Projects Books

Great reference guide, very user friendly. Quick and easy tabs for fast reference!

I could not have asked for a better guide! I keep this by the phone for my babysitters and mother-in-law-much easier than explaining what to do if..My sons' preschool also has a copy in each classroom!

As the author of, The Second Virgin Birth, I have to say that Mr. Kirch's book is very believable, with well developed-characters with amazing dialogue that surrounds an action-packed story that will keep you guessing the entire time. It's an easy read, and extremely well written.

I read this book in one day. It was very enthralling and I had to keep reading to find out what was going to happen next.

Michael Southworth and Tridib Banerjee, former students of Kevin Lynch at MIT's School of Urban Studies and Planning, have organized a brilliant collection of most of Lynch's works. Here we can find his seminal ideas pointed out trough his researches in the field of environmental perception, as well as his urban design projects. The book still presents a good biography of Lynch and serves as a very interesting complement to the books that this fundamental author wrote. It is an extremely important work both to architectural and urban design students as well as to professionals and researches.

This is THE BOOK for anyone -not exclusively urban planners- who wants to understand not only the physical form of the city, but how its citizens interact with the urban landscape. Through his experience and observation, Lynch reminds us that the most important component of a city -the reason why they are built- are its inhabitants.

This book is a wonderful Hands-on addition to a colonial unit. My kids really enjoyed making the projects.

The book is well written, the models are easy to make with little adult supervision. The text explains the event in easy to understand language for the student.

Great book that expresses the flavor and feelings of a high school student in New Orleans.

The book is in goon condition and shipped to me in an adequate amount of time. Thanks!

Oh my gosh, if you are into scouting you have to check out this book for Nature. It is so cool. It is chuck full of interesting ideas for scouting. Any leader would enjoy the guides or suggestions that are offered in this book.

THE COMPLETE BACKYARD NATURE ACTIVITY BOOK

You can tell that Robin Michal Koontz, the author-illustrator of this book, has personal knowledge of the wildlife subjects she writes about. Each topic, from butterflies to birds to bats, gives children a wealth of information and plenty of projects to choose from. For example, kids can make a hummingbird feeder from an empty plastic bottle or draw a "family tree" of all the animals that use a tree for food or shelter. The sidebars provide fascinating information, such as the fact that many birds pick up ants and tuck them under their wings, so that the ants can deter lice, mites, and other annoying pests. I highly recommend this book - parents as well as kids can learn from it.

- Barbara Gregorich

My wife, Rebecca, loves reading these books. They help her in making soaps and candles for her website, http://homespun-candles-soap.com.

Normally i steer away from craft books because there always full
of cottagey,patchworkish,floral or granny type projects,but this book is exceptional.It has a very simple/country/scandinavian air about it,all the designs/projects are modern and timeless and great to make.I also liked that you could easily add your own creative input to a project.Its also a enormously big book and best of all has a history to each project/craft e.g the history of ceramic painting,the history of weaving etc.Excellent book.

At long last! Much of the theoretical framework for facilitating human development has been around for decades now, but practice has been carried along by its own inertia and "Hey! That's my meal ticket you are stepping on!" As someone who has spent many years working in the developing world, I can testify that the development industry has not being delivering at anywhere near the efficiencies required to meet the challenges ahead, and that this would be the case even without the new challenges of climate change and energy crises, and other emergent ones such as HIV/AIDS. As with the generals ruling the trenches in World War I and to even more devastating effect, steady-as-she-goes prevails: development project managers have been major contributors to this problem.
Now, a challenger to the comfort zones of project managers has arrived with a message of hope for the rest of us: that some project managers are capable of a phase transition taking them beyond the reductionist, clunk and grind approaches they have been taught by their generals, and are gaining competencies to genuinely address the messy, non-linear reality that we find ourselves immersed within. A retreat to certainty is a retreat from development, but Dombkins not only embraces uncertainty, but shows us how we can dance with it - not only in our professional lives, but in our personal ones a well.
With his emphases upon partnering as a cultural change process, on double-loop learning as a personal change, and other aspects of wave planning as an environment change process, Dombkins has pointed the way for his discipline to evolve up the developmental hierarchy traced, for example, by Bill Torbert in management theory (Torbert's "action inquiry" process has similarities with Dombkins' "double loop learning") and Michael Commons in cognitive development (Dombkins' work can be seen as a means for project managers to develop from Commons' levels 8, 9, &10 - concrete, abstract and formal thinking - up to levels 11, 12, 13 and beyond - systematic, metasystematic, and paradigmatic).
Concrete thinkers consider themselves to be practical. They aren't really: they are simply rather primitive thinkers. As Benjamin Disraeli put it, "the 'practical' man is one who tends to repeat the blunders of his ancestors". The truly practical are the seers, those whose vision embraces more reality, and with that embrace, evolve the capacity to address new and non-linear challenges as they arise. I see Dombkins as one such, and this book as a product of a highly developed cognitive complexity in his own field, and with truly practical potential applications over a far wider field. It remains to be seen whether or not Dombkins and others like him can overcome the pervasive and pernicious resistance to change which still afflicts so much of humanity, but where there's life there's hope, and there's hope for us all in this book.

