Source The Books

The skill, writing style, depth of knowledge, able to comprehend, and pure genius of Professor McGovern is astounding. One of my favorite books.

This is the most brilliantly written book that I have read in years. The author has a clear understanding of this geopolitically vital area. In addition, he was the greatest professor Northwestern University ever had.

I used this book for restoring an Edwardian home that had been stripped of its details in the late 1950s. An invaluable resource for designing stairwell banisters, interior columns, and crown moldings, as well as a guide for antique shopping to find appropriate period light fixtures and stained glass windows. Couldn't have gotten by without this book!

This book does a wonderful job of compiling all those little details concerning Edwardian Home Styles... I tried for a long time to find a book to do research for my dollhouse, and this fit the bill perfectly. I found all sorts of interesting info, and the seller was wonderful too!

"The Edwardian Scrapbook" is simply wonderful. You can get a true sense of Britain through pages of royal souvenirs, the latest inventions for the household, food products, advertisements, sweets, toiletry items, tobacco, the Women's Social and Political Union, women's fashion, newspapers, magazines, comics, books, toys, postcards, traveling, motor cars, airplanes, table tennis, diabolo, roller skating, theatre, and international sports. The pictures are wonderful and this book goes great along with "The Victorian Scrapbook." I recommend.

This is Robert Opie's seventh unique style scrapbook. The very simple formula works yet again, this time he has collected 1300 printed items from his packaging museum all relating to everyday life in Britain from 1900 to 1910.

Like the previous books, the material is laid out as a still-life and then photographed. If you want to see what printed items Mr and Mrs Average had in their homes it is all included here, food packets, comics, newspapers, magazines, postcards, candy bars, boxes of toys and more.

If I have a criticism it is that there are eight pages that have only one item, I would have preferred maybe four of these to be crammed with items like the other pages.

Social historians and graphic designers, amongst others, will enjoy looking through this book and with the other titles in the series it is building up into a tremendous visual resource of everday British life.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

I tried the Armenian Perch and it was sensational. I am looking forward to the Sweetbreads Ragout and the Salmon Keveeched. The commentary is learned and fascinating, the recipes are logical and achievable, even for the average cook, and the book is laid out beautifully. Buy this for the cook in your house, and sit back and wait until he/she gets around to the formula for 112 gallons of strong beer. Don't know how to skin an eel? to cure ague? You're in luck. DiMarco has located three unpublished English manuscript sources with around 500 recipes, and has presented those recipes in the order they appear in the original, giving you an insight into what a cookbook was like two and a half centuries ago, but he has modernized the measurements and the processes so that they present no more problems than the average Irma Rombauer concoction, and has indexed them for convenient meal planning. Great reading and great eating.

This book is not only an exceptional work of scholarship, but also an intriguing narrative liberally sprinkled with dry humor and deliciously unusual (and unusually delicious) recipes that you CAN make at home. Bon appetit!

I should state that I had the benefit of being a student in Professor Brown's class where we utilized this book.

That being said, many of the "myths" in this book are misconceptions that perhaps most of society today falls victim to. The book presents evidence from leading scholars in the fields of energy technology, public policy and economics which shed some much needed light on these topics and shows how interwoven they really are.

If you have an interest in where this country and the rest of world is heading in terms of energy reform, and what obstacles (both technological and political) lay in their paths, then this is an excellent book for you.

This is an excellent introduction to real energy issues, written by experts, with many useful references for further study. Energy mythinformation (inadvertent or otherwise) propagates all too easily, and this book does a good job of debunking the common myths.

Anyone involved in policies regarding energy&climate change should be familiar with this material, and that includes ordinary citizens, especially those who might care about the US economy and environment seen by any grandchildren.

I'd summarize the book as saying:
a) We face serious problems, as we *will* run out cheap oil, and then cheap gas [look up "Peak Oil" in Wikipedia], and if we keep burning coal without sequestering CO2, we will push the planet into a much hotter state with serious economic downsides. Right now, the US economy depends on cheap oil, and of course, it might be better not to be selling off big chunks of the US economy to other countries to feed our oil habit forever.

b) However, we actually have pretty good solutions for many of the problems, mostly without requiring magic technology leaps. There is no one silver bullet, but a myriad of small actions to be taken to stop wasting energy, many of which actually save money right away.

c) Most of the actions required are actually policy choices, with help from widespread use of existing technologies, plus rational R&D investments. Low electicity-per-capita use in some states has been achieved with no obvious economic catastrophes. [Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, and California are not usually considered poor places.] Of course, we have much further to go, but in many cases, it really is a matter of choosing to do the right things.

