Titles Books

For those interested in this subsection of IPE this is a great introductory textbook. It highlights the various systems under use and the last third focuses on very interesting phenomena that has been occurring recently, privatization. It is very clearly written and you do not need much background in economics to get a lot out of this book.

This is what every economics textbook should aspire to be: detailed, clear and compelling to read. Perhaps the greatest resource is the notes and extensive suggested readings after each chapter (grouped by topic).
There is however one downside. Since this is such an extraordinary text you may not find too many used editions to purchase. This one's a keeper!

This is the best guide for Carribean Cruises! I checked out others before ordering this one and this one was the most comprehensive. I have never been on a cruise before but, after reading this book, I feel very prepared!

I'm in the travel industry and am oftentimes disappointed by the out-of-date information found in other cruise guides. I consider The Complete Guide to Caribbean Cruises, however, to be one of the absolute best resources to use when planning a cruise vacation. The guide has a great layout, is highly accurate, and provides the kind of information useful to both novice and "expert" cruisers.

In my opinion, The Complete Guide to Caribbean Cruises is a must read for anyone considering a cruise!

This is the book that I turn to when I want to learn something new. It is not the best "Learn to Juggle" book, but if you can already juggle, this book will push you to the next level.

This book just expects you to want to learn how to juggle 5 pins, or learn complicated passing routines.

The coverage complete, but brief. There isn't a lot of hand holding, but covers a lot of ground.

I have had this book for the last 10 years, and it is well-worn. It has been very useful in helping me refine my club juggling, devil stick, and ball juggling skills. The diagrams are well drawn, and Finnigan also provides hints for when things go wrong.

He goes into details other books skip over (such as color-changing rings) and cigar box juggling.

My only complaint is that this book isn't indexed, so you have to rely on the Table of Contents to search for stuff.

All in all, I highly recommend this book.

This united edition of the correspondence was long overdue. The letters of the Emperor and Empress appear together for the first time, cleansed of the transcription errors which spoiled the first (1923) edition of her correspondence, and of the tactful editing which expunged the more intimate passages from the 1929 version of his. Joseph Fuhrmann's footnotes are helpful, thoroughly researched and not unsympathetic to the writers. For students of Russian history, this book is an extraordinarily important source on the government of Russia immediately before the Revolution; it repays careful and open-minded reading. For those interested in the personal life and the characters of the last Tsar's family, it is arguably better still: here we have Nicholas II, affectionate and gentle, occasional author of rather poetic descriptions of scenery (this is not the Nicholas of the blandly factual diary). Here too his beloved Empress, sharp-tongued and energetic and interested in everything, very different to the tragic-eyed lady of legend. High politics and war jostle for attention with amusing little accounts of the childrens' activities, but there is never any doubt that the letters were written in serious times by people who understood and sought desperately to find a solution to the problems Russia faced. They certainly don't make light reading, but if you have the patience, these letters repay your perseverance.

It's hard to believe these letters and telegrams were exchanged by a ruler and his wife under the immensely stressful conditions of WWI. I'm an aficionado of Imperial Russian History, but the unbelievable banality of this couple, relentlessly exposed in their own words is hard to take. A terrifically thorough book, it's a slow read--which certainly makes you feel you're getting your money's worth. I'm glad I bought it, and have learned more about these Romanovs even though their correspondence reveals shallowness and self-interest. Very good book, pitiful subjects.

Arnold Joseph Toynbee's clear genius focused on a project of his younger years. It all started with Toynbee's insight into an enlightened contemporary reference to Gibbon's own account of De Administrando Imperio and to its author. Toynbee's mother also had a role in this " project " which is, afterall the work of a professor of byzantinology. The author's pertinence, honesty, erudition and writing style are, as usual, unsurpassed. If it were only by this book, and Toynbee would enter the famous historiographic gallery guarded by pillars such as Edward Gibbon and Lord Acton. However, my cultural hero, whose own interests ranged from International Affairs to Archives of the British Admirality and from anthropology and histories of religion to those of cities and sociology, did it greater than ever. Civilizations, wrote Toynbee, don't die. They only commit suicide.

The intricacies of Byzantine life in the time of Porphyrogenitus show all that. It is not surprizing that in a sort of testament of the imperial idea, the Great Lavra of Mount Athos was inaugurated shortly after Constantine's death, as if the realm of spiritual conquest retired towards the inner and true life. In a seminal work, Virgil Gheorghiu epitomizes the Western Civilization almost in the words of Mahatma Gandhi ( What do I think about Western Civilization ? I think this would be a very good idea... ). To me, at least, it is no wonder that Virgil Gheorghiu's prophetical work, The 25th Hour, stronger than Kafka and much stronger than Orwell, started with a quote from Toynbee. But that is for the following review...

