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I am a practitioner, but this is not a practicioners' book on many counts: some of the formalism is hard (eg chap 5 on continuous-time models), it does not include rules of thumb, its basic framework requires a lot of effort to translate into numeric advice (10% cash, 40% bonds, 50% equity or suchlike). A PFP system based on this is some way off (also because real estate is left out).

Yet: (a) the book saves you a lot of time catching up with the literature; (b) it does dispel some bad criticisms of modern portfolio theory, especially in the first two chapters which are extremely useful as a reminder of basic dynamic theory; (c) it does throw in real-world considerations such as why do we advise older people to hold more conservative portfolios, what does labor income do to the basic model, why are bonds advised at all, the "asset allocation puzzle" etc.

You end up your quest for knowledge much the wiser having read this - and my quest was not effortless. I read this book (actually the Web version) while on a summer vacation. Got up every morning at 7 and worked about one hour at a time, first reading, the following day taking notes. In two weeks I sweated it out. It was worth it, and I bought the book too (the physical book is much leaner than the printout).

To know whether it is appropriate for you, you need to realize that the "problem" the book addresses is the (now classical) consumption/investment problem from the standpoint of financial economics.

I would say it is not a practioner's book....mostly because practitioners usually do not have the specific background in math and economics, not because the ideas cannot be applied.

The ideas you will take away are at a very fundamental level. Not at the "how to" level.

I agree that most of what is covered in the book cannot be implemented in Excel. However, that statement applies to most of the interesting (and practical) problems in finance.

No one who uses Amazon's "search" feature to examine the book will be disappointed. If you bought this based on title alone, you could easily be let down.

The McMurrys excellent and well researched book that should be on the shelf of every historian or researcher of this topic. This is not just the thoughts of the McMurrys, but taken from actual microfilms from many locations and from different newspapers over a period of time. Good reading!

Herbert Barger Jefferson Family Historian

In 1998, DNA tests linked the male line in the Jefferson family to Hemings' youngest son, Eston. The staff at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, owners of the Jefferson home Monticello, then issued a report that Thomas Jefferson had fathered not only Eston, but three other children by Sally Hemings. The prestige of the Monticello name generated world wide publicity. Prominent in the Monticello report were excerpts of the Callender articles.

The McMurry book displays the articles in chronological order demonstrating how Callender picked up on local gossip in 1802 during Jefferson's first term and parlayed it into a series over the next six months, when Callender drowned in the James River. The Monticello report presented the articles as "evidence," but the McMurry book demonstrates clearly that Callender had never visited Monticello (contrary to a recent TV movie), had no source he could quote, and had no proof of any connection between Jefferson and Sally Hemings. He just made it up.

It has also been routinely repeated by historians that Sally Hemings was the daughter of John Wayles, father of Thomas Jefferson's wife, Martha. This would make Sally the half sister of Martha Jefferson. The McMurrys reveal the source of this rumor is no more substantial than an 1805 letter to the editor by an unidentified writer, which caused a new flurry of the Callender slanders.

The Paris baby, named "Tom" by Callender, is claimed to be the ancestor of a present day Woodson family. Except for the Callender articles, there is no proof that Sally had a son before 1798, eight years after the claimed birth of Tom Woodson. An important result of the DNA tests, which has been ignored by the paternity sympathizers, showed that the Woodsons are not descendants of Thomas Jefferson. This raises an important question why historians, and particularly Monticello, continue to reference the discredited Callender articles to support a paternity claim against Jefferson.

This book won't make the rumors go away but the McMurrys have performed an important service of original research. It is disappointing that more prominent Jefferson historians are not examining the Hemings myth with the same objectivity.

Calendar's life is potrayed it the book "Hammer of Truth" written by a native of Australia. Because he at time drank he would spend time in local jail, hearing of all skeltons in closets. He also wrote and ran several newspapers. So there is credibility to his knowledge of Tom Woodson.

Uhtil they exhume Jefferon and test his blood with Martha's children and Sally's children - no one can disprove the Legacy of the Woodsons- Epps, Randolphs or Hemings.