The editors provide an introduction and summary bookending 13 myth discussions by (mostly) other authors. Following is a list of the 13 myths, with comments on a few of the chapters:

1. Today's Energy Crisis is "Hype"

2. The Public is Well Informed About Energy

3. High Land Requirements and an Unfavorable Energy Balance Preclude Biomass Ethanol from Playing a Large Role in Providing Energy Services
- This is an especially important chapter, as the topic engenders much confusion. Not all biofuels need be from corn, and there is more land available than many think.

4. The Hydrogen Economy is A Panacea
- Dr. Joseph Romm shows why hydrogen (especially for vehicles) is a long way off, if ever, compared to PHEV/FF (plug-in-electric-vehicles with flex-fuels). He shows why research is appropriate, but not spending huge $$ for premature deployment, especially to the detriment of truly useful steps doable much sooner.

I also his recommend Joe's website http://climateprogress.org/, and his book Hell and High Water: Global Warming--the Solution and the Politics--and What We Should Do.

5. Price Signals are Insufficient to Induce Efficient Energy Investments

6. The Barriers to New and Innovative Energy Technologies are Primarily Technical:
- The Case for Distributed Generation
- In many ways, distributed generation of electricity would be more efficient, but power companies are geared for centralized generation, even with expensive long-distance distribution.

7. Renewable Energy Systems Could Never meet Growing Electricity Demand in America

8. Worldwide Power Systems are Economically and Environmentally Optimal
- Tom Casten and Robert Ayres show how far off we are, illustrating the efficiencies gotten with waste-energy recycling / cogeneration ... that are strongly inhibited by regulatory issues and market distortions, compared with places like Denmark or The Netherlands, etc. See Casten's website: http://www.recycled-energy.com/index.html

9. Energy Efficiency Improvements have Already Reached Their Potential
- Amory Lovins shows why not, why "negawatts" are really cost-effective, and why nuclear plants don't seem very cost-effective compared to other options. I especially liked his description of his Rocky Mountain house that lacks a conventional heating system, but whose design cuts heat losses to within 1% of various free heat gains. "The last 1% can come from a 50-watt dog, adjustable to 100W by throwing a ball..."

10. Energy Efficiency Measures are Unreliable, Unpredictable, and Unenforceable

11. Energy R&D Investment Takes Decades to Reach the Market

12. Climate Policy will Bankrupt the US Economy
- California is pretty aggressive on this, because we have to be, as all the impacts of global warming will cost us money. Nevertheless, California is hardly poor, and we expect that reworking our infrastructure for energy efficiency, and heading towards minimal use of fossil fuels as early as we can, will only make us more competitive in the face of increasing oil costs.

13. Developing Countries are Not Doing Their Part in Responding to Concerns about Climate Change

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This is a very useful book. I expect to study many chapters in further depth and chase down references.

ENERGY REVOLUTION presents a sensible strategy for promoting the necessary transition to renewable energy in the U.S. I would say the title is misleading (revolution?), but even sensible reforms seem like revolutionary changes in the face of the entrenched power of the oil companies, auto industry, nuclear power lobby, and the rest of the empire of the fossil fuel status quo.

Howard Geller is an old hand and an expert in the field -- he headed the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy for two decades in Washington D.C. He has stepped out of the Beltway, and is now Director of the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project based in Boulder. With that background, you can bet he knows what we're up against.

The core of Geller's book are his presentations of Clean Energy scenarios for the U.S. and Brazil, where he studied. His U.S. scenario has 10 policies:

1) increase passenger vehicle fuel economy standards,

2) establish a national system benefits trust fund (a utility surcharge used to promote energy efficiency),

3) adopt voluntary agreements to reduce industrial energy use,

4) establish a renewable energy portfolio standard for power generators,

5) adopt new appliance efficiency standards and stronger building codes,

6) provide tax incentives for innovative renewable energy and energy-efficient technologies,

7) expand federal R&D and deployment programs,

8) remove barriers to combined heat and power systems,

9) establish renewable or carbon content standards for vehicle fuel, and

10) strengthen emissions standards on coal-fired plants.

Geller calculates that the impact of these policies would be a $600 billion cost and a $1200 billion savings, for a net savings of $600 billion compared to a baseline scenario of continued promotion of fossil fuels. He knows that this economic analysis is critical, given that the fossil fuel lobby will try to portray renewable energy as more costly. Notice that Geller avoids proposing any sort of energy or CO2 emissions tax -- such "green taxes" are already being used to great effect in Europe, but Geller is experienced and pragmatic enough to know that the U.S., the land of cheap gas, long distances and gas-guzzling SUVs, requires a different approach.

