Distribution Books

The bulk of this book is dedicated to examining the extent to which the Maoist state reduced income inequality in Sichuan province, and the consequences for living standards. Bramall finds that significant gains were made in both these regards. There is also an excellent review of the Great Leap Forward famine which covers the famine throughout China but focuses mainly on Sichuan. This makes sense because Sichuan was the hardest hit province, and nearly half of the deaths came from there. He concludes that 30m died in the famine throughout China (it seems that by now most scholars have settled around this figure). He points out that there were actually two famines. One in 1958 concentrated almost exclusively in Sichuan and Gansu, and the more widespread famine of 1959-61.

The former is found to have been a consequence of maldistribution. In the afflicted provinces, per cpaita calorie consumption increased in 1958. However, the statistical system broke down and there was a large degree of geographical mobility of labor. This resulted in maldistribution which caused widespread starvation.

The larger famine of 1959-61, however, was a result of a decrease in agricultural productivity. Bramall finds the culprit in the Commune form of organization, and the sichuan leadership's politically motivated decision to organize into a commune very quickly.

I am deducting a point from this book (actually, it should be more like a 4.5 ) because when one thinks of discussions of economic planning, they generally think of the effectiveness allocation of resources to productive uses and the consequences for production. In fact, a rather long chapter on theoretical issues related to planning seems to imply this sort of focus (e.g. deindustrialisation in the UK is discussed in the context of the potential for planning). However the book focuses almost exclusively on equality and inequality. To learn about the effectiveness of Maoist planning of production, one would actually do better to look at Bramall's more recent book "Sources of Chinese Economic Growth: 1978-96." Don't be misled by the title, since the Maoist conditions were among the sources of growth, they are reviewed in depth in that book.

This detailed economic history of modern Sichuan Province by economist Chris Bramall is a balanced, illuminating lesson about the pros and cons of industrial planning and egalitarian oriented interventions as a development strategy for deeply impoverished areas.

The title requires explanation to avoid misunderstanding, in that it sounds like a radical leftist cheerleading tract, but actually is far from it. Presumably the title was chosen as an attention grabber, highlighting the counter-conventional wisdom conclusion the empirical research supports.

Why counter-conventional wisdom? If someone argued Shanghai/Jiangsu did ok on the Mao era, few would object strenuously, but Sichuan? Sichuan was devastated far worse than any other province by the Great Leap Forward famine of 1959-61, which Bramall spends an entire chapter analyzing. (Among estimates, Bramall argues that the higher famine death numbers are the most plausible). Later, at the end of the Mao era in 1976-77, Sichuan was again facing a severe food crisis (though not massive deaths this time). These two episodes would hardly make anyone suspect that economic development happened between these two dreadful endposts, but in fact it did, quite rapidly, both in traditional measures and Amartya Sen's alternative "capabilities" view, which Bramall is sympathetic to and employs extensively. Unlike 1970s nonsense written about China, this is not due to uncritical use of official PRC stats. Intepretations can be debated, but his empirical work is solid.

The title aside, this book is not only about the Maoist period. It discusses Sichaun's experience under the ROC, and discusses how the post-famine development phase served as a good foundation for the rapid growth in the first phase of the reform period. (A theme continued in more detail in his follow-up book _Sources of Chinese Economic Growth 1978-1996_)

Bramall points out that the post-famine growth-with-equity phase was even more impressive given the amount of resources that had to be diverted because of external military threats. The "third front" was the duplication of industry in the interior in expectation of American invasion of the Chinese mainland during Vietnam. It is now known that Mao was planning to send the PLA to North Vietnam if the Americans bombed the area of NV near the Chinese border. He felt that the Americans would retalitate by invading China itself, and the extensive third front economic strategy was preparation for this eventuality.

This is purely an economic study. For a more social-political view of rural Sichuan, there are two village studies in English: Stephen Endicott's "Red Earth: Revolution in a Sichuan Village" and Gregory Ruf's "Cadres and Kin: Making a Socialist Village in West China, 1921-1991". Both would make a good companion to Bramall's technical study.

