Bradford Books

Entering the Royal Navy in 1739 at the age of 13, Admiral Lord Howe remained in the Navy until his death in 1799 -- sixty years of service. His career spanned four wars, including the American Revolution where he attempted to negeotiate an end to the revolution and when that proved impossible he commanded the British navy during much of the war. ==His was a lifetime of service and triumph. He was quite possibly the most famous Admiral of his time. Unfortunately in 1805 came the Battle of Trafalgar and Nelson, and Howe's fame faded into history.

This is the first detailed biography of the Admiral. Dr. Syrett has used as many primary documents for his sources as it was possible to find. His analysis of Howe's career places it in perspective to the organization and structure of the Royal Navy through some of its most important years. It also provides an interesting perspective from the other side on the American Revolution. His report of his meeting with John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and John Rutledge has a somewhat different viewpoint than other versions.

This is abook long awaited that fills a hole in any Revolutionary War library.

Admiral Lord Howe proves to be a mildly interesting but brief biography on England's greatest admiral of the 18th Century (and one of the greatest in British naval history). There isn't a single biography on Howe that I know of while there are hundreds on Lord Nelson who totally overshadowed him. This book is an effort to correct that absence of material on Admiral Lord Howe. Unfortunately, this book really don't add much to the literature that well. Much of what you read about Howe in this book can be found almost any book related to the admiral. Whether it due to lack of primary material or lack of research but this book lacks the depth and the detail of a real biography. Almost nothing is written about Howe's childhood and his career until he gained command. Much of Howe's career until he became admiral proves to be short and sweet for the readers. Much of what is written about Howe's latter career as commanding fleet admiral can be found in books related to that subject. This biography however, provides nothing new or insightful to these subject matters.

Overall, this proves to be a biographical summary book. Lack of details, insights and in-depth analysis of the subject at hand make this a hard book to recommend for the price they are asking. Most people who are well read on the Age of Wooden Ships and Iron Men have read superior material on Howe and his battles from other books even if such books may not be centered on Howe himself.

This is excerpted and slightly modified from a published review (Perspectives on Politics Volume 3, June 2005) I wrote of this book, which I like quite a bit and regularly recommend and assign to my political science graduate students.

Event History Modeling: A Guide for Social Scientists provides a broad and in-depth introduction to duration analysis for political scientists and for social scientists in general. This book will instantly become the go-to guide for most political scientists interested in event history analysis and should become a staple on syllabi for graduate courses for years to come. The authors cover a broad range of important topics, employing a combination of mathematical detail and verbal discussion; important concepts are illustrated with examples using political science data that readers can download. For a book on statistical methods, Event History Modeling is quite readable and the authors do a commendable job of presenting a great variety of issues and making clear recommendations.

This book witnesses the long-standing prejudice that non-math or non-stat people would prefer books which drop all the mathematical or logical gimmichks. I could know nothing about the methods from this book. This book does not provide necessary knowledge. Try Lawless or Lee's book. They employ some mathematics. But don't worry. If you are not a statistics major, you just pick up what you should know for your application.

Written in a tight, well paced manner, which should keep young readers enthralled. Matsen does a nice job of keeping the dramatic turn of events moving while adding interesting factual aspects. No - not every detail is included - but I don't think its necessary to get too bogged down in all the facts in a book for this age level. The main intention is to galvanize a young reader's imagination and I think Matsen had done this admirably. I also appreciate his including the female scientists' achievements in the follow-up section for young girls who might be interested and inspired by the subject matter. A fine book for young readers.

This is a juvenile work which allegedly deals with the underwater explorations of William Beebe and Otis Barton. Of the thirty-nine pages of text, however, almost a quarter relates to post-bathysphere explorations. This includes not only the exploits of the Picards and the Trieste (at pp. 36-40), but also accounts of Cindy Lee Van Dover and Sylvia Earle (at pp. 34-35). The latter two are included under the rationale that Beebe and Barton inspired them, but there seems little doubt that their sex played a major role in their appearance here, as neither is stated to have been involved in a record-setting deep sea dive. Perhaps another clue to this grab-bag approach is the publisher website's statement that the series is aimed to appeal to "reluctant readers" (see http://www.enslow.com/catalogue.asp?Exact=true&SeriesID=135 (visited Oct. 19, 2004)), but the lack of focus is shown in the dearth of background given by Matsen for both Beebe and Barton (at p. 7), and the fact that Barton's subsequent explorations of the depths are not considered.