Much more could be said about this excellent book. But given the political campaign now going on, let me add a word about Democratic political strategy and vision. The current debate is over who will do a better job of keeping gas prices low. Kerry is certainly realistic in this, and I hope he wins in November -- with Bush/Cheney and the oil industry in the saddle, renewable energy is going nowhere. But keeping gas cheap is doing nothing to encourage renewable energy -- it's sending the wrong price signal. Kerry needs to go on the offensive, making the case that we've got to rapidly wean ourselves from oil for the sake of national security as well as ecological survival. His policy team should take a look at the bold program of the Apollo Project, which includes major labor unions -- a proposed all-out push for renewable energy comparable to the 1960s race to the moon. This would create jobs and revitalize the economy while making the environment cleaner and making the U.S. self-sufficient in energy. Put Bush on the defensive! Renewable energy needs to become the focus of a mass movement, starting now.

For a truly revolutionary strategy for renewable energy, see THE SOLAR ECONOMY by Herman Scheer, a member of the German parliament, the Bundestag, and a Social Democrat (SPD) -- see my review. See my OVERSHOOT AND COLLAPSE? list for more on oil and energy.

I would recommend "Energy Revolution" to anyone interested in energy policy. Howard Geller provides an inspired, yet extremely practical and down to earth vision of a path towards sustainable energy use. It is an understatement to say that most people in the energy industry assume that energy demand will continue to grow, and that the increasing supply needs should be met mainly through a mix of coal, nuclear, and natural gas. To successfully debate with the tremendous inertia of this business as usual view, it will be extremely valuable and essential to have available the depth of research and documentation that Geller provides in this book.

Of course all discussions of future energy use scenarios are debatable, but Geller provides numerous examples of policies to promote efficiency and renewables that are currently in use in various countries, as well as the successes and results they have achieved. The bottom line is that an intelligent and rational energy policy in the U.S. or any country would consider the least-cost options to meeting energy needs (including social and environmental costs as much as possible). Analyzed in this way, policies to encourage energy efficiency and renewable sources are clear winners, more often than not. As Geller clearly illustrates, the main obstacles to more sustainable energy use are not technical, but a variety of other obstacles that can be overcome through different types of policy instruments. However, there are also serious political obstacles to smarter energy policies. For example, U.S. oil and automotive companies continue to oppose and successfully block any new standards for increasing the fuel-efficiency of cars and trucks, in order to increase their own short-term profits and despite the negative impacts of wasteful U.S. oil consumption.

Even many people with only a moderate interest in energy policy would enjoy the reading at least the first and last chapters of Geller's book. Hopefully, "Energy Revolution" will become an important part of rational discussions of energy policy issues by policy- makers, researchers, progressive business leaders, students, and informed citizens for at least the next several years.

With Domination and Conquest Davies, one of the most prominent historians of the "British" middle ages, has put together a gem of a book. Davies' fundamental purpose here is to put an end to many of the misconceptions about the Anglicization of Britain and Ireland. Beginning with a discussion of the difference between domination and conquest, Davies helps us see that the military aspect of this episode in history is not as important as it often appears. From here Davies moves on to shatter the idea of a concerted and organized Anglo-Norman endeavor to conquer and dominate the Isles, and the myth of organized resistances in Wales and Ireland. In the end, Davies leaves us with a profoundly different understanding of Anglo-Norman expansion in the British Isles. In addition to being illuminating, Domination and Conquest is wonderfully written and a joy to read.

I should start with a disclaimer - Rees Davies was my doctoral supervisor at Oxford. That said, this is a short, well-written exposition of the trend in recent British medieval historiography, advanced by Davies and Robin Frame, in which the boundaries of "national" history are broken down. Davies examines the ideological underpinnings, going back to the Anglo-Saxons, for the overlordship of the British Isles and Ireland by the kings of England. He then proceeds to examine Anglo-Norman expansion and infiltration in Wales, Ireland and Scotland in all its myriad aspects. Military conquest was only one tool available, and was accompanied by economic exploitation (and blandishments), the imposition or denial of English law, and English domination of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in Wales and Ireland. With an eye for the telling anecdote, Davies shows how the Anglo-Normans were flexible, adapting from local societies what suited their purposes and exploiting political divisions and rivalries for their own ends. Davies is a good writer as well as one of the most prominent medieval historians in the U.K., and this book should prove accessible for the lay reader interested in what the author has called the "first English empire".

