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An amazing book in many ways. It is comprised of 22 questions that face every person on the planet. The questions are ones that mankind has been searching for answers ever since he has wondered why things are as they are.
The answers have been supplied by 22 Nobel Prize laureates.One of the traits of brilliant people is their ability to explain the complex in a simple way that can be easily understood.Although ,on first glance,one might be tempted to dismiss this book as one only suitable for school students;but it is a book suitable for all ages and all levels of knowledge.
Only if you could give an answer to the following questions,would this book not be worth your time to read.

How do I win the Nobel Prize?

Why can't I live on French Fries?

Why do we have to go to school?

Why are some people rich and others poor?

Why do we have scientists?

What is politics?

What is love?

Why do we feel pain?

Why is pudding soft and stone hard?

Why is the sky blue?

How does the telephone work"

Will I soon have a clone?

Why is there war?

Why do mom and dad have to work?

What is air?

Why do I get sick?

Why are leaves green?

Why do I forget some things and not others?

Why are there boys and girls?

Why does 1+1=2?

How much longer will the earth keep turning?

Now that you know the questions,and also know how well you might answer the;let Nobel Prize laureates ,who have been recognized for their work and knowledge in their fields ;give you answers to them. And their answers are unbelievably understandable.

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My seven year old daughter loves this book. It tackles a wide array of topics (nutrition, poverty, economics, love) in a kid-friendly way without sacrificing important concepts. As a parent, I often tire of reading children's books aloud, but this one is as interesting for me as it is for my daughter. My daughter likes the book so much that she carries it in her backpack for emergency reading material and agreed that it would make a lovely Christmas gift for her 8-year-old cousin. It would also be appropriate for boys and I believe it will still be interesting throughout her elementary school years. I hope that the publisher will continue to tap into the brilliant minds and thoughtful pedagogy of the Nobel community and publish another volume or two.

This book was so great, I can't imagine why someone would not like it. Some parts were so good, I reread them many times. WHY WE HAVE TO GO TO SCHOOL, WHAT IS POLITICS were a few of my favorites but WHAT IS LOVE, WHY ARE SOME PEOPLE RICH AND OTHERS POOR were not so good. Overall, this book is a sure hit!

I used this as my study guide for the Nokia Security Administrator test, as well as a reference book at work. I work a mixed bag of Checkpoint firewalls at my office and this helps when I have been off of a Nokia for a long time. If you are using this for your cert, you will need access to a Nokia appliance as well to practice...

Everything you need to know to prepare a Nokia Box for Check Point is in here. The author uses a step by step approach to configuring your Nokia box and avoids the ugly details of Unix when he can. Finally, you don't have to be a Unix guru to deploy a super secure platform from which to run Check Point. Warning: This is not a Check Point book and it does not talk about secure network design or any of the other issues involved in network security.

I've been working with the Nokia Appliances and the IPSO OS, since they were first released. These boxes loaded with Check Point FW-1 provide top notch security. There are lots of CP books out there, and I was surprised that there wasn't a Nokia book also. I ordered this right when it came out, and the book has been a huge help to me. Its well written, comprehensive, and concise. The UNIX appendx at the end is very good, becaue you dont need to be a UNIX guru, but you do need to know the basics if you have to go beyond Voyager and get into the command line stuff.

As one of the few people outside of the Amazon contest who has had the privilege to read Old Blood in its entirety, I am writing to sing the book's praises. Simply put it has a wide appeal outside of its listed genre. While it is a serious vampire thriller, it is also a well researched work of historical fiction with finely developed characters, and an intricately woven network of well articulated plot lines, all topped with a generous sprinkling of witty social satire. Frankly, its scope is cinematic and it would make a damn good film. Finally I must add that while I am not familiar with Amazon's criterion for designating its "Top Reviewer", I have to say that I am very surprised at the slapdash quality of that particular review. From the poor spelling to the gross inaccuracies in describing the plot the Top Reviewer's critique should hold little credence with the judges.

