Bailey Books

I actually purchased this book as a gift for a friend who is a cinema buff. We talked at length about the book, and he was quite pleased. If you are a person who enjoys the finer points about the movie industry, this book is a must have. Highly recommended!

I love listening to audiobooks "on the road" as well as while washing dishes for hours at a time (I'm a very bad dish washer), and this one acutely held my attention. Agatha Christie wrote no shortage of losers (I've read every book and play that she ever wrote, which is more than 80) but I place this one in her top twenty percent.

A young lady typist is sent to a house of a blind woman by her prickly boss (aka "Sandy Cat") and the poor girl finds a man's body lying in the floor. She runs out the door, shrieking, to the aide of a passer-by (who just happens to be a covert agent of the British government!) who takes her side when the police inspector (a friend of his) suspects the girl of being involved in the death. But there is the additional laundry list of close neighbors who are all equally suspicious. I'll stop there to avoid a spoiler.

Poirot is barely part of the mystery, I would guess that Christie stuck him in the last third of the story as a marketing afterthought, but this does not harm the larger work. The reader does a fine job which is often the key element of a decent audiobook. The story line is quite coherent and, while this one is not what I would call "killer", it still earns the full 5 stars.

A final note, this is primarily a murder mystery with a side story of espionage, a trick that Christie often practiced, only not usually so shrewdly as she did in this particular episode.

Aging baby-boomers like myself can rest more easily; herein one discovers a wonderful effort, which succeeds marvelously in accurately and faithfully recounting and retelling the somewhat convoluted and always multi-currented tenor of the times for the 1960s. Given the massive neo-conservative effort to discredit the theoretical positions and social ethos of the sixties generation, it is terrific to have such a carefully researched and meticulously documented effort as is "The Columbia Guide To America In The 1960s" to give greater voice and renewed verve and credibility to the ideas and theoretical positions that arose from the ongoing new-left critique of mainstream society that emanated from the events of that storied decade. Authors David Farber and Beth Bailey are both academics with considerable expertise in the area of contemporary 20th century history, and this aplomb with the facts and the sense of the times is fascinating to plow through on both an intellectual and also an emotional level. This is scholarship well done!

It does one well to remember that the sixties decade and what came out of it are both subjects of serious disagreements as well as continuing controversy, given the attempt by the right wing to define the ideas stemming from those times as bogus and discredited. Therefore, making sense of all that is brought back to the surface in this book represents a considerable effort, but it is hard to deny such an effort to make sense of a time with so many crosscurrents and so much social, cultural, and political turbulence is well worth the effort. Therefore, the book is organized around several different perspectives and approaches. In the first section, we are presented with a well-developed and intricately organized narrative that superbly covers the waterfront of the era's most significant events, policies, and changes. The second part of the book is organized around ten different essay efforts by well-regarded contemporary historians on various salient aspects of the decade, ranging from the counterculture, the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, and of course, the war in Vietnam.

The net effect of the combined first and second sections is to give us a much more comprehensive and detailed understanding of both the issues and events on the one hand, and how they fit into the mosaic of the sixties, on the other hand. Subsequent section also add to the overall contribution of the book, by giving us shorter essays on other aspects of the era, subjects of particualr interest to each of the authors, and a terrific extended bibliography for those of us interested in further exploring the eddies and currents of various aspects of the decade in question. It fairly well smashes revisionist interpretations of the era into smithereens by exposing them for the solipsistic efforts at refashioning the truth that they are, and does so while educating and entertaining us on an number of levels at one. This is a great book, and one I can recommend to anyone interested in learning more about the most fascinating decade of the 20th century. Enjoy!

I used this book for a teaching reference. I am a Edcuation major in College at the elementary level. It was very useful.

This volume combines four Covert Bailey's best selling titles: "The new fit or fat", "The fit or fat woman", "The fit or fat target diet", and "Fit or fat target recipes". These books give practical advice on exercise, training and diet, and it does so using a clear way and with a great sense of humor. A complete package that even includes a recipe collection to lose weight and stay fit.

When I bought this and a couple of other books, about six years ago, I was looking for an introductory reference on aerobic training, fat burning, and on the use of heart rate monitors for general fitness improvements, and wasn't disappointed at all, since what I learned really worked out for me: Armed with a Polar Heart Rate Monitor (the old M61) I was able to drop more than 200 lbs in about eight months, and the heart rate monitor training has helped me keep those lbs off for over six years. Not only I went fro size 44 to size 32 pants, but also obtained substantial benefits that included weight control, cardiovascular improvements, lowered blood pressure, and improved muscular-skeletal strength and flexibility, but also the myriad of mental and psychological benefits derived from being in the best shape of my life.