David Goodman's "China's Provincial Leaders, 1949-1985" also contains rich information about the province level politics of Sichuan.

Bramall also wrote a related journal article showing that there was no connection between the date of decollectivization (which varied from 1977-1983 in Sichuan) and rate of agricultural growth; "Origins of the Agricultural 'Miracle': Some Evidence from Sichuan" by Chris Bramall. China Quarterly Sept 1995.

I'm glad I ignored the Kurkis Review or I would never have experienced the enjoyable true story of the life of an American pioneer; James Wells of Montana. This book is a great read for those who want a snapshot of life in the early west without wading though the details that could bough down the telling of the story. Of course a book with only 256 pages will miss some details or information especially since it spans such a long period. However, recognizing that, the author entertains us with some dialog that brings the story to life and made it quite enjoyable. Wells and his adventures, which were true (including marrying the princess of a Gros Ventre tribe), fascinated me. As his life unfolded, I had the same impressions that I enjoyed in "Dance with the Wolves" and "Jeremiah Johnson". It's unbelievable what our forefathers did to pave the way for us in the 20th Century. You don't need me to quote the story line or talk about the people and places. The best I can do is say that as a reader of almost any type of book including, autobiographies, science fiction, mysteries, adventure, and fiction, this book goes on my recommendation list. Just read and enjoy the short narrative about one person's true story and the world around him in the early west. There's even a gunfight for those that loved "Gunsmoke". After reading this story, I'm looking forward to reading James Frank's next book "Mary Wells".

I really enjoyed reading James Wells of Montana, an excellent, first-hand look at early American history. This true tale also provides many interesting facts of the native-American Gros Ventre culture -- very educational and my favorite aspect of the book. As you read, you become enveloped in the life of James Wells, and feel his and his family's struggles and joys. There are even some humorous anecdotes that round out the story. If you like learning about other cultures, history, or the Old West, or just enjoy accounts on the life of a family, then this book is for you.

This book is extremely well structured -as apparent from its table of contents. It describes and motivates the evolution from cellular automata to lattice-gas cellular automata to lattice Boltzmann schemes. It tells its story in a very brief yet lucid way. The text points to valuable references for further reading or for further explanation.

The main drawback is that -after all- it sometimes really are 'just' lecture notes in mathematics (being an aid mainly for those who follow the lectures). *Some* of the important derivations are very short and formal, with implicit mathematical shortcuts, and without giving any physical interpretation of the main formula's. In addition, once too often the reader is referred to the scientific literature -which is not always easily accessible. In other words: the book is not self-contained.

Nevertheless, I truly enjoyed reading the book from back to back, even though I had to work hard to get through some sections.

This is an outstanding book for anyone concerned with computational models of real physical processes (digital mechanics or digital physics). It is accessible to anyone with a bachelor's degree in computer science, mathematics, engineering, or physics. It is also accessible to others with a few years of math courses. Lattice gasses and lattice boltzmann machines are the natural extensions of cellular automata such as the game of life.

Not a bad field guide but falls a little short on some subjects. The ones it does cover it does well but skips over some key topics. Every Line truck should have one, but keep a copy of the big book close.

I used this book as a reference for a project I needed to do on splicing. I found the information contained was concise and clear. The book covers a wide variety of subjects that are very relevant to the jobs that a lineman and cableman would need to perform everyday.

As an Consultant and an Information Technology Project Manager, I have to get up to speed on new industries in hurry. If only I had such a tool in other industries. This book was great. After spending just three days reading the book, I had enough knowledge to be credible with the transportation industry people I was going to work with. In fact, their "school of hard knocks" learning could only hope to make those with 30+ years of experience, have as wide ranging a knowledge as I acquired with this book. This book is for anyone wanting to quickly elevate themselves in the area of Logistics.

This book was considered the "qualitative" text at Carnegie Mellon's Graduate School of Industrial Administration as opposed to other more "quantitative" logistical text books available.

This book does a great job discussing the executive and managerial aspects of logistics management. Some of the book topics include: basic logistics, logistical operations,customer service,supply chain relationships, global logistics, resources, forecasting, inventory strategy and material handling. It provides several real-world examples which are quite valuable.