David Dombkins is clearly one of the world's leading thinkers regarding the issues surrounding project and program management complexity. His work provides the basis for the global community to begin the discussion on how we can more successfully deliver our most complex programs and cope with complexity in increasingly uncertain and complex world. Well worth a read and a good one for any high end program/change manager's reference library.

This is, out of several project engineering books I have referred to, the most straightfoward, well written, logical, and useful texts about projects, and project engineering. It does not get into complex project theory (useless bull), but rather gives good, in depth, practical advice, in a relatively small book. This book is not only good for the information about computerized management system, it's good information about projects in general.

This book is a great refererence for anyone who is responsible for managing multiple, small, concurrent, fast-track projects. This is a very understandable and well written book. Westney gives thurough detail of all of the basics of project management. He shows how project management software packages can be used to organize and simplify the complex network of aspects that must be managed in projects. One of the best things about this book is that the author avoids being product specific in regard to software application.

Learning + insight + genius = Joseph Levenso

If not one of the most popular works, then certainly one of the most elegantly written on the subject of the congruencies, or lack there of, between traditional (Confucian) and "modern" China is Joseph Levenson's trilogy 'Confucian China and Its Modern Fate'. Although for the past twenty years or more this has been an often refuted work (see Paul A. Cohen, 'Discovering History in China', 1984), because it was written during an era when many scholars believed that China only made advances toward modernity in a response to the Western onslaught, it is nonetheless a classic in the field of Sinology. Therefore I felt it needed a more thorough review.

According to Levenson's analysis, the China that had existed for thousands of years, the Confucian China, had become stagnant and unable to deal with the modernity that accompanied the second coming of the West to China in the middle and late 1800's. The West, he argued, was the prelude to China's modern transformation, one that had no room for Confucian precepts.

The most refuted sections of the book concerns his discussion on substance (ti) and function (yong), which is taken from Zhang Zidong's (1837-1909) catchphrase, "Chinese learning as substance and Western learning as function", Levenson states that the more the Chinese used the Western model as the 'yong' the more 'ti' (Confucian learning) became irrelevant to Chinese reality.

"Chinese learning, which was to be the 'ti' in the new syncretic culture, was the learning of a society which had always used it for 'yong', as the necessary passport to the best of all careers. Western learning, when sought as 'yong' did not supplement Chinese learning- as the neat formula would have it do- but began to supplant it. For in reality, Chinese learning had come to be prized as substance because of its function and when its function was usurped, the learing withered. The more Western learning came to be accepted as the practical instrument of life and power, the more Confucianism ceased to be 'ti', essence, the naturally believed-in value of a civilization without rival, and became instead an historical inheritance, preserved, if at all, as a romantic token of no surrender to a foreign rival which had changed the essence of Chinese life." (vol. I, p.61)

This view is a continuation and elaboration of his argument in an earlier work, "Liang Qichao and the Mind of Modern China" (1953). In this work he states; "Confucianism, after so many centuries, had at last been drained of any relevance to Chinese reality" (pp. 84-85). In both works Levenson questioned if there could be true deliverance from the past while holding on holistically to culture. In volume three of "Confucian China and its Modern Fate", he seems to give us his answer by implying that the Communist had been able to take Confucianism, once an ideology in action, and place it in the museum of history.

While Levenson is a product of the time when scholars mostly viewed China as being forced to modernize in response to the Western threat, his analysis does not fall into the trap of considering the West as being superior.