Departments Books

If your having trouble finding which business school to attend this can greatly help you. Very detailed and ranks schools within given regions.

This was the first book we purchased on the subject, but is was similar to the top 300 undergraduate schools books - Princeton Review, etc.

This was very helpful in narrowing the field of possible schools and informative on the types of students.

The average graduate's salary was also very helpful.

This is a great resource for the money. I found the reviews of the business schools to be very helpful, and when compared to my other research on the subject to be right on point.

This book gives some information that can be helpful
1. A whole lot of stats (Academic rating, GPA ave, GMAT ave, # of students, student faculty ratio, joint degress, financial facts, and a lot more!)
2. A short description/info on academics, career and placement, student life environment, admissions, + more of every school.

Why I don't like it:
1. Most are just US schools. I expected more schools from Europe, Asia, Australia.. There are still a number of non-US schools. But I bought this book to have an idea of how other schools outside US are.

2. They are all MBA programs. I chose this book among others because it said "Best 282 Business Schools," not "Best 282 MBA programs." I intentionally excluded books with "MBA" on their title from my shopping list. There are a lot more programs than the MBA(Ms Finance, Ms Marketing, Ms International Business etcetc.) Business schools are not just about MBA programs. I was expecting see more of them from the book. The only non-MBA programs that they list are the joint-degrees available per school. If you're looking for an MBA program, this won't be a problem.

3. Academic rankings are........ absurd. I couldn't believe they gave University of Chicago just 78 points in academic ranking. Businessweek ranked that school #1, ahead of Harvard/Wharton/Stanford. They could have at least given Chicago an 85.

One final note, if you plan to use this book to gather research information for your essays in top 30 schools, this won't be enough. You'll still need to interview/talk to the adcom, teachers, students or alumnus/alumna.

This is an up to date and good textbook on IT auditing. It begins with an overview of IT audit, legal and ethical issues, risks and controls and ends with a chapter on fraud and forensic accounting. What makes this book especially suited for classroom or self-study is the inclusion of discussion questions, exercises, notes and recommended reading lists at the end of every chapter.

The authors cover a wide field but on the same time manage to touch upon all important topics. COBIT, ISACA standards and guidelines are heavily used and referenced throughout the book, providing a good link between study and practice and perhaps making the book one of the preparation resources for the Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) examination. The book also includes a CD with ACL software and a sample auditing engagement, which may be useful in some cases, although it does cover only a fraction of knowledge presented in the book.

Overall, this book indeed teaches the core concepts of IT/IS auditing. This book exists in two identical versions: one is for the North American market, another is for all other countries, although the coverage is mostly limited to US and Canadian regulations and practices.

Affordable book compared to other IT books, it is well written that provides a comprehensive framework for IT auditing. I especially liked the many Figures/Exhibits that listed Key Risks for the many subjects covered. Working in the SOX compliance area, these risks were a useful summary/checklist to understand what risks should be assessed and managed for SOX compliance. It would not be a detailed book for implementation for an CIO and staff to follow, but for an audit assessment of an IT department, I found useful.

Also, solid instructional material on use of ACL, and of course, the software itself.

Although this is a college-level text, it can be effectively used by newly minted IT auditors to quickly learn the key knowledge and skill factors needed to function within their roles.

I like and highly recommend this book because of the emphasis on CObIT (Control Objectives for IT), which is the basis for auditing per the IT Governance Institute, which is, in turn under the aegis of Information Systems Audit and Control Association.

As stated by a previous reviewer, this book is wide in scope. The first three chapters cover the basics in clear prose and sufficient detail to give both students and on-the-job new practitioners all of the information needed to orient themselves in the role of an IT auditor. The emphasis on risk management in different domains is another strong point. The chapters covering risks associated with network and telecommunications, e-business systems, and system deployments are both technically accurate and portray realistic scenarios. Chapters 9 (Conducting the IT Audit), and 10 (Fraud and Forensic Auditing) round out the topic areas, leaving no gaps in the knowledge required to be an IT auditor.