If you are looking for an executive-level logistics book this is great. If you're a logistics manager who needs learn how to run a linear program to optimize your distribution routing, find another text.

I was a student of Mr. Yates at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown in Pennsylvania during his last term (Spring 2001). It was a very enlightening experience. He used this book as our main text and I've read it 4 times the entire way through. If you've ever heard your parents say "They raise everything up and your pay stays the same" you'll find out they are exactly right! The arguement made by Mr. Yates is even more true today with soarding energy prices and falling real wages. I recommend this book for anyone who wants to find out how the government and big business has bonded to bend us all over a barrel.

Though published in 1994 and being reviewed in 2003, this book is not irrelevant to the present. Ostensibly, the book is concerned with hours worked and employment, but it is far more a primer on the realities of capitalism and its control of the social relations of production. The timing of the book missed the economic surge of the late 1990s and the bust in the early 2000s, but the boom-bust cycle of capitalism is described and predicted by the author.

During WWII and in its aftermath for 25 years, American corporations somewhat accommodated the American working class, especially those segments that had substantial union representation. But the fragility of that accord was clearly demonstrated as the global hegemony and profits of American businesses began to erode in the early 1970s. American businesses reasserted their ability to dominate the political and economic landscape by taking measures both directly and through the government to discipline the working class.

The author makes abundantly clear that capitalism is by definition an economic system that is exploitative of the working class. The power of capitalists is hidden through the rhetoric of free enterprise, which holds that neutral, or "invisible," forces work to the advantage of all. The fact is that by the early 1980s and continuing through the early 1990s, the entire employment situation had changed considerably through the exercise of that power. Factories were closed, jobs moved to the South, unionization rates were slashed in half, wages declined, especially for the high school-educated, and contingent work became much more widespread, that is, part-time, temporary, and contractual. At the same time, marginal tax rates for the rich were greatly reduced, inequality in income and wealth increased, and the investing class received a huge bailout from losses incurred in the S&L scandal.

In addition, unemployment levels soared throughout the 1980s, officially averaging over 7 percent across the decade. As the author points out, the unemployed are an important component of capitalism as they are an immediate source of workers, but more importantly they force the employed to moderate wage requests. However, it is not in the best interests of capitalism to have the official unemployment rate be too high. Conveniently, the Labor Dept has lax standards in defining an employed person, but stringent standards in declaring someone unemployed. The net result is an official unemployment rate that is always several percentage points below actual un- or under-employment.

Though mainstream economists debate and constantly adjust the level of unemployment that is considered to be indicative of "full" employment, the author invokes President Roosevelt's State of the Union address of 1944, where he called for the right of all Americans to be employed who wanted to be, even if government is the employer of last resort. It is clear that public employment and/or a minimal guaranteed income are doable, but the employing class rabidly opposes any measure that would minimize the life-and-death dependency of the working class on private sector employment. The author also points out the devastating social effects of unemployment: increased crime, health and mental problems, and suicides.

The working class in America has the "potential" political power to change the entire economic landscape. But that has not happened. Divisions within the working class based on skill, position, race, ethnicity, and gender have obscured the fact that capitalism is primarily based on the social relations of work. It cannot be ignored that capitalism has managed to persuade huge portions of the working class that consumerism is a form of empowerment. Nonetheless, worker organizations, whether they are unions or otherwise, will have to develop workers' class-consciousness for them to have any chance of radically changing the current exploitative relationship that exists in producing goods and services. The author calls for increased unionization, but it is unclear as to whether he regards co-opted, bureaucratic unions as adequate vehicles to represent workers' interest. It is clear that workers' efforts will have to proceed along political lines as well as within workplaces. In addition, he calls for non-capitalistic modes of production. But it would seem that production in the interests of the general population is mostly a matter of control, not formal structure or name. The social democracies of Europe have been successful in taming capitalism, though that is eroding at the time of this review.

The book succinctly makes some key and irrefutable points about capitalism and capitalistic society. An interesting angle to this book will be its connection to the author's newest book, "Naming the System." From the vantage point of 2003, will the author extend or alter the points made here?

