters on the business and regulatory side of commercial aviation were interesting to me. Now I feel ready to start my own airline and build an international airport. As with any multi-author volume the writing is a little uneven, and there is the occasional error of fact (confusing a Double Wasp for a Wasp Major), but overall the editing and proofreading is superior to many newly published books. After reading the earlier "Biplanes to Monoplanes", I would have preferred more information on the immediate post-war period and the disappearance of the flying boat, but that is a personal preference and should not detract from this volume's overall worth. A little pricey, but worthwhile. I look forward to further volumes in this interesting series.

Samuel Putnam (1892-1950), best known as a translator of Don Quixote, went to France in about 1927 and lived there, with his wife and child, till 1934. He relates his encounters with Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, Joyce, Pirandello, and many others and the account is of interest. He talks more about art, including Picasso, than interested me, but all in all this is not a bad book to read.

This is the great Samuel Putnam translation of "Don Quixote," plus two of Cervantes' "Novelas ejemplares": "The Colloquy of the Dogs" and "Rinconete and Cortadillo." Putnam's is arguably the best modern translation of the "Quixote": straight-forward and rendered in plain English. Some of the "classic" translations that preceded it are kind of stilted and hard to read. Jarvis' (1740?) and Ormsby's (1880?) -- among others -- are actually still in print, so watch what you buy.

Putnam translation's is available in many editions. "The Portable Cervantes" is an abridged version of it. Like all abridgements, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Whether Cervantists want to admit it or not, "Don Quixote" contains a lot of lengthy and tiring passages that really aren't very relevant to the novel as a whole. Many readers are turned away from the book by its sheer size.

If you're a lazy student, this edition is for you. Putnam frequently summarizes ten or twenty pages from the original in a couple of paragraphs. Usually, this is OK. But he also summarizes some of the more important sections of the book, like the entire story, "El curioso impertinente" (which in the original amounts to over fifty pages). This can be annoying. Having read "El curioso impertinente" both in the original and in Putnam's summary, I can't say I would have done the same thing.