The accompanying CD ROM has a software application to be used in conjunction with Appendix B case study. I did not work the case study, nor did I thoroughly exercise the application, so will refrain from making judgments about the usability or value of the application. The case study, though, was well put together and realistic, making it an ideal adjunct for class exercises, as well as working practicing auditors through real world scenarios.

For those new to IT Auditing in general and CObIT in particular I recommend visiting the following two sites: IT Governance Institute, ASIN B0001F8V14, and Information Systems Audit and Control Association, ASIN B00006BW74. You can paste the ASIN numbers in the Search box, select All Products and click the GO button to reach these sites. Once there you can explore additional material that will augment this book, as well as copies of CObIT, and an 84-page document titled 'IT Control Objectives for Sarbanes-Oxley', which is one of the hottest contemporary topics in IT auditing.

As an example, in the chapter on IT Risks and Controls, the only discussion of data integrity is buried in a few lines in a section entitled Security Risk. The examples in the book are mainly about Security issues. Take the subject of data integrity on file transfers. I believe the only mention of the subject outside of Security concerns is a Figure on the OSI Model (Transport layer alone won't detect if a mixture of old and new files are erroneously transfered to downstreams). There is no mention of detection/recovery of skipping/double-posting transactions, error thresholds, data base consistency on no-posts, restart/retry logic, checking for count and amount mismatches, balancing using checkpoints, etc. An auditor I believe should be aware of these types of issues concerning data integrity even in a core concept book.

Curious George always get in trouble. This time he gets in trouble in the fire station. I think Personally that this book is a good book, for little kids like me so, I that is why I rated this book a 3.

Like all Curious George books, George is in over his head when he causes a false alarm at the fire station. But he comes to the rescue and saves a curious puppy. He is awarded with an offical fire station hat.

I think this is a good book for kids. It has fire truck and puppy's. Think back to when you were a little kid, if you didn't want to be a fireman your best friend did.

Curious George and the Man with the yellow hat visit the fire station. Just like a child, George tours the fire station and gets his hands on just about anything. As usual, George finds himself getting into a spot of trouble. All ends well as George saves the day.

Our fire department uses this book in our kindergarten reading program where firefighters go to school and read to the children. Its a favorite of ours and the children.

This book is " adapted from the Curious George film series". The illustrations are different from the original, and even from the "Illustrated in the style of H.A. REY" both of which I feel are much better.

More of CG's adventures. My nearly 2-year old likes the book because of the puppies, fire engines, the pole etc, but he doesn't linger on the pages like the original books, looking at the details of the illustrations.

It doesn't start with the normal, " This is George. George is a good little monkey...".

I only remember the original books, didn't know about the tapes and film series, so I was disappointed. I would build my collection of CG without this book, until I had all the original and book first ( "Illustrated in the style of HA Rey") versions.

This novel is one of the most unique and easy to read novels I have ever read. It kept my attention from start to finish. When it came to crime, murder and sex, it held NOTHING back. It was very, very descriptive to say the least!!! I highly recommend this novel because it is unique, easy to read, and holds NOTHING back!!!!!!!!

This is the first novel I have ever read about a crooked Health Inspections Department. It is well written and very easy to read. If you are into crime, murder, and sex, this is the novel for you!!!! It leaves NOTHING to the imagination..... I HIGHLY recommend this novel!!!!

If you are into crime, morbid murder, and kinky sex, THIS IS THE NOVEL FOR YOU!!!! IT TELLS IT ALL!!!! NOTHING IS SPARED IN THIS CREATIVE WRITING!!!! It is well written and several segments of the novel sent chills up my spine!!! I HIGHLY recommend it for those who are into the Genre of Crime!!!!

Awkward storyline and bad grammar make this novel seem very much as if it was written by a 9th grader. Nothing very interesting here. How do these things get on Amazon??

So many people have such wonderful memories of this great store and of this great family. Others have not so fond memories. Either way, people who knew of the famous Canadian Retail Giant, no matter how they remember Eaton's will likely find something of interest in this book.
The Eaton's: The Rise and Fall of Canada's Royal Family chronicles the story of Eaton's from successful beginning, to tragic end, focusing mainly on what the private, and yet public family was like.
To Americans, this book will really give a story of Canada's own enormously wealthy family, and how they lived. We aren't just a country full of beavers and "EH"'s.
If you know nothing about this amazing store and family, or you know much, but want to learn more, this Great Book is definetely a must have.

