John Wayne Books

Interesting. The first article, though, on Polk's New England tour, was dull and pointless. Wayne Cutler makes his point long before he ends the article. The best article was Miguel Soto's on the Monarchist's conspiracy in Mexico. Soto's work is probably an essential piece to a study on the politics of Mexico during the conflict. John Eisenhower also gives a interesting look into the relationships of Polk, Scott, and Taylor. However, even this article is lacking. Soto's article is the only purely essential piece. The others are just food for thought.

What a wonderful story of an American family struggling with the lack of success both personally and professionally and their interaction with someone - Wayne- they feel has achieved the success they strive for. The story had me thinking with each chapter, "what is fact and what is fiction?" A great read of how the success of an American icon such as John Wayne may not have been as great for him as what the American public saw from the seats in a movie theater. Only those who had personal contact could see he suffered the same struggles as the everyday public. The more I read the more I was drawn into the family's struggles and where they were headed. Short, but stated all that was important in life during that period of time.

This book was brilliant. A complex, powerful study of an American family and their interaction with each other and with one of America's most indellible icons. I thought the writing was excellant - insightful and concise. A great depiction of inter-family dynamics. Just brilliant.

This is a fine book by a fine new writer. A subtle commentary on family, American culture, and the role that celebrity plays in the lives of both the noted one and those around them. I especially liked the spare, honed writing and the pace of the novel. We'll be hearing more from Dan Barden.

After reading this book I was left completely unsatisfied. The subject matter, plot, and overall writing was horrible. I would not waste your time OR money on this book!

Dan Barden is a great writer -- the dialogue flows beautifully. However, the story didn't move me at all. I'm a huge John Wayne fan and I figured: how could I be disappointed?? But I was...BIG TIME. ZZZZzzzzzz

Can you imagine spending time with a serial killer after they have been caputed? Dr. Helen Morrison has with the likes of John Wayne Gacy, Bobby Joe Long, and other serial killers. In this book, she writes about her life as a doctor among those monsters that we envision. She doesn't find them to be monstrous but their actions such as murder, mutiliation, kidnapping, necrophiliac, and others are truly monstrous. Dr. Helen Morrison seeks the individual behind the monster and what causes men to do such monstrous actions. Ironically, women serial killers are few and Wuornos killed more out of a defensive reaction after a lifetime of trauma, abuse, and abandonment. Wuornos was a product of society who lashed back but she never denied her crimes and went to death even fighting the appeals. Serial killers especially those examined by Dr. Helen Morrison were mostly men and usually caucasian. What would white men who have more of a power in our society need to kill so mercilessly against the defenseless? Dr. Morrison doesn't always get her answers clearly because serial killers are not as dumb as we liked them to be in slasher films. Dr. Morrison without going insane herself has lived a life where she does the unthinkable in spending time with serial killers looking for something that would explain their actions. We'll never know the actual truth behind what makes a serial killer to prevent others.

Dr. Morrison, if she is in fact an MD, seems to skip over the blindingly obvious in her assessment of these killers. I mean does she honestly belive that relentless phsyical and mental abuse from childhood and rape at 16 would have NO IMPACT on a serial killer? Is she serious? Does she actually still retain a license for practising medicine/psychiatry or, hopefully, has she been disbarred?


It seems hard to tell as she veers from a fruedian perspective wherein all physiological inputs are null and void to a purely frightened and judgemental one, that the killers did it soley because they wished to where in fact she bases her judgements. Frankly, as a former defense attorney, I would run a mile before I let her get her hands on my client.