The Woodson's kept this story alive despite historians trying to deep six it. The truth alway lives on. Purchase "A President in The Family" and you can follow the trail of evidence as all of the research has been done.

Trena and Byron Woodson, author and Jefferson Genealogist

The language and style is easily accessible to those with a basic science education, and it was refreshing that this book avoided the doomsday predictions of nanotechnology and kept the unbounded prediction for when this will all happen to a minimum.

Published in 1996, the content of this book is a good introduction, but is in danger of becoming dated due to the fast moving nature of this field. This might be the first nanotechnology book to read, but not the last for a true fan of the topic. This book might not be for you, if you've been able to read Nanosystems by K. Eric Drexler, but if you want an entertaining walk through visions of future technology, check this one out.

If you're looking to get serious and read a discussion of recent research, look elsewhere. The remaining chapters fall into the realm of pure speculation, where futurists practice the fine art of making guesses to which no one will hold them.

Ultimately, it is exactly this light-heartedness and high-level thought experimentation that makes the book a good weekend's read. Enjoy it the way you would enjoy a work of science fiction with its technology premise solidly rooted in today's understanding of the universe.

If you enjoy this kind of reading, I would strongly encourage you to read _The Diamond Age_ by Neal Stephenson.

After reading nanotechnology, Molecular Speculations on Global Abundance (The MIT Press), I found an ancient bottle washed ashore by the tide.
I popped the top and to my surprise, a Green Genie materialized before my eyes.
You have three wishes boomed the Arabian aberration.
Cool.
Ill have nanotechnology. And your other two wishes? And to his surprise I said, Pack up and join the ether. Who needs magic if you have atomic precision chemistry.
This attitude is amply backed up by the stream of authors and their thoughts presented in BC Crandalls latest work.

Prepare for anew wave of startling ideas written by a group of the Worlds foremost nanotechnologist.
Attention Nano Venture Capitalists.
This is the info you are looking for.
Read and profit.
Now a summery of the authors and their chapters:

1. Molecular engineering.
BC Crandall, the books editor, founder of Molecular Realities, Memetic Engineering and co-founder of Prime Arithmetics inc., starts the work with a thorough intro to the concept beginning with an explanation of the atom, the workings of chemistry and self assembling natural machines like DNA in a style comfortably accessible to the uninitiated layperson.
Then Crandall moves on to A Genealogy of Nanotechnology. How ideas and discoveries of the past, (the study of artificial life concepts, the invention of scanning tunneling microscopes, walking molecules) have transported science to the brink of this incredible power.
Excellent and mandatory background information.

2. In-Vivo Nanoscope and the Two-Week Revolution.

Ted Kaehler of Apple Computer, has a two part chapter that sheds a calibrating light on the time table and extreme complexity of developing nanotechnology through the eyes of a computer scientist (Carnegie-Mellon) with a physics background (Stanford).
Kaehler argues that a great deal of early nano (preassembler) devices must be developed and understood before moving on.
His example in part one of his chapter is an early nano-like multi-purpose bioprobe unobtrusively investigating the immune system in a living organism.
This device is connected to desk top computers in a normal lab scene.
This is early nanotechnology.
The bioprobe was extremely expensive to hand craft (no assemblers yet exist).
The information from the experiment is richly rewarding and will be added to a massive library of knowledge needed to make the sophisticated cell repair machines of a mature nanofuture.
Venture capitalist: There will be many steps to mature nanotechnology that need financing and because of the novel utility of these breakthroughs, such first on the block investments should produce fabulous returns.

Kaehler goes on to explain away the myth of the Two-Week Revolution, referring to the concept that very shortly after the building of the first self replicating assembler, every nanotechnology idea conceived and nanotech product would spread across the planet and into space like wild fire. Arguing from the experience of complex systems builders, Kaehler predicts that lots of debugging and product cycle improvement are inevitable.
The two-week revolution will not happen.
Two weeks after the first assembler works, it will be in the shop for repairs.
And not many of the things that it builds in those two weeks will work either.
The pervasive use of assemblers in our lives depends on the development of several new fields of study and entire new layers of infrastructures.
It will be a human endeavor operating at human speeds. It wont happen without thousands of cycles of experimental feedback, and it wont happen in the first two weeks.
Good news for society as we will have, mercifully, more time to adapt.
(Good sources tell me, he argues the other side as well, that while it won't be 2 weeks, it won't be all that long either, especially with good design ahead.)