Having enjoyed the wit and vigor of the author's excellent historicial nonfiction, I thought I was prepared for his historical fiction. But if I had been-- I wouldn't be writing this review now. He takes his knowledge of Philadelphia history and embodies it in characters you feel for from the get-go. Their struggles engage you in universal hopes, dreams and fears, and before you know it, you really, really want to know what happens next.

So, please Amazon, -- let us know, what -does- happens next?

From the 1st sentence you are swept into the harsh world of 17th century Pennsylvania. Keels combines realistic period detail with gothic suspense. By the last sentence you desperately want to know if the hero has fallen into friendly or evil hands. Give me more!

Cheering for Eddie and Dick Stodghill's "The Old School Yell"

Amazon Short

"The Old School Yell"
by Dick Stodghill

I started out reading this Amazon Short due to the title "The Old School Yell" never dreaming it would take me to where it did. The story was about a man named Eddie who entered a bar that the author frequented and how he started out as a moocher but became a fixture there at Nick's place, especially near the Jukebox where one of his favorite singers was Vaughn Monroe.

The author heard so many stories from Eddie about growing up in Ohio, and being a reporter he always checked his sources so he always looked up details Eddie told and always found them to be true. The stories are so interesting and reveal a great deal about Eddie and the life he had led. Without giving away the end I will conclude with a must read suggestion to each and every one reading this.

Mary E. Preece author of In This Valley I Grew, Life on Blacklog and Happy Hollow; Poems, Prayers, and Promise of An Appalachian Woman; and the soon to be released Leavin' Sandlick and Speakin' Appalchian

Its odd how you can find friendship and tolerance in unexpected places. Kindness shows no boundries, demands, no restrictions, and comes from the gut as portrayed in this fine short. Mr. Stodghill gives the reader a tight story of compassion that comes straight from the heart.

As I read through this wonderful little piece of life, it invoked so many special memories. You find yourself sitting at the bar taking it all in first hand. "Eye-dee, dye-dee, Christ Almighty..." I loved it!

In "Organisation Design: Fashion or fit?" Mintzberg discusses five distinct organisational configurations namely the simple structure, the machine bureaucracy, the professional bureaucracy, the divisional form and adhocracy. Each configuration is made up of five component parts namely the strategic apex, operating core, technostructure, support staff and the middle line.

The author explains how coordination is achieved in the five organisational configurations. For example, in the simple structure, it is through supervision; in a machine bureaucracy (such as a vehicle assembly line), it is through standardisation of work; in a professional bureaucracy (such as a university), it is through standardisation of skills; in a divisional form, it is through the standardisation of output; and in the most complex organisational structure, the adhocracy, coordination is achieved through mutual adjustment. The author explains the pros and cons of each configuration and where it is most suitable.

According to Mintzberg, these configurations are effective tools for diagnosing the problems of designing organisations.

This is a very enlightening article in organisational design which is a must to read by managers who need to understand how to design their organisations for effective performance. Those studying management, business studies or an MBA will find the article very useful, easy to follow and understand.

Henry Mintzberg is Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and a Professor of Organization at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France. This classic article was published in the January-February 1981 issue of the Harvard Business Review.

In order the discuss and distinguish the five distinct organizational configurations, Mintzberg first discusses the five component parts which make up the whole organization: strategic apex, operating core, technostructure, support staff, and middle line. He then continues with describing how each of these elements cluster into the five configurations. Each of these five configurations (simple structure, machine bureaucracy, divisional form, adhocracy) are discussed in detail, with both their strengths and weaknesses. So how do we need to use these configurations? "... this set of five configurations can serve as an effective tool in diagnosing the porblems of organizational design, especially those of the fit among component parts." Mintzberg uses four basic forms of misfit to show how managers should use it as a diagnostic tool. He emphasizes that especially fit remains an important characteristic. There are excellent graphs, tables, and a great appendix explaining the organizational configurations and component parts. The author concludes that "the point is not really which configuration you have; it is that you achieve configuration."