This book is written by a claimed profiler. However, there is no profiling in the book. My favorite book by a profiler is Mind Hunter by John Douglas. In that book (plus Obsession), he goes into details of the crime scene and what things mean. You learn what it means if the killer covered the face of the viction (they knew them and were ashamed), young versus old crimminals, etc. Helen's book has very little details about crime scenes (we like to figure it out, that is why CSI is a popular TV show). No profiling information on the clues in the scene to help investigators find the UNSUB (unknown subject, I learned this from the Mind Hunter book), etc. Helen spends more time on her personal thoughts, thanksgiving dinner, her children shouldn't watch her TV appearances about killers, tea in the afternoon, going to Brazil, etc. and too little on crimes. She also is all over the place with her theories. At the end of the book she claims that DNA is encoded to make a serial killer, and with a stretch relates this to Minority Report, etc. However, there is a compelling arguement from other profilers that some event triggered the change. Ted Bundy was social until his long time girlfriend dumped him. Ted switched and targeted young girls with long dark hair (just like his ex had), and many of the others have abusive households. Helen talks about tv appearances and helping in the insanity defense for crimminels - I get the feeling that she is all about feelings, not a fact based person (John Douglas says that once the monster is created - it cannot be reversed - done). This book does touch on Ed Gein (leatherface from Texas Chainsaw masacre, Norman Bates, and others), John Wayne Gacy (the clown who rape/murdered young buys), and Bobby Joe Long (brutal rape and death of women). However, even a short TV special on Bobby Joe Long had many more details of the tracking and catching of him than this book. Helen claims it was seeing a missing person report on TV that led Long to let her go (he felt sorry for her?). But from other reports it seems that she talked to him and told him that she wanted to be his girlfriend - this threw off his circuitry. This second explanation makes more sense in the literature. Helen also discusses hypnosis (a relaxing state where both parties agree to participate) as a scientific method, acts as if satan worship killings did happen (this media hoax was uncovered), throws in Freud psychology (just about all scientists today believe he was just a weird guy with an infactuation for women). Helen seems to be touchy feeling through the whole book, I felt he was this, or that. She constantly talks about how the men treated her with disrespect because she is a woman - it really sounds like she is trying to prove something with this book. Detailed, insightful profiling and crime description rather than fluffed up theories that DNA can pinpoint all future serial killers would go a long way towards gaining respect in the community. This is my least favorite of this type of book, and I LOVE these types of books. I recommend you instead read Mind Hunter by John Douglas, Obsession by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, or The Evil that Men Do by Roy Hazelwood. You will learn details and how the profiler's mind and experience work. The last book by Hazelwood even has a crime scene in the back that you try to apply what you've learned about profiling in. I did pretty well, because I read about profiling by Douglas, Olshaker and Hazelwood, not anything from this fluff piece by Dr. Helen (note: beware of someone that constantly reminds you that they have a PhD rather than presuade you through knowledge and facts - Helen, this means you! The only positive for this book, given the others, is that it had some non-US serial killers like a French guy (Gilles de Rais) from the 1400s. But not enough to warrant purchase. Get Mind Hunter instead!

Her 'life' among the serial killers? Her life is among children and she will occasionally go get to visit the lesser known serial killers. What a pathetic attempt to capitalize on the 'serial killer' phenomenon...and to advance her own silly theories. Oh, and her *epiphany* that serial killers are addicted to killing? DUH! I think I figured that out when I was about 17 and had just begun studying serial killers.
Do NOT waste your money.
If you want a real expert, watch Dr. Michael Stone on "Most Evil"

Unfortunately Dr. Morrison reveals herself in this book and in her various TV interviews/documentary appearances as far too emotional, self rightous, and just plain in error when it comes to certain facts regarding serial killers.

If I were to list all of these erroneous comments, this review would fill the computer screen. Let me just point out one error. Pg 24 of the paperback version...."No serial murderers are addicted to drugs, drink or even smoking"

Interesting....tell that to Jeffrey Dahmer who used alcohol heavily in order to facilitate his killings. He was an alcoholic even in high school and would drink to the point of blacking out.

This is just ONE brief example of heavy alcohol use by a serial murderer indicating an addiction versus normal social drinking. So how can Dr. Morrison make such an erroneous blanket statement as "NO serial murderer is addicted to........."?

Just by nature alone, serial murderers are addictive...they are addicted to murder for one. It's not a stretch that, aside from killing compulsively, certain of these indivduals may also demonstrate other compulsive behavior such as addiction to drugs, alcohol, sex, smoking, etc.

Bottom line...don't confuse yourself with glaring errors by reading this book. Instead turn to those written by more learned & practical minds such as Robert Ressler, Dr. Park Dietz and others.

"This innovative book is the product of an NSF funded calculus consortium based at Harvard University and was developed as part of the calculus reform movement" Beware of Harvard, i.e. reform Calculus. Instead of teaching people about maxima and minima, you show them how to use a calculator to guess. What a load of junk. Nobody learns what anything means, just how to apply formulas, etc. It is a shame what books and authors like these are doing to college mathematics. This book is particularly bad, a whole bunch of fluff, not a damn ounce of substance.