When I was very young I was with my mother and sister visiting relatives in a big city. One day I found myself sitting in a restaurant next to a young man, Nicolas, whose wealthy father, a friend of the family, had invited us to tea. The young man made no secret of his boredom, yawning widely and frequently. Searching for a topic that might lift his ennui, I asked him: "Do you drive a car?" He smirked and, holding up a couple of fingers, said: "No, I drive TWO cars."

That is the type of hubris Rod McQueen depicts in his book about the rise and fall of Eaton's, Canada's famous chain of department stores. The four brothers who ultimately presided over the store's demise were cut from the same cloth as that long-ago Nicolas.

McQueen's book excels at guiding the reader through the financial sleights of hand performed by the various companies owned by the Eatons while the store itself marched toward its relentless demise. The author does not draw an appealing portrait of the Eatons, and most people would not dispute this depiction. However, his contempt is so blatant it detracts from what should be a more balanced account. He chides Eaton's for being slow to hire French-speaking staff in Quebec, but I lived in Montreal during the 'sixties and I recall that their catalogue order takers spoke English with a thick francophone accent. McQueen correctly shows the family coping with financial woes through excessive staff cutbacks starting in the 'seventies, but he fails to mention that this was a national phenomenon of the day, and applied to The Bay and other large stores as well. Thus began the rise of the small boutique.

Finally, McQueen's thesis about the difficulties of retailing in Canada and of Eaton's in particular is often indisputable. Yet some unflattering latter day comparisons do not seem quite fair. He contrasts a failing Canadian mall in the small free-standing city of Sarnia, Ontario with a thriving one in Troy, Michigan. Troy, although smaller, is close to the large population of metropolitan Detroit. Also, McQueen does not address all the issues. Malls fail everywhere, and not just in Canada. Many American malls near the border depend on Canadian shoppers and they fell on hard times when Canada's dollar did.

The book is, however, well worth the read, especially as it tells the fascinating tale of the beginning of the business in Toronto that was launched by Timothy Eaton in 1869. Parts of the history could do with more fleshing out, yet despite his bias, McQueen does make his case about what happens when a store's owners stop minding the store.

To read the story of Eaton's is to read the history of Canada and Toronto in particular. What starts off as a well-researched and interesting story is increasingly hurt by the authors' obvious dislike of the family. (Whom he admits in the prologue did not want the book written) Still the book was interesting and filled with titbits that Canadians in particular will enjoy learning. The authors' synopsis that Eaton's failed because the family never took to the time to really understand retail could also have been applied to his own attempt to chronicle a business he never seems to have a grasp on.

A few years ago, the wonderful British comedy `Are You Being Served' on Public Television portrayed a delightful group of store clerks and supervisors in a parody -- some might say a documentary -- of a traditional London department store.

At `Grace Brothers' the counter clerks were superb, the floor walker was properly pompous but utterly decent, the supervisors clueless and the store owners were totally befuddled but always wonderful. It was fiction, it was funny. Had been set in Canada, it would have been `The Eaton's.'

Instead, this superb book is available. It bears out Marx's observation that all history appears twice, "the first time as tragedy, the second as farce." McQueen has written the tragedy, hopefully some clever Canadian comedian is now writing the comedy.

So, what does a Canadian book about an unknown department store offer American readers? It's the painful story of how a family can totally ruin a revered national institution through their own hubris, arrogance, indifference and plain ignorance. I've seen it happen in some businesses within two generations; the Eaton family was more typical in that it took four generations.

The lesson is that times change. In 1870, when Eaton's was just starting, store goods were sometimes expensive, shoddy and unsuitable and unreliable. Timothy Eaton realized the most important guarantee for a customer was five words, "Goods satisfactory or money refunded." Today, most consumer goods have consistent quality, guarantees are almost automatic and customers look for something different -- price.