I especially like the chapter about measuring your own Fat and Fitness. The formula to estimate Body Fat Percentage is very useful if you don't have a Body Fat Scale or Monitor at Home. I used the formula, and other data that I found on several books to set-up an excel spreadsheet to monitor my progress, which gave me motivation to keep training smarter.

In short terms, based on my experience I can recommend this book, and it's a great reading as well.

Another tools you may want to consider, to complement this book and your strategies for boosting your metabolism, loosing weight, and even more important keeping that weight off are:

- A Body Fat Monitor or Scale. This will help you monitor your progress, to assure that the weight you are loosing is fat (fat lost = increased metabolism) and not muscle, water or bone mass (decreased metabolism).
- "Ultrametabolism: The Simple Plan for Automatic Weight Loss", which is another very practical, readable and insightful book, focused on how to boost your metabolism.
- "The Abs Diet: The Six-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life".
- A Heart Rate Monitor Wrist Watch. This is an excellent tool that will help you monitor and control your Heart Rate in order to keep yourself in a burning fat state (increased metabolism).
- "The Hard Body Guide". Excellent strategies, programs and workouts, aimed to increase your muscle mass.

If you are focused only on your diet, the first three may be worth considering. If you exercise, or want to start doing it right, the last two are for you. If you do both, all the four recommended options can improve your results.

The Complete Guide To Fishing: The Fish, The Tackle, And The Techniques by author, photographer, and fishing expert John Bailey is a first-rate, illustrated manual specifically written and designed to be accessible for anglers at all skill and experience levels. Full-color photographs on every page and a wide spread of guidelines on bait fishing, fly fishing, lure fishing, bass fishing, sea fishing, and so much more, make The Complete Guide To Fishing an ideal resource which is as versatile as it is easy to understand and follow, making it ideal for the novice angler. If you want to enjoy the fun and satisfaction of fishing, then browse through the pages of John Bailey's The Complete Guide To Fishing!

This book was hilarious. I never thought places like this existed, and I never would have thought they put up with what they do! This book is a good eye-opener and a very fast read.

Excellent book for teachers and very helpful to parents who would take the time to read it.

Bailey's Constitution is a pathbreaking attempt to show how an economy might be operated so as to provide public goods and services in a manner that "mimics" the operation of private competitive markets. Using principles pioneered by Wicksell and Lindahl, this has long been a goal of public economics but until the advent of so-called demand revealing mechanisms (described in Chapter 2 of his book), there was to known way to achieve this result in real world institutions. Bailey has shown the way this result can be achieved through the provision of the appropriate constitutional decision making and self enforcing incentive structure in a small public economy.

The "incentive compatible" mechanisms that Bailey utilizes received recent attention by the Nobel Prize Committee. In awarding the 1996 Nobel Prize to William Vickrey, the Nobel Committee recognized the importance of Vickrey's contribution to providing ways to "overcome the public goods problem" (the subject of B&T's Chapter 2). The Committee noted that an idea analogous to the Vickrey auction "underlies the so-called Clarke-Groves mechanism for eliciting truthful tenders for public projects. Vickrey anticipated this important result by an important time margin". Whereas this and other work cited by the Committee (particularly the "Vickrey auction") has had many important practical applications in the allocation of goods in private markets (i. e. spectrum auctions and Treasury debt auctions), it has been more difficult to apply the ideas in the public sector.

Part of this difficulty may be the result of certain perceived "technical limitations" of what Bailey calls the (Vickrey-Clarke-Groves" (VCG) mechanisms, the operation of which are described thoroughly in Chapter II of B&T. Over 25 years, the literature has spawned a number of criticisms centering on these technical limitations. Throughout the body of the work and especially in Part II, Bailey has shown how most, if not all, of these difficulties can be surmounted, mostly through the self enforcing incentive structure embedded in the appropriate constitution.

In my own 1980 book (which was an extension of my 1978 University of Chicago dissertation), I tried to deal with many of these difficulties as well as other difficulties being raised outside the conventional "rational choice" framework of analysis. For example, political scientists were asserting that altruism invalidates the VCG mechanisms. Bailey's work greatly extends previous attempts, such as mine, in dealing with these technical limitations and criticisms, and offers important and pathbreaking fresh perspectives as well.