Yes, this is one of the best articles I have read. It provides a great introduction/framework into organizational structures and design. Mintzberg does not want us to see his introduction as a framework. But I disagree. This article is thorough enough to use as a framework, keeping in mind that larger organizations (can) consist of a mixture of the discussed configurations. For people interested in a further discussion of organizational structures I refer to Henry Mintzberg's 1978-book "The Structuring of Organizations". This article should be compulsory reading for managers and MBA-students. The author uses simple business US-English.

The best book to understand the nature of any organization in business or no business world. Henry Mintzberg give us the elements to detect the sick part in the structure and the way to keep in control every part through parameters.

That's the best tool to use when you want to see your company focused in the structure analysis, to take the actions to align the model. This article is old, but is actual too, then you want to know it.

This is an entertaining story of a boy who sets out to do his part to protect the family's crop from hungry wildlife. Not only does he learn how to build a scarecrow, but he gets plenty of down home advice from local characters along the way. I'm glad that Rolland Love included scarecrow building directions - I may have to construct one for my own backyard.

Rolland Love opens this story with a breakfast scene set in a farm kitchen. A young boy sits down with his parents to an abundant country breakfast.All is right with his world of plenty. The air even carries the scent of an apple pie in the oven. The author uses food to raise the readers'level of comfort and then confronts the comfort with a problem. This farm family knows that survival is threatened when weather fails to co-operate. The table is boutiful if the right amount of rain falls. Stingy rainfall offers meager crops, and critters in the wild will arrive to demand their share of what grows in the garden;a garden that feeds this family. The boy's parents give him the job of keeping the wild animals away from the family food source. The boy gathers information from all of the community wise men who offer creative solutions to scare creatures away, including the design of a scarecrow. This is a heart warming tale of a boy who claims for himself the power of problem solving in a family that understands the dynamics of that old adage,"it takes a village to raise a child" or for that matter, a garden.

The Ozark Scarecrow is one of the best short stories I've read in a long time. I can close my eyes and picture Love's Scarecrow "flappin'" in the wind. What a great story for young readers. Love's description of a country breakfast made my mouth water. And I can just picture his young farm boy character at the sale barn, seeking the advice of the men on how to rid the garden of critters, listening with wide eyes as he considers their advice.

Being a professional photographer I have worked with many stylists. This book has lots of good info in it. I bought it for a friend who was interested in being a stylist. I looked at it and have barrowed it back several times to improve my own skills. It has lots of great ideas and skills you need.

This is a fantastic source of information for anyone interested in finding out what the career of photo styling entails but also offers lots of tips even for a veteran stylist like me. The author writes with insight, humor and obviously from a great deal of experience.
There are illustrations showing how things are done, many tips and "secrets" and very useful lists and websites.
The chapters on the business of styling and self promotion are alone are worth the price of the book.
Get this book if you want to work as a stylist or if you are working as one now. You'll learn something useful!!!

This book has helped me time and time again and I've only had it for a month or so. I'm so glad someone finally wrote a book on such an important part of photography. I recommend anyone serious about fashion and photography to get this book, it helps a great deal and explains everything in such detail.

Ever read digital photography texts written by corporate sposored gurus who are not really photographers, but are in reality salesmen trying to sell you some kind of software, tutorial package, or traveling seminar? Well this isn't one of those kind of books.

What The Photographers Guide does do is layout a logical and human path for moving from traditional photographic practice into the realm we now inhabit digitally. He carefully points out the innate similarities but also the value of new innovations. Bill Kennedy is smart enough and honest enough not to attempt to sell you products and software, but rather to actually assist photographers in adapting what they already know to the rapid changes that we all face with digital capture,scanning, image correction, file archiving, and output decisions. He also guides the student in establishing good work habbits at the very beginning, when it counts the most.

To me it is an excellent text for any student starting out with learning about what photography is now, how to control it, and to help anticipate how it may develop in the near future. The fact that Kennedy is a college photo instructor himself, gives a clear clue to why he wrote it. It is a perfect textbook for any photo progam - wish there was something like this when I started making that transition...


