William King Books

What does the discipline of Canadian history need? To quote Samuel Gompers it needs more, more of everything. More social history, more comparative history, more economic history, and, in this case, more political history. Wardhaugh's book seeks to show that the decline of the Liberal Party in the West is not so much the fault of Pearson or Trudeau, but that its roots could be seen in the era of William Lyon Mckenzie King (leader 1919-1948, prime minister 1921-1926, 1926-1930, 1935-1948). According to Wardhaugh, King was sympathetic, in a vague romantic way, to the West in the twenties when he needed the support of the Third party progressives to hold power. However he lost sympathy for it when the West's poverty in the depression threatened his support for economic orthodoxy. In defense of this book, one could say that it gives a throurough account of the many splits and factional problems that King had to deal with on both a federal and provincial level. In this respect it fills a niche. We are given plenty of quotations from King's diaries and papers which show his pompousness, narrow-mindedness, smugness and callous indifference to every issue and principle except maintaining power.

Yet ultimately the book is deeply flawed. The book is oddly proportioned as well, devoting 127 pages from 1919 to 1930, 67 pages from 1930 to 1940, and 33 pages for the last eight years of King's ministry. The problem is not that King's policies were good for the West. The question that arises is whether they were any better for the rest of the country. If not, then the flaws of these policies cannot explain why the West was especially alienated from the Liberals. After all the Liberals have been competitive in Ontario despite having only governed the province five years since 1943. The Atlantic provinces are worse off in Confederation than the prairie ones, but that has not weaned them off liberalism. Why would conscription and the problem of postwar reconstruction be any less pressing in the rest of English Canada in 1945 than in the West? Yet according to Wardhaugh any disaffection was markedly less permanent. Wardhaugh points out that organization was weak, yet the Progressives in the twenties showed an almost continuous decline, while the conservatives were almost always in desperate straights before 1958. Other parties in other regions have been bothered by factionalism, yet have made up enough to win elections. Liberal politicians may have been anaemic, but were the other parties any less mediocre? King did not really know about the West, but as the career of Ronald Reagan shows, you do not always need real knowledge. The problem is that Wardhaugh consistently takes up a "high politics" approach which ignores questions at the base. Who voted for the liberals? What were their class, ethnic, religious and occupational background? How did they approach politics, what were the ideological assumptions, what were the material basis of their partisanship?

Another problem is that the Liberals actually put in a creditable performance in 1926, 1935, 1940 and 1949, which does not really match Wardhaugh's constant pessimism. By constantly reminding the reader of the Liberal party's ultimate fate he produces an illusion of inevitability, and he reduces much of the Liberal party's problems to King's obtuseness and the obtuseness of a few leaders. (His notes consist largely of King's diaries and papers, supplemented by the papers of Crerar, Gardiner and Dafoe). His treatment of issues is consistently unimiginative and conventional. The three prairie provinces are reduced simply to agriculture. No mention is made of increasing urbanization or economic diversification, and the problems of the prairie farmer are reduced to one issue, tariffs, with an occasional mention of freight rates. Why were nativist appeals successful against the liberals in 1929 and 1930, and what does this say about western political culture? Often Wardhaugh glibly speaks of public opinion in the West, as if it was an undifferentiated mass. (When you look at the notes it is largely just Dafoe complaining.) That King was an unimiginative leader is not in dispute, but Dafoe and Dunning, Bracken and Brownlee were not much better or more thoughtful. Like it or not, there was a market for incantations of balanced budgets and economic orthodoxy in the West, in patent definance of overwhelming economic catastrophe. In the West you had to suffuse this with a some regional self-pity, some cant against "established parties," and a little "reformist" goobledygook. Perhaps that helps to explain why Diefenbaker, a politician with more rhetoric than competence, would be so successful in the future.

I must have missed something, considering the amount of praise heaped on the author on the dust jacket, I thought I was about to read War and Peace. There was nothing new here, and the story line moved around like a heart monitor display - no consistent track - grabs something here, something there. This really is a very disappointing book.