It's why Wal-Mart succeeds; its stores are big charmless boxes with indifferent clerks and mass anonymity. But the attraction is a reputation for low prices. It's why Amazon dot com succeeds; the Internet makes it possible to combine low prices with superb service. The four Eaton brothers who ran the chain -- which once had almost 60 percent of Canada's department store sales -- were oblivious to change. They committed the worst sin in business, instead of adapting "they did as Daddy did." The title for the musical comedy of this story will be "How to Go Bankrupt Without Really Trying."

Sure, other stores collapse. Where's Woolworth's these days? Look at Sears. Add up the J.C. Penney balance sheet. In Arizona, the Goldwater stores that funded the political career of Barry Goldwater vanished. This book details, sometimes with agonizing reality, why even a national institution can be reduced to irrelevancy.

One example may suffice. Some years ago, Eaton's stocked a particular item that invariably sold out within days. To solve the problem, the item was dropped because they couldn't keep it on the shelves. Wal-Mart would have ordered more and put it on sale to attract customers; Eaton's was embarrassed by empty shelves. Add up thousands of such petty mistakes by owners who ran Eaton's on the basis of offering customers what they should have instead of what they wanted, and you have the recipe for disaster. McQueen is unsparing in this portrait of self-indulgent arrogance.

Anyone who deals with customers will benefit if they read it on the basis, "Do we do that?" I've seen the Eaton attitude in a dozen or more family businesses, run by owners who have the emphasize "We've got the money to pay the bills" instead of responding to customers' wants. When anything replaces customer satisfaction, the business is headed for decline.

Eaton's did it, going from the most revered department store in Canada to bankruptcy within a generation. Anyone can do it if they follow Eaton's formula of elitist indifference to customers -- it's not patented. Many people will do it, even without reading this book. Some who want to avoid it will read this book. An old saying nicely expresses its value, "A smart person learns from his mistakes, a wise person learns from the mistakes of others."

I can't come up with the words to describe how bad this book is. It's completely full of typos, spelling errors and duplicate facts/phrases (on the same page even). Worst of all there are many errors in the answer sheets and practice tests so you never really know if you've studied the correct facts. I cannot imagine that anyone proofread this book before going to press.

Skip this one, it's seriously not worth the time to pick it up and there are better study guides out there.

I bought the book for my son to study. He is preparing for many firefighter exams at different stations.

I purchased this for my son to use to study for the exam. He said it was helpful to him and he passed the exam. I did not read it myself, so I can't offer any further info.

This book contained all of the different types of information and questions I needed to study in order to do well on my fire exam. In fact, the questions in the book were generally more difficult than those found on the fire exam itself and the book contained reams of information which, while dull to read, came in very handy in some of the oral components of the exam. I showed the book to an experienced Firefighter and he recognized many of the questions in it right away.

It is also a more proven sleep aid than Ambien can ever claim to be...

A newer creepier verison of A Chrismas Carol. Kenny as Scrooge. And a biker,a ghost(the one on the cover), and something else as the three ghosts. Ending leaves you kinda hanging. But It's an okay book. If you like R.l.Stine, then read this book.

I recently was in the cast of A Christmas Carol and as opening night and the holidays rolled around I was looking for an appropriate gift for the kids in the show. I got this book for each and the reviews were terrific! Each one told me how much he/she loved it. It kept them all busy for several days during their off-stage time, both reading and discussing with eachother. It was a fun comparison to the Dickens which they now knew so well. I say get both and start your own Oprah style book discussions with the "juniors" in your house.

I think this book is preety good. Every chapter ending and paragraph ending were cliffhangers. But some parts were BOR-ING. Overall, I give this book ****.

Kenny Frobisher is the meanest bully in Shadyside Middle School. One day he was stranded at Dalby's Department Store. This is the funniest part, he keeps on shouting and shouting. When Kenny gets out,the store is locked. Now Kenny is alone, until three frightening ghosts[scariest ghosts in FEAR STREET] comes and will wish him a SCARY CHRISTMAS.

