Feed Services Books

In an era where America is the last remaining superpower, it is sometimes easy to feel that there are no real threats left in the world to American security (apart from the occasional terrorist, that is); it is easy to slip into a complacency a la the British Empire in thinking itself impregnable due to its relative insularity from the rest of the world (truly, for a variety of reasons, Canada and Mexico pose no real threats to America) and the power it is able to wield abroad. Of course, there are many countries, geographic areas, economic coalitions, and military alliances in the world, both real and potential, that could pose a major threat to the America. Thus, it is important that in this period of relative hegemonic success, Americans do not become insular in thinking.

This is a rather long preamble to introduce a book of importance, 'The United States and China', by John King Fairbank. When I first studied political science as an undergraduate, I had completed the requirements for my primary major without having once heard a lecture or participated in a discussion of any substance on the topic of China. Perhaps this is because the prominence of the Soviet Union in the superpower relations, and most political scientists when discussing international relations preferred to focus on economic powers (Japan, Western Europe, emerging markets and resource-rich areas), or on comparative democracies, both of which do not include China. China has been, and continues to be, a mystery in most Western eyes, including those of scholars and political strategists.

It has only been with the breakup of the Soviet Union that the prominence of China has been increased. No longer is it considered a backwater; no longer is it ignored save in relation to American interests in Taiwan. Even at the height of the conflicts in Vietnam and Korea, the West had very limited knowledge of China. As mysteriously enigmatic as the Soviet Union might have been, it was still essentially Western in orientation and ambition; the Western powers could be reasonable sure that discussions with and strategies against the Soviet Union would proceed on the same framework of thought. Despite China now being a Marxist-inspired regime, it is still essentially Eastern, with an historical and philosophical underpinning vastly different from the West. China is one of few civilisations to survive that arose as an independent urban culture from the mists of prehistory; it is the only one that has retained a powerful position.

Due to it's relative isolation from the rest of the world, and its now millennium-old concentration on the preservation of cultural integrity against outside forces (which produces a very strange dynamic with the introduction of Marxist and Western radical political ideas), China has remained focussed upon internal situations.

'The strength of China's age-old family system has made it a target of the modern revolution. New loyalties to nation and to party have countered the claims of familism, but not always successfully.'

Fifty years of Marxism still has not managed to replace the old ways. Perhaps one reason why pro-democracy ideas do not have more urgency in China is that this, too, is a foreign concept.

Bounded by the Himalayas, the vast Mongolian steppes and plateaus, the Siberian hinterlands, and the Pacific Ocean, China remains a large area of relative isolation. China has vast resources, but only recently had the capacity to exploit them in any systematic and useful way. The land is used almost entirely for grain-food cultivation, made even more necessary by the continuing population explosion. Even with this high percentage of grain agriculture focus (90% versus 40% for America), China cannot support itself. Livestock is a rarity (only 2% of farmland is used for this, as opposed to nearly 50% of American farmland for this purpose).

China had its own renaissance, several hundred years before the Italian Renaissance that sparked the development in the West that led to our present age. However (and perhaps it was due to the lack of necessity that China failed to continue this development whereas Western nations, always at threat from each other, were required to for survival) China ceased to make technological and economic advances on a significant scale, and retreated into a thousand year decline. By the time the European powers shipping arrived in Chinese ports in the 1800s, Chinese power was no match for even small numbers of these new powers.

John King Fairbank first wrote the book 'The United States and China' in 1948, recognising the lack of good information, historically and politically, about China. It has been revised a number of times, taking into account more scholarship and learning, as well as the developments in relationship with China (the Korean conflict, the Vietnamese conflict, the 'reopening' of China, continuing tensions with regard to Taiwan). Fairbank in his introduction states that he produced this work in the hopes of a greater peace between East and West; sadly, that has not been the case. With the re-emergence of China into international affairs, trade, and military consideration, there is a question which remains about future peace with China. Fairbank, who was a professor of history at Harvard, has always been regarded an expert source in Chinese history, analysis of Chinese society, and Sino-Chinese relations. This book contains elements of all of these.

For a greater understanding of China, for the interested CNN-watcher to the student of politics and international relations, this book is a valuable resource.

Mel Hurtig lays savagely into those who are permitting such disgraceful proportions of our poulation to continue to live in poverty and despair. He mercilessly strips through the received wisdom of (neo-)Liberal Party propaganda to reveal to what extent their turnarounds on the promises that got them elected have really and materially injured the Canadian populace. He shows us a face of poverty we don't usually get to see. This book left me furious. Please read it.