The book describes various types of entertainment in colonial America: The Native American game of lacrosse, fox hunting, children's games, music, theater, quilting bees, and festivals. The beautiful period artwork illustrates the information. The teacher may want students to compare this book to another book read in class, such as Thomas's Fun and games in colonial America. Students may try making items for entertainment and trying out some games.

When the English colonists came to the New World, they brought their religion, their government, and their culture -- which most definitely included all kinds of games and entertainments. Many games and sports allowed the participants to practice necessary skills for life, such as horse riding and racing and fishing. For children, the games that they played would look familiar to Americans today. Leapfrog, hopscotch, flying kites and card games were all played back then.

Of course, if you wanted to hear music, you probably should be able to play it, yourself! Fiddles, banjos and flutes were all popular. Just like today, colonists loved plays, and sometimes put them on in their own home for fun with family and friends. In 1717, the first real theater in America opened in Williamsburg, Virginia!

Because life was so hard in colonial times, work dominated your time. So large tasks were frequently shared as a social event, such as a quilting bee. Festivals were usually linked to events like religious days, marking the passage of the year, or observing particular events.

Book shops began to flourish, selling volumes of poems, stories, plays and often ideas that led to the American Revolution.

Recommended for young readers, who might be surprised to realize that people of the past were as interested in having fun as we are today! This book is an excellent addition to any student's exploration of colonial history.

Open Source Flash Development is an excellent book for Flash developers that want to enhance their data-driven Flash applications. It covers the most essential about the so presently so used swfObject, AMFPHP, SWXPHP, Papervision3D, RED5 and many more! This book was indeed a must for me, therefore I strongly recommend it.
Carlos Amaral (Lusoned Interactieve Media, The Netherlands)

I saw one copy of this at Powell's Technical Books in Portland yesterday, and picked it up, figuring it was new. It was--just published in the last few weeks. I haven't delved into it as much I would like, but that doesn't matter here because I carefully reviewed the contents before purchase.

So: why buy this book? If you're working with Flash and ActionScript 3.0 currently, you know the Flash world is a moving target that changes very rapidly, and the main reason for this is the addition of open-source tools and "classes." This book gives us a needed status-check on what's currently available, how to get it and how to use it.

In my case, I was mostly interested in Papervision3D, the Google add-on that has rapidly gone from cute curiosity to must-have in every Flash developer's bag of tricks. However, you don't really need this book for Papervision3D--there's plenty of documentation available online.

Likewise, if all you really want to know is how to implement SWFObject (a popular add-in that lets you update a Flash element by updating your html or external text file), or how to make Flex work with XML, you may not need or want this book.

But if you like to read about some fun new stuff that's available and that you might like to explore--all of kinds of mashups, FUSE, HAXE, Red5 video--then grab this book right away. It's readable, fresh, and informative--like most Friends of ED books. Also like most other Friends of ED books, it will rapidly go out of date as the moving target moves on!

What can somebody who is a science of consicousness freak say about a 1000 pages book about the psychological, cognitive, theorethical, neurological, and historical bases of consciousness? ......well, maybe "finally". This is THE definitive collection of papers on the science of consicousness, something that could only be said before about all three volumes of Towards a Science of Consicousness, edited by Hameroff.

Everything one needs to know to START an inquiry into this interesting field is here. Represented are those papers that started the whole cognitive revolution, all the way to the most recent theoretical investigations on consicousness. The only thing one who is familiar with the literature can disagree with is witht he inclusion and omission of certain key papers, but I am sure the editors had their hands full in making the books size acceptable and at the same time representative of the field. That said, it is impossible to ignore that Baars seems to have chosen some contributions on the basis of how much they are supportive of his global workspace model. I doubt this was made on purpose, however. Another objection could come from the absence of a neurochemistry of consicousness chapter, or a consicousness in quantum physics chapter. The former seems to me impardonable to have been left out, and the latter probably should have been there simply because of the popular attention paid to it, if not because of its shaky scientific foundations.

It is a custom of mine to declare a book on consicousness a must-have, but this one has the most merits to deserve such title. No one who has pronounced the word consicousness in a scientific context can do without this volume...it could also work quite well as a textbook for graduate level consicousness courses. One only hopes that many more editions are published, and that it can be someday extended to various volumes.