This is the worst math book I have ever been forced to buy. This book does not teach you calculus, it only gives word problem after word problem that your regular calculus student will not be able to solve! Most require a knowledge of physics or economy, as well as even-- topography! I am SO FRUSTRATED with this book. If someone has any idea where I can get the complete solution's manual, (the student solutions manual only gives answers to 25% of the problems, in such a way that I can't possibly practice enough to do well on the exams or even LEARN), please email me at angelaalbert@hotmail.com THANKS, and good luck to you all that take math with this book. You will need it.

Calculus is confusing enough. You don't need a terribly written book to make it worse. The explanations are poorly written and extremely short. It takes a comprehensive understanding of calculus in order to understand anything that the author says. A well written book shouldn't have arrows pointing in random directions. Random arrows don't make a confusing concept any less difficult to comprehend. I could read my chemistry book and learn more about math than by reading this one.

Besides the picture on the front, this book is horrible! I've learned more by personal derivation and experimenting than through this book. The explanations are overly bloated, and include so many approximations and tables that the theory behind this book's ramblings is lost completely. Instead of focusing on theoretical multivariable calculus while introducing, as a short diversion an approximating method, this book builds around a foundation of approximations, which clouds the actual mathematics in the process.

In my opinion, unless theory is ingrained in students' heads from the start, they will never even attempt to understand it. After all, the book gives the theory second priority, so why should students pay any attention to it?

Moreover, in the introduction, the book promises to have problem sets that a student "cannot just look for a similar example to solve... you will have to think." However, after working with this book's homework problems, I've found them to be the exact opposite of this! There are plenty of similar examples for any given problem, and as a result the teacher's role becomes trivial, while at the same time students don't really understand anything they're doing. Not only this, but the problems are overly MUNDANE, and there is too much practice for a single concept. If a student has taken calculus, he can do derivatives, so he should not need 31 exercises to learn how to do partial derivatives.

Capping all this off, there are no truly challenging problems at all in this book. All of them focus on mechanical methods rather than clever application of known theory. The biggest challenge in this book, in fact, is keeping your hand intact as you take 50 partial derivatives, and then hit a problem that says "repeat for the second partial derivatives."

Meanwhile, your fine motor skills deteriorate quickly as you overwork them drawing or re-drawing a graph or table every other problem.

Bravo, Debbie Hughes, you can use Mathematica's graphing capabilities to their fullest. We're all proud of you. Now can you keep them out of your textbook? No one wants to see a billion tables staring them in the face, and then have to copy and change a billion more for homework. That's not a way to learn. This whole textbook is just a way to pretend you're learning.

Waiting to really learn anything from this book is like waiting for Richard Simmons to get married. Trust me, it's not gonna happen, folks.

kubkhan

I have to disagree with my fellow Californians and unfortunately agree with someone from New York. This is an excellent foundation overview without the clutter of Anton's and Stewart's books. I found it to be a conveniently carried paperback and an enjoyable read.

This is actually a review of the entire four volume set that is The Birds of British Columbia. Clearly not restrained by limitations on space, the authors drone on endlessly. Finding useful information is like sifting river sand for gold flakes. It's there but requires a lot of work to accumulate. There are innumerable graphs, but these are just information blotted onto the pages without interpretation. One could easily get the idea that Mountain Bluebirds, for instance, are nearly as common on the south coast (where rare) as the interior (where common). Why? Because the graphs show total number of sightings, not adjusted for the overall effort (which is much higher in the populous areas around Vancouver and Victoria. The noteworthy sighting section often contains many sightings that leave me scratching my head as to why they are noteworthy. Pictures often seem included just because an author happened to have them on hand. There are lots of photos of bluebirds or phoebes nesting in manmade sites yet precious few photos of the birds themselves.

Rather than presenting every bit of data obtained, relatively unedited and undeciphered, the authors should have condensed the information into compact statements that focus on important points of status and distribution in British Columbia. The reader is left to do so on his/her own, which is at times is frankly impossible. Making all of this more onerous is the enormous size of the 4 volumes and the concurrent enormous expense.