Web APIs will become more and more interesting as they provide quick and easy access to data and functions from widely known web service providers auch as Google, eBay and others. However, this book can only provide an overview - "making the first API call". It is therefore useable for beginner s.
The book is easy to read, helpful for the first steps and conatins enough scripts and examples to understand the features and see the possibilities for extension.
All together, useful but not detailed.

This book does what I like in a book. Deliver great information on a specific topic without trying to be the do-all-end-all book. It focus's on API's with PHP and does a great job at doing so. Different chapters cover different API's with a catch all chapter at the end to cover additional popular API (like National Weather Service and Flickr).

This is the kind of book where its just fun to play around with and see what you can come up with.

I approached this book expecting a reasonably good tech cookbook with some code examples I could put to use. This book is that, plus more. The book gives a very good background of web APIs, plus thoughtful discussion about -why- certain items are done a certain way. For example, discussion about non-trivial security matters, and various reasons why you wouldn't want to produce a web feed (followed, of course, by how you would produce a web feed, in various flavors).
For me, this book very successfully balanced the dual goals "give me the nuts and bolts" and "tell me the background behind it all".
This book will not teach you PHP, so if you are a beginner, start with a more general PHP tutorial. Beyond that, I recommend this book.

The overviews are also excellent for concise functional descriptions that can be read by anyone with a general technical background. In sharp contrast to most technical books of this nature, this one is well organized, well written and very readable. It uses the PHP programming script/language to delve into specific implementation details, but the information can be readily understood regardless of the reader's specific language of choice. The material is presented in two sections. The first section in four chapters provides a general foundation in web services (or Service Oriented Architecture to use current technoabble). The second section in eight chapters describes specific uses and conventions for these services provided by the major companies of the New Economy, who are driving these technologies as engines of commerce. This field is an amalgam of several technologies, each with a huge supporting literature, and one of the more remarkable things about this book is the degree of editing it took to bring to the forefront those items that can immediately be used. Well worth the investment.

Those working on the PayPal services should also acquire 'Pro PayPal eCommerce' by Damon Williams as an excellent companion reference.Pro PayPal E-Commerce (Expert's Voice)

This book asumes you are already a programmer. There is no explaination of how to but rather a look at some API's out there. If you do not already know how to work with API's you will be lost. Of course if you already knew how to work with API in PHP you wouldnt have bought the book!

Barnes wasn't joking when he entitled this book with the word 'pedant' in it to describe his obsession with things culinary. This text is littered with illustrations of just how particular he is, not just about cooking, but also about accuracy, both in the details of recipes and what impressions he draws from other's works or opinions and how they affect him.

"Of course, this still leaves you faced with preparing 'an excellent dinner' for 'those one is fond of'. Again, listen to Pomaine: `For successful dinner there should never be more than eight people. One should prepare only one good dish.' These are his italics, not mine. Don't they make the heart lift?" (p117)

Barnes injects humour into his preoccupation with food preparation and consumption: its ingredients, how they are sourced, their preparation, their origins and any quirky historical fact associated that might add piquancy.

In this book Julian Barnes excels at two things:

1. Unearthing interesting and slightly obscure facts about people, vegetables and the mundane experiences of maintaining a kitchen.

"But then there is the other drawer - the one where items of sporadic usefulness live, the one where everything is tangled up and furtive, into which you insert a tentative hand, not knowing where sharp edges lurk. When did I last empty it? Ten years ago?" (p121-122)

2. Analysing ideas and reflecting wittily on things other than food.

"We might as well suggest that current American military zeal is a consequence of that nation's love of fast food - in which case, an infantryman's widow would probably have a lawsuit against the nearest burger outlet. And if anyone is tempted to believe in an automatic link between protein and aggression, don't forget that Hitler was a vegetarian." (p133-134)

Barnes is an idealist and experiences angst in his desire to reach perfection in the kitchen. Gladly he recognises this and employs self-deprecation, along with sprinkles of culinary history to make this a small but satisfying dish to digest. One small quibble, there are no references to the texts he refers to. It seemed rather ironic after all Barnes' plaints about cooks not revealing all the tricks of their trade in their cookbooks, that he should leave the detail of the sources he refers to out.

Julian Barnes, most well known for his elegant novels dissecting the core human issues: love, death, the role of memory, the perils of desire has a parallel alternative career as a fine essayist. He started out as a journalist, before turning to fiction full time, but still keeps up the shorter form and does it very well. His Letters From London excellently investigate a number of issues roiling around in the early 1990s period in Britain, and this collection takes a wry look at a narrower theme: the travails of the amateur cook.

