Performance Books

This new group of Zuni stories (many never published before) is a wonderful testament to the author's ability to translate not only Maya literature (i.e. Popol Vuh & Rabinal Achi) but a North American Indian language as well. There was another prize-winning book by the same name that this author published earlier but it had many fewer stories. This is a better much better book!

This is more than just a book containing the libretti from the first Night of each of G&S's brilliant operettas. It also contains historical essays placing each of the operettas in it place in time and discusses, to the extent known the reasons for the changes. It also contains a separate box holding facsimiles of the programs from Opening Night. (An interesting bit of trivia is that the opening night program for a particular Opera does not feature characters from THAT opera, but rather from an earlier oprea. Thus, for example, the Program for Ruddigore (the Witches Curse) has a picture from Iolanthe on the front cover, and pictures from Pirates and Iolanthe on the program pages). The true value in the work is the libretti. They show the works, as performed on opening night, which allow a modern performer to see how the standard script has changed over the years.

This is the author's second book and he has grown quite a bit from the first to the second. The poems are engaging and entertaining. The intrique and make you question the things around you in this often mixed up world. Great job on the book.

First time managers usually have a lot of new things to try and learn very quickly. One of the most dreaded for most new managers is the performance appraisal. This is especially true if some of those you are evaluating were your peers before your promotion. Diane Arthur has long experience in HR and provides solid advice to the new manager. She divides the 16 short chapters into six "parts".

You get advice that the real value in a performance review is not to pass judgment on last year's work, but to use that to manage the employee to grow and become more valuable in the coming year. She provides the 3 golden rules for performance reviews (I will let you read them in the book, but they make sense), and how you prepare for the next appraisal by coaching and counseling your employees throughout the year.

Arthur then takes you through the preparatory process and how to get started on writing the review a month ahead of time so you have time to draft it, think about it, and rewrite it. That you have to gather documentary information from multiple sources to see things clearly and how to do it and why you should focus on objective measures rather than reacting subjectively to personal issues.

You are then guided through how to write the review, the tone you should use, and the dos and don'ts of performance review language. She gives you a seven step format for writing them up including letting the employee have enough room to respond to your evaluation.

The face-to-face meeting takes up four chapters because it is where the rubber meets the road. The key is to start right and create a supportive and comfortable atmosphere. The author takes you through what you should discuss to create a positive and constructive experience. You are also advised to speak no more than 25% of the time and to use active-listening (which she describes) the other 75% of the time.

Arthur covers how to handle unexpected responses and difficult employees. I also enjoyed her chapter on the typical performance appraisal pitfalls. The last section covers performance appraisals for employees of differing performance levels and how to manage those with different work arrangements such as telecommuters.

This is a useful, clearly written, and concise guide to this important topic.

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI

Finally, a book that clearly combines sound theory into a practical delineation of what it takes to produce high student performance. Marazza moves from the merits of collaboration to chaos theory in order to provide definitive guidelines for administrators, teachers, and parents that are understandable and easily put into practice.

The "Five Essentials" avoids the bandwagon approach to prescribing change. Rather, Marazza successfully teaches how benchmarking, collaborating, planning strategically, governing by standatds, and engaging the stakeholders are not only simultaneously necessary for organizational excellence: but, by their nature, must be integrated. He provides excellent illustrations and constructive exercises that facilitate implementing the "Five Essentials."

Innovation and communication drive a successful school transformation. When adults collaborate, they become invested in the success of the outcome. Marazza has truly captured the spirit of transformation needed in schools today.

This is Stengel's contribution to the flight dynamics literature with some emphasis on controls. There are things I like about this book and things I do not like about this book. First, I like his statement and treatment of the equations of motion and the engineering and physics of flight and its control. The only problem I have with those parts of the book is that the Euler angle and quaternion sections have clearly been written by someone who has never had to actually use them in a simulation etc. The equations are, however, as far as I can tell correct. But the student/engineer will have to do some digging to get what they need. Second, there is an awful lot of good information in this book and it provides pretty much an all in one reference book for flight dynamics. Most of it is very readable.
Now for the parts I don't like. First, with just a little effort this book could have covered missiles as well as airplanes ( just like Blakelock ). This is not a big sin and is very popular though. Second, Stengel's treatment of the flight coefficients in the stability frame are strange and do not seem to follow the standard conventions. They are correct but the normalized approach developed by NACA and propounded by Blakelock led directly to servomotor design. There is an additional step in Stengel's approach. Several of his frames of reference seem to suffer from similar maladies. There is nothing wrong with this of course but it may be that he was so busy trying to leave his own mark that he did in fact neglect several aviation traditions in this domain. He does mention the old DATCOM work but one can not directly use DATCOM from his book without first doing some more work. Third, many of the most advanced concepts are glossed over or just touched upon. This is being sold as a textbook but it is really more of a treatise ( a not uncommon identity crisis these days ). Neural networks, modern controller designs, and others are just pranced over. The literature is cited however and of course one can just go look it up. A little more depth in some areas would have been appreciated, however. Fourth, evidently we can't have a book on flight dynamics without singing odes to lqr and lqg. These methods are popular with the state space crowd since normally there is no clearcut relationship between eigenvalue placement and phase margin. lqr in some of its incarnations is known to have excellent phase margin properties ranging as high as infinity. This is perfect impementation of course and lqg is standing by to solve that issue. These methods have their place in the control engineers arsenal but to use lar/lqg to establish the basic flight path of the aircraft with the pilots inputs just used to make small trim changes about that direction probably violates the current trend towards 100% control authority for at least some types of aircraft and the pilot needs to retain at least enough to be able to handle problems. When these idealistic problems are solved the lqr/lqg controller methods begin to look more like current controller designs.

Anyhow, this is an excellent book that any flight controls or aviation engineer will find more than just useful. It provides a pretty complete treatment of the state variable approach and should serve as an excellent starting point for those wanting to design actual controllers for aircraft.

This book is excellent, plain and simple. As it comes from the AIAA Education Series, it lives up to their high standards for publishing material with their organization's name on it. It won't disappoint.

This book condenses many latest papers on flow instruments into useful but brief information for instrument engineers working in industry. I found it very useful for writing flow instrument procurement and design specifications. The materials described for each type of flow instrument can prepare the engineers in a short time (within 2 - 3 days) to become a knowledgeable person in the specific area including the latest development in flow measurement. A book I carried to work without showing it to my colleaques.

This book looks like it just came off the printing presses. Immaculate shape and the arrival time was weeks earlier than quoted. I would absolutely use this buyer again.

Compiled and written by David Montgomery, Franz Schubert's Music In Performance: Compositional Ideals, Notational Intent, Historical Realities, Pedagogical Foundations is a comprehensive, 319-page guide written especially to help performers better understand and bring out the minute subtleties of Franz Schubert's classical works of music. Extensive history and detail, understandings of rhythm and tempo, advanced studies and methodology and a great deal more pack the pages of this extremely technical and professional guide intended especially for skilled performers who seek to hone their expertise to new heights. Enhanced with a thorough index, Franz Schubert's Music In Performance is a core addition to any Classical Music Studies collection in general, and Franz Schubert Studies reading lists in particular.