"Aquanaut" does not mean "deep water voyager" as stated at page seven, but merely refers to someone who travels in the water. Similarly, while round-offs are allowable in metric computations, 4.5 feet is given both as 1.4 m (at p. 9) and as 1.5 m (at p. 24). Some of the Fun Facts (at p. 25) could have been made more interesting; Matsen does not note, for instance, that the bait used to attract fish was a live lobster who survived the descent, or that Otis Barton was involved in filming Titans of the Deep. We are not told who broke the Beebe-Barton descent record in 1948 (at p. 28), while the Challenger Deep is said to be named "after a famous British ship" (at 38-39), with no reference to the vessel's importance for oceanographic exploration.

Books which are listed in the chapter notes do not appear in Further Reading, nor is Barton's book listed in either section. Finally, while the ephemeral nature of internet websites is noted (at p. 2), the site reference for Chapter 5, fn. 2 pulls up a useless screen.

I believe that a vast amount of viable space is wasted on horses in this book. While they technically are large animals, they're so vastly different from cattle that they deserve and have their own books which are great.
I think this book isn't very well written and doesn't go into the pathology of diseases very well... at all. I hate the layout, and I think some ideas are just skimmed over or not mentioned at all.
I would not recommend this book, but the problem is there isn't another one out there.

This textbook is, in my experience, the best single medicine reference for large animals. It is designed for the graduate veterinarian and is not easy to read, but contains an immense amount of information (plus references) in a usable format. The index is comprehensive, which is useful as some conditions are discussed by different authors in disparate sections of the text. The text is divided into body systems, then subdivided into equine and ruminant diseases. There are also useful rule-out lists for major clinical signs provided at the beginning of the book. The illustrations and photographs are black-and-white and are largely the same as the previous edition, but this edition contains well-updated text material. Detractors from this text include minimal specific treatment information for some disease processes and the lack of a formulary. It also does not cover swine or camelid species. Nonetheless, I find this book far easier to read and use (with more comprehensive information) than the similar Blood and Radostits text. If you care to invest in several texts instead of a single one, try the Current Veterinary Therapy Equine Practice and Food Animal Practice (very easy to read). However, if you choose these keep in mind that you may need more than one volume of each, as each CVT volume is not comprehensive. My copy of Smith is constantly at hand, and has seen a great deal of use since I purchased it. I recommend this book to any large animal practitioner as a necessary reference.

Since Kingsley Amis was one of the most interesting and amusing 20th century English novelists, any book that closely examines his complete work is bound to be welcome. As well as the sheer gut-busting humour and insight of his first and best known novel, Lucky Jim, Amis was an excellent story-teller capable of serious reflection about the human condition. He just didn't believe in being pompous and self-important about it. Some of his books - The Anti-Death League, for instance, or The Green Man - serve up a fascinating blend of dry humour, drama, characterisation, philosophy and even suspense.

Obviously the man who wrote these books - not forgetting poetry, critical essays and biographies - was himself quite complex. The life and soul of any party, though many were hurt by his scathing wit, Amis was scared of the dark and even being alone, and was apparently prone to sudden attacks of pure existential fear. The tendency to identify him with Lucky Jim, his first and most famous anti-hero, was strengthened by the gradually spreading awareness of the chronic womanising which broke up both his marriages. Yet it seems that Amis much regretted these domestic disasters, conceivably having failed to understand that marriage offers real, though easily overlooked, benefits to husbands as well as wives.