Barnes turned to cooking relatively late the day. The kitchen only became a location of tense pleasure in his 30s. He is a cook very much in the strict adherence to the recipe line, worrying exactly how large is a 'medium' onion, and what is a 'glug' of olive oil? So not the Jamie Oliver throw it all in and mash it about heartily school. In many respects, this sharp precision parallels his writing style. Neat, light and elegantly balanced. He refuses to cook a squirrel 'you're just a rat with PR' on the grounds that it, well, looks rather like a dead squirrel and indulges in a minor diatribe against Nigel Slater for a recipe of pork chop that doesn't seem to fit in the frying pan. (This essay earned Barnes more letters of complaint than his polemic against the Iraq war, such are the priorities of the British middle classes).

His erstwhile love of France is also there, with an interesting disquisition on the French distaste for root vegetables and a mention of long time food goddess Elizabeth David. The writing, while always witty and stylish, never quite reaches the high essayistic heights Barnes is capable of. The format - popular column in the Guardian newspaper - probably shoehorned each piece into a fairly predictable audience remit. Nevertheless, a fine book to be enjoyed by Barnesophiles and foodies alike.

Originally written as columns for the Guardian, this collection of foodie essays is by turns hilarious and instructive, as in how many hangman's nooses (one to five) to ascribe to a meal that is going bad fast while hungry guests are whooping it up in the living room, and how the relationship between professional and domestic cook is similar to a first-time sexual encounter ("No, I won't do that"). On every page I found something that made me holler "Comrade!" I have so been everywhere this guy has been in the kitchen.

This book has some great ideas on how to make a difference in the world. Some are very easy to incorporate into our lives; others require us to consider making drastic changes in lifestyle and career. All, however, have the potential to help meet the basic physical and spiritual needs of the people in our world. There was not much background information on of the problem of poverty- instead, it is directed toward upper middle-class Americans who are already aware of this problem and are looking for ways to help. Ronald Sider's book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger is a great book to read to learn more about it.

This third volume of unreliable memoirs picks up where the previous volume (Falling Towards England) let off. James, in these books, is interesting, yet not as funny, at least to me, as it seems the things he is describing should be. I definitely need to give his fiction a try.

The nice thing about reading a writer's biography like this is to realize that you are not alone. It is much too easy for me to think that I am the only one with trouble concentrating on the matter at hand instead of flirting with one passion after the other.

Having so much enjoyed the first two volumnes in this series, I was not prepared for this turgid list of self improvement. Yes Clive is well read, English and Italian, yes he does know the difference between a Donatello and a Michelangelo, but do we need to know every book he read in the two years, every painting he saw and how it moved him. The simple answer is no. Unfortunately it takes 250 pages to find out. The story of how a drunken extemely funny youth becomes a sober mildly funny old pseud.

This looks like being the last personal memoir Clive James intends to let us have. After he left Cambridge he became well-known from the media, first as BBC film critic, then as the television critic of The Observer on Sundays, and latterly with several shows of his own. He must be nearer 70 than 60 by now, to the best of my knowledge his marriage has survived, and the combination of anno domini, stability and exposure has probably left him with nothing much more that he feels driven to tell us.

His Cambridge career must have given the university more of a challenge in dealing with him than the other way about. He read voraciously, but he read what interested him rather than what was on the syllabus. He devoted much of his time and energy to theatrical productions, and much of his time if not energy to watching films. To what extent he found the Cambridge experience formative I can't really tell, but it clearly didn't take him over. He mentions a number of personalities - F R Leavis who clearly angered him, Germaine Greer thinly disguised as Romaine Rand, and a few others such as the college dean who come across to me as institutions at least as much as they do as personalities. Of the institutions properly so called he has a bit to say about the Union Society, which was clearly as imbecilic a tabernacle of triviality as its Oxford equivalent that I knew only a little earlier. Other institutions were the regular theatrical events, and here we get a genuine sense of involvement. Cambridge gave him a forum here where he could develop his talent. It might have developed less if he had never gone there, but in any case he carried on with his theatre productions in London at the same time, so I'd guess Cambridge's real gift to him was the student grant that unintentionally left him free to do substantially what he liked.

