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This is the best book i had ever come across

This is the best book i had ever come across

It seems that more and more women, especially, are being faced with the task of caring for one or more aging and/or disabled parents at the same time they are caring for their own families. This story portrays such a situation very well, and the reader is tempted to write a sequel. However, the sad thing is that there is no ideal solution for this problem, either in this story or in real life. It's a story worth reading and thinking about.

Wife or Daughter is an extremely realistic story about a young woman with a tough choice to make. Ms. Hill has a wonderful talent for drawing a reader into the worlds she creates. I enjoyed this story very much, and found myself longing to know how things turned out in what would seem to be a no win situation.

An exceptional story which makes you understand what it is like to be poor in Iraq. Gives good insight into Arabic culture.

This is a powerful and emotionally moving story from an excellent writer whose works are appearing now in English. You won't want to skip a single word. I highly recommend his stories and books for those interested in Iraq as well as the world and the human condition more generally.

I used this book for a recent class in Analog Filter Design. This book is an excellent reference and learning tool for filter design. Overall This is the best textbook I have used.

Working with numerous analog circuits in the day to day workplace, I found that this book was very helpful. A nicely written and understandable reference.

Great book. Must for any one working on ADCs and DACs.

One of the few books in the data converter field. I used this book when I took an advance course on analog circuit design and found this book to be very usefool. This book contain a good amount of information on data converter and cover almost every important areas - i.e specification, testing, High-speed/high accuracy architecture, sample and hold circuit, compartors, noise shaping coding, voltage and current reference sources and also contain a chapter on sigma-delta converters that can lead to more advanced study for IEEE books on oversampled data converters. If you are an analog circuit designer or want to be an analog circuit designer this book will be a good reference for data converter circuit.

This book offers a brilliant new approach - at once rigorous, experiential, and intuitive - to the most up-to-date research within planetary ecology. Harding is a close associate of James Lovelock, the polymathic scientist who formulated the Gaia hypothesis - the theory that the chemical composition of the earth's atmosphere, its temperature, the salinity of its oceans, and a host of other variables are continually monitored and modulated by all the earth's organic constituents acting collectively, as a vast planetary metabolism. Originally considered an utterly radical hypothesis when first proposed in the 1970s, Lovelock's insight early on attracted the active support and research interest of one of the most far-seeing American biologists, the audacious microbial biologist Lynn Margulis, and has since, as their evidence mounted, garnered more and more respect from the scientific community. Today most of the theory's tenets have been integrated within the standard account of planetary ecology.

Harding - the staff scientist at Schumacher College - brings a new, deeply participatory approach to the articulation of whole earth science, employing a nuanced sense of philosophy and the history of ideas in order to demonstrate the transformative, paradigm-shattering power of Gaian theory. Throughout his lucid presentation of recent and ongoing empirical research, Harding strives to show the relevance of these remarkable discoveries to our most personal experience of the world immediately around us.

Current evidence is pushing various researchers in the natural sciences away from the through-going objectivism of previous science toward a more animistic acknowledgment that the biosphere in which we're immersed is more a living subject than a determinate object, and hence that their research is less a pursuit of inert and unchanging "facts," than it is an ongoing participation, and dialog, with a vast, spherical sentience whose corporeal complexity we can never completely fathom, and whose actions we can never entirely predict. At every step in his presentation, Harding offers richly imaginative and meditative exercises for the reader to try, as a way to experience these insights viscerally and corporeally - as a way to EMBODY this new understanding of our physiological interdependence (or interbeing) with the animate earth, and so to let this understanding resonate within our daily life.

At such a precarious historical moment as this one we're in, such creative, interdisciplinary visions as Harding's are catalyzing a new and more mature kind of science. They provoke a new kind of intelligence - a rationality informed by our ongoing sensory experience of the world around us, and by the empathic heart beating within our chest - a keen and rigorous intelligence that places itself in service not to humankind alone, but to the wild, more-than-human community of life.