As others have noted, Hilary Spurling really hits you over the head with the unsavory reputation of her subject, Sonia Brownell, "The Girl from the Fiction Department." While seemingly a friend's generous attempt at salvaging what she could, it seems to me that she might have downpedaled how awful most readers think Sonia is. At least then she wouldn't come off as sounding so defensive.

When all is said and done, it sounds as though Sonia did a heroic job protecting the estate of George Orwell, but it might well have done just fine without her. She never quite lived down her status as the woman who married Orwell in extremis, and she never will, not as far as I can see. My hat is off to Hilary Spurling insofar as her loyalty to pal Sonia, but I think she went about it the right way, and after a while, you get tired of hearing about Sonia's beauty and distress and boyfriend after boyfriend, for a short book it has many longueurs. There are tidbits about the famous (Marguerite Duras, Lucien Freud, etc) and these perk up a sad story. But the reader longs for the unadulterated vemon of something like David Plante's memoir of the difficult women in his life. If you want to read a good book by Spurling, about another of her neurotic friends, read IVY instead.

Born Sonia Brownell in 1918, the subject of this book is believed to be the inspiration for a character in George's Orwell's book, 1984. Apparently, she has been a figure of controversy since her death in 1980. Her curious life decisions - including her marriages to a dying Orwell in 1949 and later to an openly homosexual man, and her lawsuit against George Orwell Productions - have sparked charges that the literary editor was a gold-digger.

Spurling combs through Sonia's papers at the George Orwell Archives as well as unpublished letters and other sources to disprove this well-established notion of her subject. In spite of her obvious bias, the author succeeds in creating a fair portrait of the former Mrs. Orwell, one that doesn't hide her subject's flaws but puts them in context of a long, at times trying, life lived.

The opening pages reveal an early source of Sonia's pain: she lost her father at a very young age. While living in colonial India, her father died under mysterious circumstances - some now believe the death was a suicide. Later, her stepfather turned to drink and nearly died of emphysema. These early hardships, coupled with stiff social competition at a traditional and elite Catholic school, give us insight into her scorn for religion, her tendency to seek philosophically absolute positions and into some of her guilt later in life.

The second chapter chronicles Sonia's early life and times with literary and artistic circles, namely her involvement with the Euston School of painting. She became a frequent subject for the artists in her neighborhood. Because of her seemingly cocksure personality and her unwillingness to pose in the nude she became known as "the Euston Road Venus". A long series of affairs with lovers and her somewhat clandestine trips abroad with multiple men are enticing parts to her story and give the impression of a fiercely independent, if susceptible, woman.

Because I know little of art and literature from this time period the material is less accessible to me but the book is well-written to the degree that one need not be all too well versed in this work to appreciate the story. It certainly doesn't hurt that the subject of the book is a truly fascinating, eccentric person. Nearly anyone interested in 20th century British art or literature, as well as the lives of modern literary figures, will find this short biography a satisfying read.

"The Girl from the Fiction Department" is a slim but effective biography of the woman who seemed to be at the epicenter of 1940s literary London.

While Sonia Brownell never wrote any books herself (and is primarily known for having married "1984" author George Orwell on his deathbed), her life does have a certain fascination, and author Hilary Spurling (the biographer of the criminally underrated novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett) does as much as she can to indicate that, had Brownell not had the misfortune to have been born a) a woman and b) a Roman Catholic, she might have amounted to something in the literary world. In other words, this book belongs to the "Minor Characters" school of literary history (pioneered by Joyce Johnson, the one-time girlfriend of Jack Kerouac): instead of writing about the men who write, write about the women who hang around the men who write, because even though they never wrote anything worth reading, they nevertheless slept with people who did, and that makes them interesting in their own right -- right?

I've never been too sure about this thesis, but the fact is that Sonia Orwell was a pretty interesting person in her own right, and her life makes for absorbing reading, even if only on a gossip level.