Hey this is Shakespeare, not so easy to understand but at least it's available in large print.

This book provides basic background information on Turner's progression as an artist, and it does contain a nice selection of Turner's landscapes. However, the reproductions are poor in quality, hardly doing the authentic works justice.

I agree with many of the other reviewers: this book does a semi-decent job of explaining inorganic chemistry. The practice problems are okay, but the layout and organization can be improved upon. Nonetheless, most students have no choice when it comes to choosing a textbook.

This book is required for my chemistry 1 course. I have taken 2 tests, and so far I have a "D" average in this class. The class is online, so I'm relying on this book to learn chemistry. As you can tell from my average, I have learned nothing from this book. I can't understand why colleges always require these VERY over-priced books that sucks. This book is the worst chemistry book that I have ever read - and I have read at least 7 chemistry books. Don't waste your money on this piece of garbage. If it wasn't so expensive, I would use it as a door-stop. By the way, the solutions manual that you can buy as a companion to this book sucks too.

First of all, good thing about this book is that it has lots of practice problems to work with. A lot of questions and exercise problems are sophiscated and challenging. Secondly, the explanations of the text are not confusing at all to me. The figures are well explained, too. ( I don't know why so many reviewers here say "confusing" about the book.)
It is overall a nice book. This book has a few calculation errors and typos but they shouldn't be a big problem for you to understand the concepts of chemistry.
Of course, I have seen better general chemistry books but this book does not confuse you much as long as you know how to read.

This book is the reason why half of the incoming premed population at tulane change to business majors. Please avoid at all cost. If you are assigned this book, go and buy it used so that you can just glimpse over it during class. Buy another better chemistry book and study from that.

Incoherence is not an opinion but rather a fact when it comes to associating that word with this book. Petrucci although as a long history with writing chemistry textbooks, still has not been able to provide an adequate explanation to some of the MOST basic concepts of chemistry.

I think he is probably a brilliant chemist as the questions in this book can be challenging; I found them trivial however. This is not because I deem myself intelligent (that goes without saying :) but the fact of the matter is that I had better books to rely on when I was studying undergraduate chemistry.

Silberberg and Malone's Basic Concepts of Chemistry where to two that got me through. I initially was given this book to study from and I found some of the chapters deadly boring.

How Petrucci explains and expounds and Acid-Base, and Quantum Chemistry is satisfactory, however organic chemistry, the concept of the mole and redox are chapters that accentuate the inarticulate nature and the overall dullness of the book.

This is not good becase fundamentally chemical reactions are about the transference, absorption and dissipation of energy which is normally expressed as the "movement of electrons". One of the principle topics in chemistry which first introduces this is redox.

Secondly the concept of the Mole and basic calculations are required and if an individual has only this book to rely on then there is not much hope that the student would get a good enough grasp of what is at hand.

Better Books:


Basic Concepts of Chemistry by Malone. A tried and tested book which takes a layman or (laywoman for that matter) and makes a chemist out of them.

Chemistry by Silberberg: very detailed explanations on various concepts.

Chemistry by Olmsted, if you are short on cash and need a book that does both of the above, then this is it. It is a fairy good book.

I know it wasn't written by Dumas, but it is an interesting book
for those who like the 17TH century

If you are to read the complete text of this novel, you will find a subpar 19th century adventure novel. It WAS NOT, however, actually written by Alexandre Dumas! His name was used illegally by a number of authors and publishers in the late 1800's to sell supposed sequels to some of his most famous books (see "Daughter of Monte Cristo.") All of them are poor imitations of the original. Buyer beware! Order instead the five books which make up the true Musketeer cycle. You can get great Oxford University Press full-text paperbacks from Amazon. Long live Dumas!

This is unlike ANY Musketeer book Dumas has written. It seems to be more of a story that takes place in Portugal with D';Artagnan and Porthos "thrown in" to put D'Artagnan's name on the book to sell copies.