3. Cosmetic Nanosurgery

Former senior editor at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories prestigious monthly, Energy and Technology Review , Richard Crawford blows the doors off the $18 + Billion Cosmetic industry, showing how even early nanotechnology can actually deliver on the bogus promises made today by copywriters for their big business Oil of Old Lady clients.
He shows relatively simple designs for early nanodevices that change hair color, texture and skin color (I would love a tan in the winter!).
No more bitter baldness for male and female. Cast off unwanted facial and body hair. Such would be converted into CO2, H2O and sulfur crystals at the source.<

>Enjoy wrinkle repair, full body tight skin well before the assembler.
Later, with cell repair machines working at the molecular level, full body makeover.
Look completely different every month. Shock your friends by morphing into a Klingon.

Alas, there is a bleak, dark side, the sleazy underbelly of this nanotechnology utilization: Inevitably, there will be people who dont know how to leave well enough alone.
Many who never liked their own youthful appearance will opt instead to copy some popular model or other sex symbol.
It could become very confusing, with dozens of pop-idol look-alikes crowding the parks and boulevards of our future metropolis.
Some may relish the prospect, but we may never see the last of the Elvis clones.
(Oh.. My... God..! What did I do in a past life to be sent to this Universe?)

4. Diamond Teeth

Famed nano D.D.S. Edward M. Reifman also has a B.S. in mechanical engineering, magna cum laude, and an M.S. in biomedical engineering. After graduation and before obtaining his D.D.S., Reifman went to work for Hughes Aircraft designing communications satellites. (Makes sense.)

As a warm up for early, then sophisticated nanotechnology, the Dr. offers some really advanced dental tech like a CAD-CAM system with a fiber optic wand to quickly take 3D measurements of a tooth to be capped and a portable milling machine to make perfect caps on the spot.
On to early nano and a hand held (Tricorder like) PET scanner that not only sees in 3D, but detects abnormal bone and gum densities, all vessels, and specific sites where further tooth or jawbone loss will likely occur. Then early nanites are introduced to rebuild problem areas.

Nanotechnology will deliver the holy grail of dentistry: long-lasting, cavity-free teeth. Advanced nanotechnology will deliver another coup: arresting or neutralizing the genetics behind a degenerating, aging jawline.
We could eventually see the replacement of the entire jaw and teeth with diamondoid matrix.
But why stop there? We can expand this approach to improve or replace the bodys entire skeletal structure.

5. Early Applications

Harry Chesley is a senior software architect at Macromedia, formally with Apple Computer and SRI International.
He has designed code for 25 years. Chesley presents a nuts and bolts presentation on building nanomachines.
Scale, shape, and energy needs are included.
You can get a real physical grasp of how these hypothetical mechanical marvels come together. Like all machines, they are built from components. Each machine needs storage and computing facilities. It seems that it will be possible to build a 1,000 MIPS (million instructions per second) molecular computer that fits inside a cube 0.4 microns (millionths of a meter) on a side.
This is roughly 1,000 times the computing power of todays personal computers.

But now on to the fun stuff. In his An Opening Selection, Chesley offers a long delightful list of early applications, some of which I present for your enjoyment:

-Board games with billions of moving parts, allowing economic, logistical, and military games with incredible depth of simulation.
-Full-wall speakers for people

Many are enamored by the way the cells and bacteria of the body construct our reality. They would like to copy these processes and rename them nanotechnology. Viewing cells and proteins as nanomachines is not new. Evolution, itself, could be viewed as a way of encapsulating cooperating cells into human shaped terrariums. Crandall quotes Richard Preston on the flesh eating Ebola Zaire virus: "seven mysterious proteins that ...work as a relentless machine, a molecular shark, and they consume the body as the virus makes copies of itself."