Brownell worked at Cyril Connolly's "Horizon," the great British literary magazine of the 1940s, and either knew, befriended or had intimate relations with many of the great writers and artists of the period, many of whom she inspired. From Francis Bacon, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Lucian Freud to Michel Leiris (whose works, hitherto unknown to me, I am now decidedly curious about), it seemed that Brownell knew or slept with just about everyone worth knowing or sleeping with during that time frame, and Spurling makes a convincing case that it was Brownell, and not the sybaritically indolent Connolly, who really kept "Horizon" going during its glory days of World War II, when it really seemed to many literate observers as if the magazine was the only thing keeping the torch of culture lit during Europe's painfully protracted Gotterdammerung.

Among the many authors intrigued by Brownell was George Orwell, already suffering from the tuberculosis that would kill him, and he immortalized Brownell by using her as the model for Julia, the heroine of his last novel "1984." He also fell in love with her, and clutching at the straws of romantic love (never overly reliable at the best of times), he persuaded her to marry him in the delusional hope that it would keep him alive: it didn't. And while this transformed Brownell into (as many people maliciously called her) The Widow Orwell, it also gave her the responsibility of looking after his estate, editing his works for posthumous publication and generally complying with his wishes (among them the wish that no biography be written), which Spurling believes she did far more conscientiously than her abundant detractors have been willing to admit.

In most of the Orwell biographies you read, Sonia Brownell Orwell doesn't come off very well, usually being portrayed as a golddigging slut, and Spurling's portrait is a praiseworthy attempt to redress the balance. She even advances the claim that looking after Orwell's interest in the long run not only made Brownell miserable but eventually killed her. I'm not so sure about that, but I will admit that Spurling makes Brownell seem like the thoroughly fascinating person she must have been in life, and this slim volume is definitely worth reading to find out not only who she was, but why she's worth remembering.

This book was terrific! A glimpse into a very fascinating period, in world events, art and literature through the life of someone at the epicenter. Ms.Orwell went through many different "periods" over her lifetime: this is a really long view of life and I found it both fascinating and reassuring.
I am a painter who is extremely interested in the Euston Road school, and I was absolutely riveted by this new perspective on them all, from the point of view of Ms. Orwell's involvement with them, both as friend and art critic. Something I had only very vaguely remembered mentioned in the (very male-oriented) literature on that school. In fact, I casually picked up this book, somewhat interested in the cover photograph, leafed through it and saw the illustrations by William Coldstream, and then had to read it.
This book is written by someone partisan to Ms.Orwell, in part to correct what she believes is a misrepresentation of Ms.Orwell in the past. I had no idea at all that Ms. Orwell was held in disfavor by many previous Orwellian biographers, but it didn't matter to my enjoyment of the book. There is something very satisfying in the way Ms Spurling "makes her case": it is very convincing and makes you wonder how many other people looked down upon in the annals of history could have used an erudite and talented friend to come to their defense.

I bought this book for a friend of mine as a congratulations gift on her acceptance to the Harvard Business School class of 2005. Knowing I'm a voracious reader, she asked me to preview it for her. I have to admit I was a bit disappointed.

To be sure, Mr. Callahan has a difficult task - to shape several hundred biographies into a coherent work in 320 pages. It is difficult enough to write one compelling biography! Unfortunately, Mr. Callahan was not able to pull out enough personalities, interesting trivia, or intersecting events to weave an interesting tapestry, instead writing about those experiences virtually everyone has shared -- drinking and reminiscing at old reunions, talking about how we went our own way and returned older and wiser, and in this case, how the collected group rose the corporate ladder. The book lacks the space to give more than a cursory examination to any single business leader, and it does not bother to illuminate us at to what experiences at Harvard tied directly to the success of the class, or exactly what common values they shared (other than some trite yet vigorous finger shaking at the fact that nearly the entire class participated in WWII). However, there are some eye-rolling and oft-repeated lines about how some members of the class suffered the hardship of working their way through their undergraduate years, as if tens of thousands of college students don't do that today (in fact Mr. Callahan alludes that they do not.) As a result, the book reads more like a long resuscitation of facts than as a compelling narrative.