John Dean

This book offers easy to understand instructions on creating and using a digital darkroom. It provides the information photographers need to work successfully and efficiently in a digital darkroom.

It is especially relevant to traditional "wet" darkroom photographers in that it provides methods for creating work prints and then finished prints. Kennedy calls these workflows. He describes a fast and easy method for creating a work print as the "hard proof" workflow. This technique is designed to replicate the wet darkroom photographers work print and is an idea not really described by anyone else. He also describes workflows for making final prints, black and white prints and soft proofs. He completes his book with the use of third-party products (for example ink, paper and printer software) in the digital darkroom.

Beyond these workflow techniques he does a great job of describing and decyphering the technology associated with digital devices such as digital cameras, printers and scanners.

This should be considered a complete workshop in a book.

This book is an excellent reference and a must read for photographers caught in limbo between "wet" and "digital". Whereas many books on the market are filled with tricks and techniques for using Photoshop, Mr. Kennedy takes the reader much further into the nuts and bolts of work flows, and the proper configuration of photoshop. The author demystifies the printing process for both the novice and the pro by presenting clear and concise explanations for understanding profiles for color and grey scale printing.

excellent book made understanding the cannon XTI easy the book is well written and easy to follow

The PIP Expanded Guide to the Canon Rebel XTi is accurately named. Many so-called guides to camera products are really dumbed down versions of the owner's manual, coupled with some chapters on basic photography. Not so with this book. In an orderly, comprehensable, and comprehensive way, this expanded guide opens the door to the amazing feature set of the XTi, and for each item in the set explains how to access it, what its for, how to use it, and why and when to use it. After reading this book, I felt as though I had a whole new camera. To get the full value of the amazing Rebel XTi, this book is essential. I'd even buy it instead of a new gadget--and that's really something!

One of the best books on the Canon 400D/XTi Rebel camera. Easy to read and understand. Great presentation and feel to this book! I have other books on the 400D/XTi and they are not as nice.

"Plague Ship" (1956) was one the first science fiction novels I ever checked out of our local library (I can still close my eyes and see that one dinky little shelf, crammed with some of SFs' greatest juvenile authors: Norton; Heinlein; Del Rey; Nourse).

This book contains the second 'Solar Queen' adventure. Norton's four-book series about the trader-crew of the 'Solar Queen' ended in 1969 with "Postmarked the Stars" but beware! Lesser authors have butted into the series, presumably with Norton's permission since this remarkable Gandalf Grand Master of Fantasy and Nebula Grand Master just recently passed away after a long and extremely fruitful career (her first novel was published in 1934, her latest fantasy in 2005).

One 'Solar Queen' rip-off to avoid at all costs is "Redline: the Stars."

Norton's 'Solar Queen' stories are told from the viewpoint of Dane Thorson, an apprentice-Cargo Master who is introduced in "Sargasso of Space," the first 'Solar Queen' novel, as a "lanky, very young man in an ill-fitting Trader's tunic." Most of this author's heroes and heroines are young, uncertain of themselves, shy, with a tendency to trip over their own enthusiasms and load themselves up with guilt at the slightest opportunity. They are very likeable and their adventures are narrated in remarkably lean prose with just the right touch of description.

After ten years of schooling, orphan Dane Thorson is assigned via a computer analysis of his psychological profile--not to a safe berth on a sleek Company-run starship that his classmates were vying for--but to a battered tramp of a Free Trader. To say that the 'Solar Queen' "lacked a great many refinements and luxurious fittings which the Company ships boasted" was an understatement. But she was a tightly-run ship and what she lacked in refinement, she made up for in adventure. Dane soon settles in under Cargo Master Van Rycke and learns "to his dismay what large gaps unfortunately existed in his training."

Sometimes I just want to give Dane a big hug.

"Plague Ship" takes the crew of the 'Solar Queen' to Sargol, where the enigmatic feline natives seem very reluctant to trade away their fabulous scented gemstones. When Dane Thorson discovers an herb that the Salariki are willing to swap for their gems, he fears that his eagerness to make a trade breakthrough might have poisoned a native child.