The book, in my mind, does an excellent job at stimulating readers ranging from the layperson with only a rudimentary understanding of economics all the way to mathematical economists thoroughly familiar with the current state of the art in "incentive compatible" mechanism design. The great strength of the work is in how it is all put together through a combination of incentive compatible devices and self enforcing incentive mechanisms, starting in chapter 2, and running through the exciting "draft constitution" in Chapter 3, concluding with a Chapter 4 with "perspectives and alternatives" which analyses other attempts to address the public goods problem and deals with the possible objections that others might raise to the approach suggested by Bailey. The ways in which Bailey combines the mechanisms (i e. the VCG mechanisms and the Thompson mechanism, the latter being treated separately in Chapter 5 of this book), for example, is particularly important and stimulates one to immediately want to explore practical applications.

Others would surely find important insights in carefully studying Bailey's response to criticisms and misunderstandings (for example the perception that altruism invalidates the VCG mechanism) all the way to perceptions that abound in the political science literature that subvert any attempts to institute decisionmaking mechanisms that would amount to a simple aggregation of individual preferences. (This is the longstanding "liberalism against populism" debate that would try to invalidate any mechanism that relies on direct democracy implemented through a mechanism that relies on voting rules that reflect the intensity of individual voter preferences). In this respect, Bailey's book is a useful supplement to Mueller's Constitutional Democracy (1996) which also provides a defense of the more complex, sophisticated procedures (though not necessarily the VCG mechanisms), leaning somewhat more to the use of the "preference intensity" rules for use in representative or parliamentary settings, rather than through individual voter referenda. All this is a roundabout way of saying that Bailey's work is a important and pathbreaking addition to the rapidly growing "constitutional democracy" literature and will be stimulating to anyone interested in this area.

I should note the relationship of this work to Bailey's other work on social choice, now readily accessible in his 1994 Essays on Normative and Positive Economics. His approach to "social choice" (contained in a "commentary" in those essays) sets the stage for this book, where he truly demonstrates that the impossibility results that haunted social choice for many decades is really a problem of a "plenty of possibilities". Whereas I may be an enthusiast for his particular perspective, the rigor and thoroughness of his work will be appreciated by those approaching the subject matter from sharply differing perspectives and who will find the rigor of his analysis helpful in sorting through the "plenty of possibilities". In this way, his work makes an important contribution to scholarly research in this important area.

I became aware of Bailey's work in late June, 1996 when Professor Bailey sent me a earlier draft. Professor Bailey has made strenuous efforts to cover some of the areas that I and others felt deserved more treatment. For example, I pointed out the altruism (Margolis) controversy and Bailey subsequently devoted an entire appendix to Chapter 2 in dealing with the controversy in what I believe to be a convincing and dispositive manner.

In terms of real world applicability, Bailey explicitly recognizes that a more complex Federal structure (rather than a small country) would require the use of a more complex decisionmaking structure than is set forth in this book. He has pointed the way for useful further research in this more complex area and in the field of constitutional democracy (and economics) generally. Others, like myself, have been or will likely be stimulated to develop possible real world applications of these principles in particular institutional settings.

I believe the book will be widely read by scholars in the fields of social choice and public choice. It will also command a good general audience along economists and political scientists, all of whom will find Part I readily accessible. It is hard to judge how wide ranging the general audience could be. I suspect there will be a good deal of "retailing" of Bailey's ideas, so the work will likely be widely cited in the economics, political science and some of the other social sciences. The ideas may catch on in a wider general audience in the near term and even become a public economics classic in later years. I think it could eventually become one of the "great books" in public economics. It will also possibly command some interest in such areas as philosophy and social theory and will surely become a classic in the rapidly expanding literature on "constitutional economics", perhaps ranking beside Buchanan and Tullock's Calculus of Consent (1962) which first stirred modern interest in this field.

In some respects, particularly the material contained in appendices A-D in Chapter 6) is heavy going for any nonmathematical economist, like myself. However, Chapter 6 (which summarizes these appendices) is a masterful and understandable presentation of very difficult material (i.e. adjustments for income effects) that has previously perplexed me, a close student of this subject matter, for many years. I can now say I much better understand what has been a difficult real world condition (i. e. income effects) that I usefully assumed away in originally developing and presenting my formulation of the VCG mechanism, but which must be adequately dealt with in many practical settings where one seeks to make decisions based on a consistent ordering of preferences. In this respect, Bailey's treatment of the asymmetry between the "willingness to pay" of those opposed and those in favor of a public project in Chapter 6 is an important new contribution to the literature....

Here's how this vintage fiction was described in 1918: "An old-fashioned love story that is nontheless modern."
The National Library for the Blind describes it this way: "The Ballard siblings, Mary, Constance, and Barry, live in an
old house in Washington, D.C. With Constance getting
married, their aunts, Isabelle and Frances, want Mary to
close up the house. However, Mary feels responsible for
Barry, so she has taken the bold step of renting the Tower
Room to a gentleman."