Bradford's thesis is simply that, denials to the contrary notwithstanding, all of Amis' fiction is drawn directly from his own life experience. All he manages to demonstrate, however, is the meaninglessness of this position. Of course every author draws on experience for material - otherwise all fiction would be fantasy. When Bradford is reduced to arguing that "Simona... has characteristics so completely different from Jane's as to virtually announce themselves as covering devices", the poverty of his basic idea is clearly revealed. If a character resembles anyone Amis ever met, he must have copied that character from real life. But if the character is completely different, the same inference is drawn.

Otherwise, the book is well written and evidently based on research as thorough as Amis' own (for a surprising rigour was one of his best qualities). This impression is hardly spoiled by occasional infelicities and repetitions - and at least when Bradford revisits the same text twice, he tells the same story each time. Perhaps the best thing about this book is that it will surely encourage any reader to get hold of Amis' novels and read them (or re-read them, as the case may be).

Is it evil to smile at the thought of how Amis would have fumed if he could have read the manuscript himself? Not really - it is the sort of joke he would have appreciated, and perhaps accompanied by his famous "crazy peasant" face.

There were already at least two biographies of Kingsley Amis in print when Professor Bradford wrote this one. Professor Bradford's biography is both complete and well-written.

It is marred, however, by Professor Bradford's insistence that "Amis's fiction (is) one of the most entertaining and thought-provoking autobiographies ever produced." His point is not simply that Amis has modeled some characters on people he has known, nor that some events are paralleled in Amis's life. Virtually every writer of fiction draws from his life. He goes much further than that, claiming that nearly every character in Amis's novels and stories is intended to be Amis himself or somebody that Amis knew.

He starts with the contention that Jim Dixon, the protagonist of Lucky Jim, Amis's first and perhaps best-known novel, is Amis himself. Dixon, fresh out of college, is teaching in an obscure English college. Amis began teaching at University College of Swansea in Wales while completing his graduate thesis at Oxford. The parallels break down there, however. The plot of Lucky Jim involves Dixon's jettisoning his unattractive, somewhat mentally ill girlfriend and acquiring an attractive, nice blonde one. Amis married an attractive blonde woman while still at Oxford, more than a year before he began teaching at Swansea. Central to the plot of Lucky Jim is Dixon's status as an outsider, never explicitly stated but implied by many things, including the fact that he is from the north of England with an accent that immediately identifies him as such and the fact that he attended a university of no particular prestige (a passage in the third chapter hints that it may be the University of Leicester). Amis, by contrast, was born and raised in London, and, by Bradford's own account had a BBC accent. As already noted, he was an Oxford graduate. Whatever else Amis was, he was not an outsider, at least not by virtue of his birthplace, accent, or university education.

On and on it goes, with Bradford claiming that Simona Quick, the waif-like nineteen-year-old in I Want It Now, is really Jane Howard, Amis's second wife, who was in her mid-forties at the period in which the book was written and takes place, that Amis has split himself between two characters in Girl, 20, that the ten-year-old boy who is to be castrated to preserve his pure, youthful voice in The Alteration is in fact Amis in his mid-fifties, worried about declining .... prowess, and that Amis has split himself into four different characters in The Old Devils, attributing to them such unusual characteristics as the fact that they all drink too much.

Bradford and his editor also get some facts wrong, either by design or by laziness. On page 206, he claims that, in One Fat Englishman, "Micheldene is obliged to take part in a game of charades and is asked to become the embodiment of 'Englishness'". In fact, the other characters try to act "Britishly", and it is Micheldene who is to guess what the word is. This is not a very important point, but consulting the novel itself is all that is necessary to get it right.

Similarly, Bradford, in claiming that Jake Richardson, the title character of Jake's Thing, is actually an older Jim Dixon (who, by Bradford's thesis, is Amis under a different name), asserts on page 305 that "Jake's given name is James", while, in the novel itself, Jake's given name is, in fact, Jaques, pronounced "Jakes". One might argue that the French "Jacques" (Richardson's ancestors came from France) is the equivalent of the English "James", but the chain of reasoning is now one link longer, and, once again, consulting the novel would have been sufficient to provide correct information.