That becomes the least of his worries when the 'Solar Queen' blasts off from Sargol with invisible, undetectable stowaways that would brand the free traders anathema to all inhabited worlds.

In space, the more senior members of the 'Solar Queen's' crew succumb to a strange plague that resembles sleeping sickness. Dane and his fellow-apprentices, with the assistance of Captain Jellico's Hoobat (a sort of blue parrot-lizard, or at least that's how I've always pictured it) discover the source of the plague: venomous hitch-hikers from Sargol. "It walked erect on two threads of legs...a bulging abdomen sheathed in the horny substance of a beetle's shell ended in a sharp point." It was only about a foot-and-a-half high and could change color like a chameleon.

The Hoobat kills and eats the first creature, and then the hunt is on for others of its kind.

Even with the source of the sleeping sickness discovered, the 'Solar Queen's' young apprentices must still convince the rest of the galaxy that they are not a plague ship--and therefore eligible to be destroyed on sight without warning.

The 'Solar Queen' novels are prime representatives of Norton's lean action-packed brand of story-telling (at least the ones she solo-authored.) If you haven't read them since you were a teen-ager, I urge you to try them again. For a few pleasant hours, you will be immersed in the adventures of a likeable, feisty band of free traders on exotic, carefully-drawn alien worlds.

Solar Queen adventure about trading contract for the planet Sargol acquired after losing planet Limbo contract to Star Patrol(Sargasso of Space). Van and Dane find that the Inter-solar(I-S) company there ahead of them. Still, they tried for fair trade with the Salariki for their koros gems. The crew of the Solar Queen after takeoff find they have a plague on board and as the crew one by one becomes sick finds the Star Patrol out to destroy the ship on sight. Classic Andre Norton

"Plague Ship" (1956) is the second installment in Andre Norton's so-called Dane Thorson series, and is a direct continuation of the previous volume, "Sargasso of Space." (A reading of that earlier novel is highly recommended before going into this one.) "Plague Ship" does everything that a good sci-fi sequel should: It expands on the possibilities of the previous book, deepens the characters, increases the action and leaves us wanting still more. This time around, Thorson and his 11 shipmates on the galactic trader Solar Queen...
It's a very fast-moving and suspenseful tale, full of unusual detail and unexpected turns. There are several highlights that make the book really shine, such as the gorp hunt early in the story. (And when I say "gorp," I'm not talking about high-energy nut-and-raisin trail mix, but rather reptilian, crablike monsters!) This gorp hunt takes place at sunset on the reefs of an oily sea, and is a highly atmospheric and exciting segment. Other great sections include a raid on an asteroid's emergency station; a landing in the Big Burn... and the viewing of the mutant life-forms therein; and the battle... near the book's end, where our heroes make a desperate bid to make their plea for justice to the citizens of the solar system. Like I said, this is a slam-bang sequel, that will leave few readers unsatisfied.
That having been said, I need to also mention that there are a few inconsistencies in the book. At one point, Norton tells us that Dane has been in the trading service for a few months; somewhere else, she says that it has been a full year. Huh? And I feel that I must chastise Ace Books for the deplorable job with which this book has been put together. Now don't get me wrong: I LOVE these little Ace paperbacks from the 1950s, especially those 2-in-1 Ace doubles. But there are so many typos--not to mention punctuational and grammatical errors--in this book that the reading thereof is made a labor. Should we blame Norton or the publishers for a sentence such as this: "His hands, blundering within the metallic claws of the gloves, Dane buckled two safety belts about him." How could any copy editor or proofreader let such an egregious line such as this get through, when just the simple deletion of that first comma would have made all the difference?! Apparently, these little Ace books were never proofed or edited. They're wonderful volumes, with marvelously pulpy covers, but sadly, the contents were not given their due. But enough about Ace's carelessness. "Plague Ship," despite the occasional blunder, is still a marvelous entertainment, and I do highly recommend it.