The quotes on the jacket cover promised, "A time when values had meaning, with lessons we can learn", and included the engaging hook "They stormed the beaches of Normandy and the islands of the South Pacific, but the exceptional generation of Americans that won World War II also produced the greatest group of business leaders of the post-war era", but Callahan seems to give up his thesis of common experiences forging common values from the first pages, revealing that several graduates of the esteemed class of '49 have been investigated variously for insider trading by the SEC, by the Justice Department for bribery, or by the FBI for mafia connections. In fact, several of the alums he writes extensively about have extremely questionable business backgrounds. Additionally, it would be hard to differentiate between today's top business school graduates and those of the middle-last century, who went to find job stability and make money, "although millions, not billions as some leaders today." To paraphrase Mr. Dickens, in short, the period was so like the present period, that one of its nosiest authorities insists on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

This isn't to say that there isn't a fascinating story to tell in the graduates of Harvard Business School, or the class of '49. In my opinion, it just hasn't been told here.

At this point I'll share that this is a qualified review -- I stopped reading about halfway into the book, which is rare for me. It is entirely possible that Mr. Callahan successfully ties the book together and presents its lessons in the final pages. I'll never know. I've since moved on to purchase "Pinstipes and Pearls: The Women of the Harvard Law Class of '64..." which thus far is much more personal and compelling.

There are a lot of things to like about Kindred Spirits. Its written with a solid pace, with a fair eye to both the achievments and limitations of a notable group, and with care not to overreach its modest ambitions. At the same time, I found this book somewhat dissapointing.

The deepest dissapointment comes from incongruity of the book's central thesis and the data it presents. The back cover carries the blurb "It was a time when value had meaning, with lessons we can learn from." In it, though, I found an account of a group no more or less scrupulous than those I've worked with over the last 10 years - in Business School and in industry. The subjects of this book donate to charity and don't seem to drive exotic sports cars, but they do bribe officials, fake the numbers, and repress unions. Its not that they're a bad bunch; the men portrayed here work incredibly hard and seem genuinely insightful about business, but they're not substantially ethically different from MBAs today. I had trouble identifying where the bygone values were - criticizing the tech bubble? questioning the wisdom of 80s LBOs? - its pretty easy to make those calls in hindsight.

The other dissapointment for me was the story not told. In the book there is a subset of the class - the most dynamic, smartest, most successful - called "The Group". There's a handful of them, 8 or so, and every year they make a ski trip with all their families. They stick together in an usually tight, powerful network. I would love to hear more about what personal and professional bonds keep that kind of association intact for better than 50 years. What's missing here is the personal dimension behind that concentration of power. An in-depth look into that could be a book on its own.

Other complaints ran a bit less deep, but were nevertheless distracting. Worst among these was pretty shoddy editing - there were several pieces of narrative that were repeated verbatim in different parts of the book. Initially, I thought I'd lost my place and was re-reading an earlier chapter.

All that said, these are inspiring people, particularly in their courage and their confidence, and the lead interesting lives. Callahan succeeds most when he lets them speak in their own words. I was not at all sorry to have read this, but wish more of the potential depth could have been realized.

The example of the Harvard 49ers is inspirational, and their adventures in business make for an exciting story.

As I read this book I became aware of just how much times have changed since 1949. Nowadays no Harvard Business School MBA student learns this style of business. Now they teach students how to line their own pockets while dismantling successful American businesses and putting all the employees out on the street. They also teach that this is simply good business.

While it does have some helpful ideas, most citations are four to twenty years old (with more of the latter). As a result, some of the advice given is questionable, as the research cited to support it is very out of date. I realize some organizational "truths" remain as true today as they were two decades ago, but there have been many changes in the academic scene since, and many changes in the typical job of the department chair.

Some generic advice from a series of papers and presentations. Nothing all that new or useful.

This book on Managing People is outstanding; I urge you to order a copy, put it somewhere nearby. That way you'll be able get your hands on it quickly. Just make off with a copy, if you must, though I warn you not to touch the Provost's copy, which is presuming that he or she has one, and I find that not too difficult to imagine! This is a book you're sure to use time and time again. It's that good.

Dr. Russell Smith

This is a valuable book and whether you're a dean or a department chair--or for that matter, anyone who "manages" people--it needs to be somewhere you can get your hands on it immediately. Its contributors offer some useful, practical advice not found in enough books that are written primarily for educators.