If you are an eliminative materialist then you need help! Not that there aren't some interesting observations in this book - see the chapter with new data on "filling in" - but Churchland's tired example of Maxwell's discovery of electromagnetic waves only demonstrates how subjective the entire world of science really is. A more interesting example might be Maxwell's equations and how they relate to entropy, but I suspect that Churchland's actual knowledge of physics is more on the level of Betty Crocker's knowledge of microwaves...

As for neural nets: go read Perlovsky! I find it odd that Churchland, who loudly proclaims nets as the future of AI, doesn't appear to have read any of Perlovsky's papers; but I suspect he's too busy waving magnets in his living room generating EM waves.

A good collection of essays by recognized leaders in a burgeoning field of philosophy. Some are only useful if what the article is discussing is quite familiar to the reader. This holds in particular for some of the articles on qualia and the article on R. Penrose. It could also be said that the article on Dennett could have been marginally better if the last part, concerning his motivations, were snipped.

This book if filled with good useful scale line drawings of various armored vehicles... Just the thing for a "scratch-builder" looking for new interesting projects... A MUST have for the scale armor modeler...

Actually if you make a copy of the pages you can try different paint schemes and it works out nice. Buy it used, not worth the new price.

Mr. Burns advances a excellent critique regarding the attempt of South American elites to ape western style capitalism. He suggests that attempts to cram western economic/political ideas into the dynamics of Latin America did considerably more harm than good.

What Mr. Burns does not address is that the remedy advocated by many of the critics of those regimes was in very much the same vein. Marxist philosophy, theorized in the traditon of western thought- with western nations in mind, proved to be as ill a fit for Latin America as was western style capitalism.

Mr. Burns failure to realize this is the books ultimate dowfall.

The end product is a study of Latin American hierarchical elites who sought to remake Latin America in 19th century Western Europe's image and a implication the results would have been different if they had modelled it after 20th century Eastern Europe. A good book soured by moldy Marxism.

E. Bradford Burns' The Poverty of Progress is a complex analysis of the degree of beneficence that modernization had upon nineteenth-century Latin America. Burns attempts to provide a novel perspective that will spark a reassessment of the common view that Latin America flourished with the implementation of the European ideals of progress, urbanization, and industrialization. With his claim that not all parts of Latin American society were in favor of the changes induced by modernization, Burns asserts his view that because progress benefited the elite minority while crippling the folk majority, modernization was ultimately a pitfall for Latin America. Due to the intricacy of Burns' argument and the informative information he provides, his Poverty of Progress successfully justifies a mandate for a reinterpretation and questioning of the traditional association of modernization with better living standards. Burns presents his argument in an organized fashion that builds the scenario of the cultural conflict. One should note that early in the first chapter, Burns shows his belief that the problems associated with modernization were due to a cultural conflict rather than a class struggle. With this in mind, Burns begins by discussing the rift between the modernizing elites, who associated progress with capitalism, and the folk, who felt threatened by the capitalist system as it opposed their old, entrenched traditions of harmony and cooperation. The capitalist ideals of individuality and competition clashed with the folk ideals causing the cultural conflict that Burns so articulately explains. He covers the goals of the elite minority which were routed in Spencerian and Darwinian evolution, Positivism, and the Enlightenment, and with these ideologies, the elites pushed for aspects of modernization such as industrialization which came at the expense of the folk majority. With his explanation of the cultural conflict and the aims of the elites, Burns then explores the majority's opposition to modernization with a discussion of the intellectuals, patriarchs, and folk. Here, one begins to understand why modernization was not entirely a beneficial development for Latin America. Burns mentions that intellectual elites began to notice the problems of modernization such as the growing dependence upon foreign investors who took control of Latin America's infrastructure. Intellectuals also pointed to the burdens of agrarian mismanagement that plagued economic conditions for the masses. Large land plots were increasingly controlled by a limited number of landlords who used the land inefficiently to produce export commodities, and economic conditions worsened for the masses as Indian, peasant, and church lands were confiscated. The masses also suffered since food was produced for export rather than for the nourishment of the country. Patriarchs hesitated to modernize as well because the new capitalist incentives for expanded agrarian production threatened their traditional norms of stability and simplicity. Burns suggests that the folks and patriarchs, having common ties in rural society, worked together in defiance against elitist modernization. Finally, he presents an important part of his argument in the last chapter when he explains that the terms "economic growth" and "development" are often misconstrued in their application to nineteenth- century Latin American history, and he offers his own definitions for these terms as well as alternatives to modernization that could have saved Latin America from its downfall. Ultimately, Burns' argument is effective in sparking debate over the degree of beneficence of modernization. One can find several strengths in Burns' The Poverty of Progress that make his belief in the detrimental consequences of modernization convincing. To begin with, the format and style he uses to present his position are effective as he first presents the elite desire for modernization, then the misgivings of the intellectuals toward the implementation of progress, and finally the opposition of the patriarchs and folk to modernization. This overview helps to illuminate the fact that Latin American society was not entirely united behind the trend for progress, and while one might criticize Burns for making broad generalities about Latin America, he dispels this judgment by explaining that his broad analysis is justified by aspects that all eighteen nations had in common: the presence of folk societies which resisted Europeanization, unbalanced power in the hands of the elite minority, and the role of the latifundio as it eventually expanded under the control of few landlords at the majority's expense. Burns also shows a great deal of wisdom in admitting the fact that his broad approach "across vast geographical and temporal spaces" is "at best suggestive," and such a statement allows his work to achieve its polemical purpose since it diffuses critics who might attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the book for its novel approach toward nineteenth-century Latin America (p. 2). This is perhaps the strongest point of the book since it works toward Burns' goal of inciting controversy and a reassessment of the true impact of modernization. Thus, in his The Poverty of Progress, Burns successfully argues that modernization in nineteenth-century Latin America was not completely beneficial as it only advanced the welfare of a select few while decimating the majority.