This is a very poor text for structural analysis. The examples are absolutely terrible. Luckily I have a decent professor who explains what is going on. Also, there are several mistakes throughout the text and I often found myself refering to my Strengths books to help with the shear and moment diagrams, and beam deflection because this book did a horrible job explaining those topics. I highly recommend you use a supplementary text along with this if you are using this book for a structural class. -M.

Very poor text, with mistakes in several problem solutions and equations. I wouldn't reccommend it for structural analysis classes

Extremely poor text. The example problems use formulas that come "from out of the blue" with no explanation of how to apply them to the situation. The explanations of how to solve the problems are totally inadequate. To a student, this text would be absolutely useless, and may cause many potential structural engineers to pursue other avenues of study. Absolutely should not be used by any professor for teaching structural engineering to students!!

I have many structural analysis solutions manual. I recommend Hibbeler and Leet Manual over this one. Mc Cormacs solutions manual is as bad as the book itself.

This book gets one star for being light on ones' back, but then that is its problem ...

The book gives very poor example problems. As a rule the example problems are no better than a problem with the answer. Unless you are one of the fortunate ones who is particularly bright, you will likely find this book to be of no help to you whatsoever.

I have a good prof who actually goes through the example probs and gives a detailed description of how the problem was solved. I am also using hibbeler to help. Hibbeler states the theory, goes through how to solve a problem in outline, and then several well worked out examples, and then the problem sets.

I have Kassimali as well and is better than Nelson by far, but hibbeler I find is just a bit easier to understand (maybe I am use to his style from statics and dynamics).

If you want a McCormac, than I would recommend the (I think) 1975 third edition (before Nelson messed up an otherwise good book). This does actually do a good job of explaining things.

Hope this helps.

This is allegedly based on the life of Coyote Smith, "Brother of the Evil Spirit." It is based on a document with that name and is a complete fabrication from the inventive mind of Wayne Montgomery.

Wayne also concocted the Diary of his grandfather, Honest John Montgomery, whom he alleged had owned the OK Corral in Tombtone. There is some truth in this. An Honest John Montgomery did co-own the OK Corral in Tombstone. The rub is that Wayne's grandfather, John Montgomery, was a lifelong farmer near Petersburg, Illinois.

Wayne concocted his story about John Montgomery with too little research, so that it leaked badly. Unfortunately, he roped in True West Magazine (which I suggested should be called True Wind in that respect) and the Tombstone Epitaph National Edition. See the book, THE EARP CURSE, also available on Amazon for the details, covered in the Chapter titled: "Meet Windy Wayne and Dubious Dean." Montgomery had the bad judgment to sue me for my exposure of his baloney, and I countersued both him and the Tombstone Epitaph (who unwisely supported his imposture) and obtained a handsome out of court settlement from their insurance company in 1980.

The "brother of the evil spirit" is woven all throughout Wayne Montgomer's fabrications which, over the years he also had published in a small, insignificant publication by historical "groupies." Their degree of integrity was high-lighted by the fact that they never apprised their readership, after Wayne was exposed in my libel suit. Future generations who happen to find a copy of the publication in some library may go through life believing in "the brother of the evil spirit."

You needn't go through life in that shape. Believe me, it's another baloney tale like Nino Cochise's FIRST HUNDRED YEARS, and Frank Waters' EARP BROTHERS OF TOMBSTONE.

The co-author of this book, Carl Briehan actually did the writing, fully apprised of the specious nature of the source not only by knowledge of the result of my libel suit, but by former associates, after Wayne Montgomery had died. The publisher, informed by my attorneys of the truth, with irrefutable proof, still persisted in publishing this book and apparently is still doing it. They should be ashamed of themselves and discontinue publication.

A weak and unsustained argument flaws this unimportant wor

A poor attempt to write a public domain record of the life and history of John Wayne. I bought this book thinking it was a new collaboration or information about John Wayne that we hadn't seen before. But what was published was a 50 page work of garbage copies from some good and bad sources. Some of the references/footnotes are from inaccurate sources, some are even taken from the error filled IMDB site. To top it off they state they are using a public domain photo of Duke and the photo is horribly copies and printed on the front cover. The whole book looks as if it was written by a 1st Grader. it's not worth the paper it is printed on. John Wayne is my hero but this book is an insult to his name.