I concur with pretty much all of the opinions here. I don't think it's any secret that the "Rat Pack" were not the most honorable of fellows but I think it is more of an insult that these two hacks thought they had the ability to write any sort of decent bio about them. What is worse, as one reviewer pointed out, was their feeble-minded review of their fimology (like anybody cares what they think?). Horrible book, waste of time.

The back cover suggests that the main reason for the Rat Pack's appeal was the fun they seemed to be having. The contents, however, seem to be intended to deconstruct this premise. One by one, in numbing detail, the five men (and "mascot" Shirley Maclaine) are subjected to jaundiced, gossipy biographies that portray them as pathetic characters. Very little of the information is original - many of the anecdotes related here are familiar and seem selectively drawn from more in-depth biographies. The tone is consistently vulgar and deprecating. There are also tedious reviews of all the films of every Pack member, including critiques of seemingly every cast member's performance, prolonging an already unpleasant read. It is as if the authors wished to undermine the undeniable talent and charm these performers had, and which remains their legacy. This cheap anthology simply exploits that legacy.

I'm going to throw away my copy, too. Perhaps the most annoying aspect, for a film buff, is how the authors add insult to injury with their "film reviews." It's bad enough that they get facts wrong -- most of the score to ON THE TOWN was NOT written by Leonard Bernstein, for example -- but then these ignoramuses presume to pass negative judgment on classics like ON THE TOWN and FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, a right they clearly haven't earned with their "research."

The only reason I give this book one star is because zero stars wasn't an option. It took two guys to write this tripe? One monkey could have done a better job. This book is lazy and poorly written and I am ticked off that I wasted my money on it. The definitive book on the Rat Pack has got to be Shawn Levy's. After reading the first two pages of Levy's book I was hooked. The difference between a real writer and a couple of hacks.

Here is the deal. If you are just starting to get into the Rat Pack or any of the players individually. Then this book is a good start. I would call it the Cliff notes of the individuals and their movies. If you have seen all the movies including the Matt Helm movies or if you have already read books on Dean, Frank, Sammy's biography then you are way ahead of this book and pass it by.

But if you have not seen the movies and want to learn the basics of each man and then from there search into each one of them seperatly then this is a good starter. There are some great books on all the guys but you will finded Sammy's Biography to be the most fun. Remember to check out deanmartinfancenter.com for more info on the Rat Pack. For the guys who wrote this you could have given us some fun facts or answered some questions, instead they read everyone else book and put together their own version.

This book is one of my text books for practial nursing. It has been very frustrating to read. The information is not always clear. I have to find other books that will help me to understand the information.

This book is rife with typos and factual errors that make it frustrating to read.

I like the concept of making an easy-to-read, basic introduction to human anatomy and physiology for professionals that need to know the basics but don't have the science background to go very in-depth. I believe that was the authors' intention, but they failed miserably.

I like the images; they are attractive and help make the concepts easy to understand. Unfortunately they are not without their own errors. For example, figure 2-8(A) shows an impossible fatty acid (one of the carbon atoms has 5 bonds).

The thing that most annoyed me about the book (so far) is this sentence "The protons and electrons of an atom always are equal in number, so that the atom as a whole is electrically neutral." (pg. 20) This is so incredibly untrue, it is ridiculous. Ions (atoms that are NOT electrically neutral because they do NOT have an equal number of protons and electrons) are so incredibly important that they are discussed just three pages later.

I was so looking forward to reading this book about a brilliant man who did more for the British Royal Family than many British Royals did, he was of course, German(I am British by the way).
Bennett states at the beginning of the book that she was not overkeen to write it and that she was asked to rather than wanted to (words to that effect) and frankly it shows. This book is far too long. The first 200 pages are about protocol and gossip and should have concentrated more on this man's greatness not a load of old twaddle. Don't waste your money, unless you like soap operas in which case you will love it!!!

The subtitle is "A facing-pages translation into contemporary English" and it is not a line by line translation, it simply has short scene summaries, a disappointment given this description. Also it would be more accurate to call this a pamphlet rather than a book since it is 30 pages of text and 10 pages of bibliography and appendices. I bought it to supplement classroom material and ironically found out that appearances are not reality!