These writers suggest ways man could profit by controlling the design of these cellular machines. Richard Crawford's contribution suggests man designed molecules could be injected into the blood steam in order to do the bidding of cosmetic surgeons. He sees big cash to be made. Edward Reifman proposes diamond teeth but would this put dentists in the unemployment line? Brian Wowk manipulates phase array optics to enable the reader to construct a STAR TREK holodeck. J. Storrs Hall envisions filling one's environment with utility fog, placing one within a kind of pixel coated TV screen where objects in your personal space can be moved as easily as pictures on that screen. Tom McKendree worries that nanosized assemblers will make goods so plentiful that nothing will be of any value. Crandall, himself, suggests that when room runs out on earth we might repackage man into geodesic spheres, floating ecospheres, in stationary orbit high above the planet. All pretty good fictional science but why not read Greg Bear where you also get the plot, characters and action.

Until the invention of antiseptic procedures in the 1930s, all surgery carried risk of infection and possible death. Bans on abortion (which were not enacted until the turn of the 20th century) were not a measure of fetal protection, but a response to the realities of Victorian double standards and antisepsis.

While legislators could have just as easily prohibited tonsilectomies, they decided to focus on a procedure exclusively related to women because conventional logic held women did not realy like sexual relations (even with their husbands)--only doing it to become mothers, and the act of procreation was what ultimately made husbands faithful.

Most educated people now also know that if a husband is truly determined to leave his family, a wife's desire for children will not produce a serious change of heart. Furthermore, the birth control methods that we take for granted were not available, and many of the foremothers of feminism mentioned in this book were also ingrained with the idea that good girls did not talk about anything sexual period.

During that time period, it was not uncommon for "well-respected" husbands to have extramartial affairs, and they unsuprisingly brought home sexually transmitted diseases. In the age of AIDS, this silence is not only impractical, but outright dangerous. Yet, according to this model, we have to return to the exact set of sexual circumstances governing early feminists. No thank you.

The advent of penicillin and antibiotics in the 1930's meant that infections could be prevented, although laws restricting LEGAL abortion still remained on the books. THe law failed to keep up with medical advances and as a result, non-connected women and their fetuses suffered at the hands of unskilled quacks who wanted to exploit the desparation of women legally prohibited from using doctors.

It is unrealistic to assume Anthony and Stanton would have opposed the relegatization of abortion in the 1960's and 1970's, just as it is to assume their actions and words in an earlier era would still have the exact same relevance today.

To use their support against racism as an analogy, although they had very enlightened attitudes for their time, Anthony and Stanton's language and acceptance of segregated facilities is unquestionably antiquated and unprogessive in today's world. However, this is the logical parallel to the anti-abortion movement's historical revisionism.

I found this book to be the missing link between the pioneering feminist advocacy of yesteryear and today's female-dominated pro-life movement. It effectively challenges the notion that feminists must, indeed CAN, defend abortion as a means of securing women's full emancipation.

The book's credibility lies in the presentation of the information. Rather than simply asserting that our feminist forebears believed such-and-such, the editors present these women in their very own words and in full context, leaving no room for speculation about exactly what they said and why.

This book ought to be required reading in every women's studies program, though the challenge it presents to neo-feminist orthodoxy is the very reason why it probably won't be.

Zymurgy: The Best Articles and Advice, is just that, a compilation of various articles from the magazine. It is a bit of a misnomer that Papazian has his name plastered all over the front because he is the compiler/editor (with the assistance of others) of this collection. He has not written much of the content at all, and only contributed 2 articles, and an introduction.

Like him or loathe him, Papazian has compiled a wide range of very good information, faithfully reprinted from various editions of Zymurgy. Each article acknowleges the author, along with the original date of publication.

If you already subcribe to Zymurgy magazine, or have been collecting the magazine for a number of years, dont bother buying this book unless you want a one stop reference to what you already have. To those outside the USA, who may not have had the opportunity of regularly receiving Zymurgy - this is a very good cross section of articles and contains a wide range of information for the home brewer.

I recommend this book as a general source of Home Brewing information.