Switzerland Books

It has beautiful photos of restaurants with only the briefest information.
Apparently "cool" restaurants are only so for their interior beauty and not for their culinary delights since this book seems to forget that restaurants serve food.

For each restaurant it tells you:

1) Owners Name
2) Chef's Name
3) Interior/Exterior Designer
4) Address
5) Contact Info (phone, web site)
6) Tram Stop
7) Hours
8) Average Price
9) Cuisine (very vague. For example, just "Fresh market" "French" or "cold Japanese")
10)Special Features (i.e. "Self Service")

What's missing
1) Dining specifics: Menu excerpts, famous dishes. What to try, what to avoid. Any mention of food besides describing it as "French" or "Italian".
2) Dress Code (casual, formal, nightclub)
3) Ambiance (i.e. quiet, loud music, lounge, dance club, crowded, sparse)
4) A single photograph with food in it...seriously

I foolishly gave my weatherbeaten hardcover of this book as a gift to a friend of mine when I was thirteen. If only I had known how valuable it was! It's a lovely book, very similar in story and theme to Heidi. Written with the same innocent descriptive tone, but with a few different plot points. Spyri uses a light touch on serious topics, so this book can be a little sad, but never actually scary. Books like it are The Secret Garden, The Little Princess, and of course, Heidi.

This is a pretty good book on how some governments - small Alpine ones - are involved in the economy. It is an extremely welcome tonic (from a neo-Con think tank!) to the idiotically overhyped purely market-oriented policies these right wing groups reflexively advocate. Katzenstien discusses how these governments seek to help local firms and what the costs and benefits are. While no panacea that can replace free markets or entrepreneurs, he shows that they can have many beneficial effects. What a surprise! Governments influence the business environment, so why not use them (from fiscal measures to old-style national champions)? It is a good question, even if the impact is often modest.

I would like to say that anyone interested in C.G. Jung's writings would also probably enjoy this book. It seems to me that the major flaw in this ILLUSTRATED biography is an artistic one. The reproductions of photographs are generally poor, but there ARE some very good ones here. Some wonderful little snapshots could have been much larger, and some of the large pictures could have been much smaller. However, there are many things to recommend this book as well. There are the very nice pictures of the tower at Bollingen - - there are the paintings and mandalas by Jung himself -- the biography is concise and quite good. I wish that everything had been done as well as the dust jacket photo of Jung.

We found the introductions, hotel descriptions and locations maps useful and well presented; however the itinaries sections leaves a lot to be desired. Reading through pages 29-130 one is overwhelmed by the repetitions presented of places, excursions and highlights. Many descriptions appear in several or all chapters listed in the itineraries. In addition the book is flawed by several misconceptions and incorrect spellings, too many to be listed here. In the book on page 73 it says " Spiez is worth a short detour before leaving the lake and heading down the Alpine valley in the direction of Kandersteg." Kandersteg is up the valley. Also on page 85 it says to take a train over the mountain from Kandersteg. Actually one has to go through the mountain as there are no roads over. These are a few examples we found. We have read other books by Ms. Brown and were very dissapointed in this one. We e-mailed Ms. Brown and she was very gracious and hopes to have the mistakes corrected in the next edition. Yours truly, Marian & Erich Tobler PS We will returning the book.

This book is an odd mix of general history of the period (easily skipped as it is in separate chapters) and how the company grew. It started with a product, invented by Nestle, of a condensced milk and flour children's food product. Proving very popular, the company was incorporated and then merged with various Swiss chocolat manufacturers (Cailler, Kobler, etc.) as well as others, eventually becoming an integrated yet decentralised multi-national corporation. It slowly acquired other firms in order to enter new industries, such as frozen food, but also innovated and grew organically, such as via its invention of instant coffee. The book also covers some of the company's values, which have been a persistant source of pride to employees. And so now it is world's largest processes food company. That is it, bascially company propaganda, though it is admittedly a good company so far as it goes. If you need to learn about the company, it is a solid grounding.

One section that is interesting, though compromised by the PR tone of the book, describes the campaign agaisnt Nestle's marketing practices in the developing world. This was one of the first development-related activist camapigns, starting in the late 1970s. The book argues that it was distorted and unjust, though acknowledges that the company needed to learn how to cope with such things - with a lobbying and PR group in addition to funding scientific research by independent outsiders.

I bought this book because it is about a very interesting subject of the 60s motor racing scene. It shows an attractive layout and contains lots of rare pictures not to be found elsewhere which makes the purchase worthwhile. But the information is a little bit disappointing. There is few more than a chronological description of the races which the Scuderia attended and the cars and the drivers. These facts you can find elsewhere. The book contains hardly background information which cannot be found in other sources. In addition there are more but a few errors about the facts. After all: My English isn't perfect but the author's isn't either.

As a whole considering the price a little bit disappointing and no more than 3 stars.

This is a beginner's book to people who wish to read cards with the IJJ tarot deck - a traditional deck similar to the tarot of Marseille (which means the numbered cards just carry the appropriate number of of the suit's symbol, rather than a picture as in the Rider deck).

The book starts with a good introduction, which explains what a tarot deck is and tells about it's history. The introduction is much more solid that than of most beginners' books nowadays.

Chapter II covers the major arcana in the standard "Tarot 101" format - two pages per card, one with the card's picture and another with a description of the card, the card's meaninig when straight, and the card's meaning when upside down. The meanings are mainly keywords, which I think are not terribly accurate but are good enough for beginners.

Chapter III explains how to spread the cards using the Celtic Cross.

Chapter IV covers the minor arcana. Court cards are explained in the same format as the major arcana, while the numbered cards are given 5-6 lines each with just meanings. Again, the meanings are mostly keywords.

Chapter V explains several other spreads - a seven cards past/present/future spread, a complex name based spread, three overcomplicated, badly explained, and rather useless spreads (56 cards horseshoe, 54 cards royal, and 7th card), and a nice Gypsy spread.

A bibliography is included, which I think is of little use - it includes this book itself, along with several other books without a hint regarding which material was taken from which book and why.

This is an average beginner's book - it covers the basic needed material needed in a good fashion, but doesnt do a great job of it.

I found the title "Ticino Guide" to be misleading. My expectation is that this would be a travelogue of the Ticino Canton with a cultural history of each town, best places to eat, sites to see, etc. Instead Ticino Guide is an architectural tour of Ticino.

I did not find the essays in this book as compelling as the ones in "Ticking Along with the Swiss." I'm not sure if that is because these are truly not as interesting, or because I've had my fill of anecdotes about Swiss culture. It took me several months to finish this book, reading a couple of essays a week.

If you enjoy the first volume, and really want more, well, this book has more---of the same. It does have a couple of real gems tucked away towards the back.