If thought about in retrospect, it is perhaps flabbergasting that the study of consciousness was not considered, and could not be considered, part of science. The impact of the behavioral school of psychology was no doubt both a symptom and a cause of this exclusion. The reasons though for excluding the study of consciousness from science are now properly given to historians, for, as this book is an indication of, extensive scientific research is now being done in this area, and this research is a fascinating story. Once thought to be the domain of mysticism and philosophy, research into consciousness has, finally, entered the domain of the laboratory. The arm-chair speculations of Edmund Husserll are now replaced by the fMRI scan and careful observations. In the words of Francis Crick and Christof Koch, who have written an article for this book, "the time to start the scientific attack is now."

The book is a collection of articles written by active researchers in the field. The preface and the introductory article are excellent and not only introduce the reasons for the book but also put the articles in historical perspective. The author addresses the skepticism of some scientists on whether there is any evidence of conscious experience as such. The articles in the book were selected according to their approach as treating "consciousness as a variable", similar to any other topic of scientific inquiry. He is aware of the problems associated with such a view though, since consciousness, he says, cannot be varied "from the inside". Decreasing it will cause us to lose the ability to observe anything, and the consciousness of others is not accessible directly. The author stresses though that contrary to the assertions of some philosophers, consciousness is not beyond scientific study. We need not depend on "plausible intuitions, thought experiments, or rhetorical brilliance", but can instead rely on experiments and testable hypotheses. He calls this a "verifiable phenomenology" in contrast with the philosophical movement of the last century.

The article by George Mandler also expresses this attitude, asserting that the study of consciousness has been plagued with "philosophical, theological, and pedestrian semantic debris". For Mandler, the "mind" refers to the "totality of theoretical processes ascribed to the individual", and this viewpoint, he believes, will avoid the collapse into solipsism and sophistry that so often accompanies the philosophical view of the mind. Mandler gives an excellent overview of some of the approaches taken in the scientific study of consciousness. He also outlines his personal views on the subject, asserting that for him, consciousness is tied to a system of limited capacity, this limitation referring to the number of "functional units" that can be kept in consciousness at a particular point in time. Mandler does believe though that psychologists and philosophers are correct in their assertion that the content of consciousness is not directly available, and so other strategies must be invented to deal with this content. Most interesting though is that the author does not view consciousness as primary, but instead views it merely as one particular mode of processing. Conscious processing of information cannot therefore be said to have more status than processing that does not.

There are many interesting articles in this book, and space constraints do not permit a detailed review here. Some of articles that this reviewer found interesting or exceptionally well written are: 1. "Consciousness and Isomorphism" by Stephen E. Palmer, which addresses the "inverted spectrum argument". This has been a source of philosophical argumentation ever since John Locke first proposed it in 1690, and asks for a demonstration that the visual experience of colors between two individuals are the same, or whether they are spectrally inverted. The author discusses his reasons for rejecting Locke's assertion that there is no way to tell whether the spectrums are indeed inverted without the two persons "getting into each others heads." 2. "Strategies and Models of Selective Attention" by Anne M. Treisman. The author outlines her strategies for classifying attention tasks and experimental procedures to study them. She restricts herself to tasks that require immediate perception and response, wherein the experimental subjects are subjected to information overload. Her goal is to find out to what extent the mechanisms of selective attention can be encapsulated into a single mechanism. 3. "Aspects of the Theory of Comprehension, Memory, and Attention" by Donald G. MacKay, which attempts to provide evidence for a "modern" version of Wundt's theory, the latter of which asserted that the processing of sentences takes place at two distinct levels, one involving preattentive processes and the other attentive ones. The "modern" version asserts that the perceptual mechanism consists of two distinct and interrelated levels of components, with the first involving limited capacity short-term memory, and the second a large long-term memory. 4. The article "Conscioussness and Complexity" by Giulio Tononi and Gerald M. Edelman. This article, like all the rest in the last part of the book, called "Theory" is fascinating, again because of its attempt to respect the role of experiments. The authors attempt to identify the types of neural processes that account for the key properties of conscious experience, emphasizing that conscious experience is integrated but simultaneously also highly differentiated in that one can experience a large number of different conscious states within a short time. The authors discuss tools for measuring integration, which they call `functional clustering' and for measuring differentiation, which they call `neural complexity'. Then they give criteria for determining whether in fact a group of active neurons can contribute to conscious experience. These criteria are encapsulated into the `dynamic core hypothesis', which they claim is a testable hypothesis on neural contributions to conscious experience. Recent experimental findings are discussed that, in the author's view, show that this hypothesis is viable. These measurements of neural activity shed light on what kind of neural circuits are needed to perform different types of tasks, these tasks sometimes needing conscious control, and sometimes not.