Although there's a lot of information, the equations could be physically correct, in SI system. Right now there are many strange numbers and conversion included, i.e. 4.44 or 10 etc. which make the practical calculations simple, but hides the underlaying physical principles.

This book is a must have for anyone serious on the subject. It's the most comprehensive source of information I have ever come across; pays for itself in time saved searching for data, examples are of great practical value and the material is current. EE background recommended.

Dorothy I love your books... Soft, clean, romantic, mysterious... I cannot get enough!! I let the whole house go because I cannot put down your books!!

This book is up there with the rest of Dorothy Keddington's books. You fall in love with the characters and love the mystery and adventure. I love to read it over and over - or just skim through it for the good romantice parts! I recommend it!

In The Moons of Jupiter, Munro clearly reveals the universal perplexities of our everyday lives. The characters have a rich realness to them and must be commended for their candid honesty. The strength of this book lies in Munro's ability to create a genuine perspective in which the reader has no choice than to become emotionally connected to the characters. I enjoyed these stories because there are many "grey areas" in which the reader must rely on his own experiences to draw conclusions. There are no definative endings to these stories. They are written in such a way that there is often a fine line between hope and despondence; only the reader's morals and values can recognize one from the other.

I won't tell you what to look for or how to feel when you read Alice Munro. If you've never encountered her before, The Moons of Jupiter is the best place to start, early Munro at the height of her evocative powers. Don't turn to the Selected Stories first. Each of Munro's books is a suite of stories, interlocking in themes and often in characters, on the model of a sonata, a suite of musical movements. The experience of reading the whole suite is more powerful than the sum of the separate stories. Perhaps the story-suite is the successor to the floundering form of the modern novel.
By the way, Munro is admittedly a woman writng about women for women to read, but I'm an outdoors guy, a baseball fan, a weight-lifter, and at least until my son was born something of a rascal, despite all of which I rank Alice Munro very high among my favorite fiction writers.

Classification is a favorite topic of Krzanowki and is one of the topics covered in this volume. This is part 2 of a volume on multivariate analysis in the Kendall's Library of Statistics series. So it has the flavor and feel of the Advanced Theory in Statistics books, a concise but almost encyclopediac treatment of advanced topics. In the first chapter on discriminant analysis (chapter 9 of this 2 volume text) time is spent describing the various methods of error rate estimation including the bootstrap and the key simulation studies of Efron, Chatterjee and Chatterjee, Snapinn and Knoke, Jain et al.,and Ganeshanandam and Krzanowski are all mentioned and referenced. There is even a section on neural networks.
The related topic of cluster analysis is covered in Chapter 10. Chapter 11 covers covariance and interaction structures that includes log-linear models, hierarchical conditional Gaussian models, path analysis and regression models. Chapter 12 covers latent structure models including factor analysis. Chapter 13 covers repeated measures and growth curve models, popular topics under a great deal of research activity lately, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry. Chapter 14 on miscellaneous topics includes shape analysis, functional data, distance measures between populations, and circular and spherical data.

Classification is a favorite topic of Krzanowki and is one of the topics covered in this volume. This is part 2 of a volume on multivariate analysis in the Kendall's Library of Statistics series. So it has the flavor and feel of the Advanced Theory in Statistics books, a concise but almost encyclopediac treatment of advanced topics. In the first chapter on discriminant analysis (chapter 9 of this 2 volume text) time is spent describing the various methods of error rate estimation including the bootstrap and the key simulation studies of Efron, Chatterjee and Chatterjee, Snapinn and Knoke, Jain et al.,and Ganeshanandam and Krzanowski are all mentioned and referenced. There is even a section on neural networks.

The related topic of cluster analysis is covered in Chapter 10. Chapter 11 covers covariance and interaction structures that includes log-linear models, hierarchical conditional Gaussian models, path analysis and regression models. Chapter 12 covers latent structure models including factor analysis. Chapter 13 covers repeated measures and growth curve models, popular topics under a great deal of research activity lately, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry. Chapter 14 on miscellaneous topics includes shape analysis, functional data, distance measures between populations, and circular and spherical data.