Taking his cue from the De Administrando written by Constantine VII and other Byzantine historians before him, this thick volume may be Toynbee's greatest achievement. Throughout, he takes Constantine's own words with a grain of salt, especially about events before the Macedonian dynasty by applying a historical perspective to this entire period of Byzantine civilization (c. 800-1050)

Political intrigues are explained in terms of the contemporary situations and also probable alternate hypotheses. And though it is a work of Academic scholarship, the writing is clear - the author takes great pains to explain in detail the unbelieveably complex (Byzantine) nature of the Imperial palace.

This book does what it purports to do, analyse convention. It is writtin the the spirit of Quine and Carnap's style of philisophical analysis, and is a fantastic book if you are familiar with thier work (especially Carnap's "Meaning and Necessity" and Quines "Word and Object" and "From a Logical Point of View" all of which are avialable). There is a significant amount of game theoretical explanation in the first part of the book and would be a great as an example of what game theory is capable of doing (besides the usual economic and biological examples). A great book by a great philosopher and a great writer.

What is the role of rationality in understanding the nature of conventions? Prior to Lewis, philosophers mostly considered conventions to be determined by "agreement," and thereby consigned their study to game theory. For David Lewis, conventions are social regularities, and hence do not reduce to issues in pure interactive epistemology. This shocking, anti-methodological individualist conclusion, is shared by Thomas Schelling, whose key notion of "salience" and "focal point" equilibria, inspired Lewis's emphasis on precedence.

The idea that I conform to a social practice because I believe everyone else will, and I believe everyone else will because everyone else did so last time around, or even since time immemorial, is prima facie highly plausible, but it suffers from the same problem as inductive inference, which surely works in the real world, but does not follow from some principle of logic or rational inference. There just happen to be "natural kinds" in the universe, such as solid bodies, for which inductive inference works, while other entities that we can freely construct in our mind but do not exist, violate the principle of inductive inference (such, for instance, as Nelson Goodman's famous concept of the color `grue').

It is striking that Lewis's basic explanation of conventions in terms of precedence is meant to apply only to pure coordination problems, but in fact almost never does Lewis use any property of a pure coordination game other than the fact that an equilibrium is a strict Nash equilibrium (Nash is not cited in the Index). Informally, Lewis discusses additional properties of coordination problems, including the notion that a shift of strategy by a single player makes all worse off, and the notion that agents are close to indifferent as to which of several equilibria is actually chosen. But, as far as I can see, Lewis' remarks apply to the far wider class of games with multiple strict Nash equilibria. Lewis think that the absence of "substantial conflict of interest" is important in his analysis, but in fact, there is no point at which this assumption is formally deployed to achieve some conclusion.

Lewis's genius, and there is no doubt but this book is a work of genius, lies in his success in linking the non-individualist concept of "precedent" with standard game theory and interactive epistemology by exploring the following argument. Suppose each agent is rational and hence takes an action only if there are grounds for believing this is the best action to take. Then, I cannot expect that everyone else will do x simply because each argues that that's what everyone else did the last time the occasion arose. Rather, everyone else will seek rational grounds for doing x. My rational grounds for doing x is that this is optimal for me providing I expect everyone else will expect everyone else to do x as well. This type of reasoning of course leads to an infinite spiral of i believes j believes k believes l believes, and so on, for all finite sequences i,j,k,l,...

Lewis concludes, for conventions to work with rational agents, it must be "common
knowledge" that people are rational and have rational grounds for doing x. Lewis's task in the middle section of this book is to explain how common knowledge, which is a naturally infinitary concept, could possibly come about in real life. Lewis also supplies an answer, or at least a sketch of an answer.

It is crucial that Lewis does not attempt to describe how a convention (or any other Nash equilibrium) might come about, but only why a rational agent would obey a convention (or a Nash equilibrium) once it has been attained. The issue of how social regularities are instituted in society is a deep and unanswered question, going far beyond the issues dealt with in this book. I believe we need gene-culture coevolutionary theory to answer this question, but that is another story.

It is interesting that game theorists generally acknowledge Lewis as the first to study the concept of common knowledge, but completely ignore his theory of how a state of affairs, call it A, could become common knowledge. The Achilles heel of classical game theory is precisely that it is totally dependent on the concept of common knowledge, but gives absolutely no conditions under which a state of affairs A might become common knowledge. Lewis provides an answer, but this too goes beyond methodological individualism, and depends upon non-rational properties of being human.