Author Stephen Harding's doctorate in ecology from Oxford and his interest in holistic science creates a satisfying blend of modern science and new age ideas, so add in a dose of history of how older ideas of an 'animate earth' can be explained through a blend of modern science and spirituality and you have a powerful set if ideas indeed. GAIA theory, scientific insights and a focus on a living earth make for wonderful, revealing reading in his new book. "Animate Earth" is a very strongly recommended for the non-specialist general reader with an interest in science and metaphysics.

this second volume starts off with a very easily misconstrued scene, which in any other yaoi manga worth its salt would have degenerated into a frenzied orgy. not so with "antique bakery". it's just one of the many examples where yoshinaga-sensei pokes fun at the cliches of yaoi mangas, and as in the first volume, this is about as risque as it gets. however, despite (or maybe because of, depending on your tastes) the lack of sex, this manga still manages to capture my interest. there is a certain sense of realism entertwined in this series. while this volume continues the trend of its predecessor with its comic ingenuity and wittiness, there is an underlying feeling that there are more to the characters than what they seem.

the arrival of a black-suited man, complete with dark sunglasses on a dreary afternoon interrupted the malaise growing in the bakery, much to the chagrin of tachibana. it turns out that the man, chikage kobayakawa, is associated with tachibana's family and was sent to "take care" of him. appearances however, can be deceiving and this is doubly true for chikage. despite his looks, chikage is so desperately hopeless (and innocent) that tachibana ends up taking care of him instead of the other way around! with his arrival, tachibana's background is also slowly revealed, showing a clearer picture of the man who seems to cruise through life steeped in cynicism.

the bulk of this volume deals with the oncoming christmas season, and the various delicacies created especially to entice customers intent on celebrating it. it should also be noted that in japan, christmas is usually celebrated with your significant other, compared to the family-oriented celebration more common in western societies - somehow it's a lover's celebration there. *shrugs* at least, that's how i've seen it being portrayed.

in anycase, tachibana's wacko idea of a santa claus cake-delivery service - with his ferrari no less! - injected much humor into the volume. the people who appreciates the gesture turns out to be the ones he least expected to. as usual, tachibana's craziness totally plays out the cliche that we can't really understand rich people... *lol*

in anycase, in between all that, eiji's history is also further explored, and readers get to see ono's 'demonic charm' in action as he, unwillingly perhaps, unleashes its power on the very naive chikage.

for a very laidback series, quite a lot of things happen in this volume. yoshinaga-sensei cooks up an interesting blend of gravity, humor and madness that somehow reflects how real life could be just as insane. what i like most is how we get to see more sides of tachibana, especially in view of the way he treats chikage. it's true that tachibana does abuse him to a certain degree, tyrannical even, but on the other hand one doesn't seem to feel that way especially when we see just how much trouble tachibana goes through taking care of chikage. it's hilarious!

as in volume one, the pastries, cakes and traitteur looks utterly delectable. the chocolate scratch and sniff cover, combined with the illustrated delicacies makes me salivate every time. it's frigging insane! background art is sparse for the most part, but the involved and witty dialogue more than makes up for it. after all, this is definitely a manga that engages the mind more than anything else.

if you love the first volume, you won't be disappointed by this one.

The first volume of ANTIQUE BAKERY introduced us to the locale itself - a French-style patisserie set up in a former antique shop - and some of its customers. In this second helping author/artist Fumi Yoshinaga concentrates on the bakery's staff, three of whom we've already met: the owner, Tachibana, raffish son of a wealthy family; Ono, pastry chef and "gay of demonic charm"; and Kanda, the ex-boxer with a passion for sweets. (The opening story includes a notably unglamorous view of Kanda's past life in a biker gang). The trio becomes a quartet with the entrance of Chikage Kobayakawa, a combination bodyguard/servant dispatched by Tachibana's family. Although Chikage comes on like a modern ninja - impeccable suit, impenetrable dark glasses - he's so physically and socially awkward that it's Tachibana who winds up as an exasperated life-coach-cum-nanny. Ono, however, gets caught in a trap of his own making when he sets out to seduce the handsome lummox and then realises, almost too late, how easy it can be to hurt someone who's truly innocent and sincere.