How reliable or unreliable these memoirs are I have to guess too, but I should think they can be believed a lot more than those of, say, Berlioz. Every newspaper review of this book since it appeared in 1990 must have pointed out that his or anyone's team on University Challenge consisted of four members and not three, and I wonder how this ever got past the proof-readers. Those of his contemporaries that he deigns to mention by name are mainly unknown to me, but some may be pseudonyms like Romaine Rand. As the book continued I started to recognise more names. These by and large are people he can mention without compromising or embarrassing them, so it's fair to suppose that some of the unknown personae are aliases to avoid problems. The story reads convincingly, and of course it reads very well. A child of that time attending a similar place of education can relate easily to his progressive disgust with the bogusness and herd-mentality of the 'intellectual' political left that drove us from any naïve revolutionary ideas back into being staid social democrats. The story of the attempt by one theatrical beauty to seduce him, in which he failed the test, is hilarious, but rather near the bone as well for someone whose occasional specialisation in such cases was just to abandon the scene or even to fail to recognise it as a scene in the first place. As for reading what one wanted to rather than what one was supposed to, scrambling through the syllabus and finishing with a better degree than one deserved - well, that rings a few bells too.

Those who know either or both of the earlier books of memoirs, or who simply know Clive James from The Observer and/or television, will know the style to expect here. It's individual, and in its way it's brilliant as well. It has 'matured' rather by this third volume - the one-liners are not so conspicuous as before, but there are plenty left and the writing has more evenness and homogeneity. He traces his developing interest in artistic and intellectual creation of various kinds, and the wide-eyed ingenu quality of his appreciation is one of the things I like best about him. The last chapter, in which he hears, as we must, the clock ticking more loudly as he continues to look into the door opening ahead of him is really striking and affecting. I sense that Clive James has said most of what he was given to say, but how well he said it all.

I love Clive James' writing - especially his wry style of combining haughty superciliousness with biting self-deprecation, often within the space of one line. He writes like he speaks, with a verbose sarcasm, and throughout reading May Week Was In June it's almost impossible not to hear his nasal, scoffing tones narrating the book for you.
And while this third (and final?) instalment in his autobiographical memoirs (following the hugely funny Unreliable Memoirs and equally hilarious Falling Towards England) contains the familiar elements of James' comedic style, it doesn't quite measure up to its two predecessors.
Unreliable Memoirs, where James told of his childhood days in post-war suburban Sydney, didn't have to exert any effort whatsoever to raise a laugh: James' skewed take on his youthful surroundings in Kogarah coupled perfectly with the countless moments of hilarity he lived through and strange and twisted acquaintances he made. In the same vein, Falling Towards England introduced us to a young man desperately out of his depth as a newcomer to the Mother Country, armed only with an ill-fitting suit and cardboard suitcase.
May Week Was In June is a continuation of James' days in Britain, as a late twentysomething attempting to forge an acting career in Cambridge while simultaneously stumbling clumsily through his English degree. Even though he's older he's still no wiser, being cursed with an overly healthy interest in women, a not-so-healthy interest in pints of ale and frustrating his teachers and himself by forgoing his assigned texts in their entirety to read countless books of his own choosing.
Yes, it's funny, and it certainly continues to reinforce James' portrayal of his younger self as more larrikin than laureate and more clown than Casanova. He's still a fish out of water, despite having immersed himself for many years in British culture, and his distinctly Australian outlook stands out in 1960s Cambridge like a sore thumb.
The funny moments, though, don't tend to come as thick and fast as in the first two memoirs. This was a shame, as episodes such as James practising his twist in his darkened bedroom in Swiss Cottage, and his teenage sex education in the back of a Kogarah garage, were what made the first two books so laugh-out-loud funny. James has grown up in his third boo, and is a slightly more serious and focused character (with the emphasis on slightly, though!), despite his shortcomings as a student and his scorn for conservative behaviour. However, the narration is still flawless in its eloquency and James proves he has not lost his sharp and unique way of observing the world around him with a cynicism that never grates, but constantly entertains.

Not quite a "must read" for deli lovers and lovers of New York City, but close...

Anyone who has ever eaten at the Carnegie Deli will appreciate this book which gives a good history of one of New York's most legendary delis, and explains how and why those great big--and wasteful--sandwiches came to be.

Lots of interesting information here, but, in the end, it reads as if it were written primarily to sell as a "souvenir" of eating at the Carnegie.
Would be interesting to know if the book is sold at the Deli cash register and, if so, how many have been sold there...

And one should note that there is a coupon for a free piece of the Carnegie's New York Style Cheescake in the back. With New York prices, that alone could offset the cost of the book.

Go for it--the book and the cheesecake.

I purchased this product as a gift. It arrived in good time and was well received.