When is an event common knowledge? For concreteness, suppose Ann and Bob are sipping tea and Carl runs in the room, hand dripping in blood, and exclaims "I've cut myself.'' If Ann and Bob are of normal intelligence and in possession of their five senses, the event A, that Carl has claimed to have cut himself, is common knowledge for Ann and Bob. Ann knows it. Bob knows it. Ann knows that Bob knows it because she saw Bob in the room looking at Carl and listening to him. For similar reasons, Bob knows that Ann knows that Bob knows it, because Bob saw her looking at him when Carl made his announcement. And so on.

Lewis' argument is on p. 52, and goes like this. What is it about A that explains the generation of these higher-order expectations? (1) Ann and Bob have reason to believe that A holds; (2) A indicates to Ann and Bob that they each have reason to believe that A holds; and (3) A indicates to Ann and Bob that Carl claims he cut his hand. Lewis shows in some detail how these three statements imply common knowledge of Carl's claim A. Lewis' argument is laid out in detail and with great clarity in a brilliant paper by Cubitt and Sugden, published in Economics and Philosophy (1993). These authors conform to Lewis' limitation of his argument to games of pure coordination, but there is nothing in their argument that limits its application to such games. All strict Nash equilibria of repeated games could be analyzed similarly.

Ultimately, the "reason to believe" in (2) cannot be explained in purely individualist or rationalist terms, but rather requires that humans recognize certain basic symmetries of the form "if I have rational grounds for believing x, then so do you." This fundamental symmetry lies in the realm of human nature and human psychology, is probably lacking in many other species, and is itself the product of gene-culture coevolution is humans. The bottom line is that Lewis (and Cubitt and Sugden) begin to give us a handle on linking human rationality with human sociality, which is a quite different thing.

It is a wonderful scientific full illustarated book which contains all formulations and procedure to prepare most of the cosmotics used daily in our life.

As a non-chemist who is certainly not the intended audience of this work, I realize that my opinion about it is of limited value. However, I found it extremely helpful and interesting. I'm a bit confused by the "2nd Edition" and "1992" publication date listed above-- as best as I am aware, the second edition of this book was published in three volumes sometime in the 1970's by Wiley-Interscience. (Needless to say, it is probably a little bit dated.) Nevertheless, since the authors & title are the same, I feel confident I know what book I am talking about.

Because I am merely an interested layperson, I'd hesitate to buy the book at full price-- I was fortunate enough to find a used copy.

This book was written for professional cosmetics chemists, and contains information about various toiletry products, from toothpaste to hair dye, from shaving cream to lipstick, from hand lotion to contact lens solution. Each chapter briefly discusses the history of the cosmetics product in question, and how it is intended to work, and what are considered to be desirable qualities in a product of that kind. In many cases, formulas for different versions are given. Each chapter has extensive references at the end, and each volume also includes a glossary of trade names for the various products. This glossary is helpful if you are also using older "make cosmetics at home" books (as compared with most of the modern book which are all about smearing guacamole all over your body), as many of these list their ingredients by trade name.

A great book to learn more from if you are the kind of person who really enjoyed "Creating Your Own Cosmetics" by Nikolaus Smeh.

This book is excellent for college research papers and oral reports. Facts are current and unbiased. I would highly recommend.

Use this for a different perspective. Avoides all the bashing that is so common on the topic, keeps it in perspective, rather balanced.

IF YOU NEED INFO ON THIS SUBJECT THIS BOOK IS A MUST. WHAT MORE CAN I SAY

IF YOU NEED INFO ON THIS SUBJECT THIS BOOK IS A MUST. WHAT MORE CAN I SAY

It's too bad the demons who struck New York on September 11 didn't come from Chelm. Though fools, they'd have learned (from Francine Prose) the utter dementia induced by trying to tackle the New World with the Old.

They'd have been locked up in crates for 50 years, trying to get out. They'd have found that rubbing against party guests in embarrassing places, turning wine into vinegar, curdling the milk and tangling hair doesn't frighten people in a city that knows no darkness, even when the moon doesn't shine.

They'd have known that while gossip was to the Old World "like opening the door and letting the demons in," New World people gossiped all the time. They'd have learned that New Yorkers frightened the demons more than the demons frightened them.

Of course, Francine Prose did not write this story as an allegory about September 11, 2001. The book came out a year earlier. And Sept. 11 was obviously no joke.

Yet post Sept. 11, the New World voice Prose gave to Chelm's mythic Old World laughter and lessons seems addressed to the foolish medieval demons who struck at America's heart without cause: Only those smart enough to adapt survive and thrive. That's why we will win.

It's a good lesson, if only those demons would pay attention. And your kids will understand it, even if the demons don't. Alyssa A. Lappen

This story from Chelm features pictures by Mark Podwal and a tale which requires good reading skills as it tells of the demons of the Polish town of Chelm, where only fools live. The demons decide to move to New York City, but find the big city is more than a match for their spirits in The Demons' Mistake, a fine story of adjustments.