The next episode is pure comedy with a trimming of culinary expertise, as the bakery gears up for a busy Christmas season: Tachibana realises that his idea of making deliveries dressed up as Santa may be counter-productive, while back at the shop the others cope with a stream of customers - including a group of chattering, brainless "kogals" - and discuss how make the perfect buche de Noel. However, the volume ends on a darker note as Tachibana discloses just why his family are so anxious about him... A little four-page "extra" illustrates personality through food preference, from Tachibana's exaggeratedly masculine taste for beer and spicy food to Kanda's lunch of butter-cake, gulped down between practice sessions at the gym.

It's a little unfortunate that Amazon chooses to describe this title as "yaoi", since readers looking for explicit man-on-man action are going to be disappointed. ANTIQUE BAKERY, rather, is character-driven comedy, with touches of bitter-sweet melancholy and a basic psychological realism that skew it toward the adult market (as does Yoshinaga's art, which tends to concentrate on figures with minimal background detail: shoujo manga cliches such as floating stars or flowers are used strictly for humorous effect). On the technical side, DMP has done a fine job of printing and presentation, and Sachiko Sato's translation makes the dialogue a pleasure to read. One tiny gripe: it would be nice if DMP invested in a Del Rey-style notes section somewhere in the book, since some references aren't entirely clear by themselves. For example, a panel of Chikage sneezing on p.41 doesn't mean a lot unless the reader is aware of the Japanese superstition that you sneeze when other people are talking about you. Again, when Kanda spoils his first attempt at a buche de Noel and assumes that he should "go into the mountains and make hundreds of buches de Noel until I've unlocked its secrets", Yoshinaga is poking fun at the genre of strenuous work-as-character-building-activity manga described by Frederick Schodt in his MANGA! MANGA!, but a casual reader mightn't get the joke. (Ono supplies a refreshing dose of common sense: "That would just be a waste of ingredients... I'll just explain now"). However, this would simply be the cherry on the cake - so to speak - for one of the most satisfying titles available today.

I have spent the last two years learning and improving my editing skills, but I have always been a little (a lot) intimidated and in the dark (no pun intended) when it came to color correction. I'm still working in FC Express, and thought that this book may be pointless, since Express lacks many of the tools discussed. But I started reading the color correction section today and have devoured every bit of it. Although I don't have the scopes to work with, I have really appreciated the clear, concise, methodical way that the book explains the concepts and procedures behind color correction. The subject is now demystified for me, and I feel confident in applying what I'm learning to the tools that are available in Express. I will eventually upgrade to Pro and purchase a monitor as well, and when I do, I'll be well prepared to take on the color correction process.

Now I am an advanced Final Cut Pro user who has made a living with it for going on 5 years now, but still this book gives me new tips and tricks that I hadn't realized, and an excellent section on color correction which is really why I got the book in the first place.

Play some relaxing music and get very comfortable because you will not want to put this book down. Arise For Healing will bring your meditation time to the next level!

Great book! Worth reading. Very inspirational. I look foward to any new books she puts out.

I used this book for an Array Signal Processing course. The book was very easily understood and complemented the professors coverage very nicely. I have read additional sections of the book and continue to be impressed with its readability and thorough coverage. Unfortunately I had to go through the Prentice-Hall print on demand service to get a compy of the text. paperbacks don't last as long and the price was still fairly high.

Array signal processing is a fairly new topic in communications and signal processing. This textbook provides broad and deep coverage on this attractive field. Well-written and highly readable makes this book an invaluable resource for both students and engineers. Since only the basic materials can be found in this book, you may need to find newly published papers/books to see the latest development on this field.