By and large, the author has succeeding in drawing together a lot of information. However, it appears to me that she has drawn most of her understanding of the history from a limited list of participants in that history. Because she is not a meteorologist herself, this lack of thorough research leads to her characterizations being rather flat. This is not a bad book for those interested in the history of our science, but it is not a definitive work on the subject.

In Scanning The Skies: A History of Tornado Forecasting, Marlene Bradford highlights the development of the US tornado forecast and warning systems from the earliest inception to the modern, multi-component, highly technical system in place today.

Ms Bradford begins the book with the historical background into the theories of tornado formation and the early attempts to predict tornadoes in the United States. The major focus of the story, however, begins a little more than a century ago when the first scientific inquiries and debates as to the nature and causes of tornadoes began. Much of the limited early debate appears to have focussed on the negative aspects of a tornado forecasts, even speculating that more would die from panic or illnesses contracted while huddled in damp storm cellars than from the storms themselves! The US Weather Bureau, recognizing the difficulties in forecasting tornadoes and fearing public panic from any such forecasts, actually forbade use of the word "tornado" in any forecast until 1938.

When the author reaches the state of tornado knowledge during and just after the World War II years, she reaches the true heart of the story. Bradford gives us a well-documented account of the friction between military and civilian storm forecasters in the post-war years that was sparked by the first storm warnings produced within the US military weather service. She takes us from the events leading up to the first "official" tornado warning forecast of Major Ernest Fawbush and Captain Robert Miller issued on March 25, 1948 to the modern forecast and warning system used today by the US Storm Prediction Center.

Having brought the warning system development to the new century, Bradford concludes the book with a chapter an the evaluation of the effectiveness of the integrated tornado warning system over the past several decades. Her analysis shows a difficulty in proving the question as to whether such a system has saved enough lives for the cost of development, implementation and function.

I have no real criticism of Scanning The Skies. Readers looking for more technical material on the scientific aspects of the history of tornado forecasting may be disappointed in this book as it only briefly and superficially discusses scientific advances that lead to improvements of the tornado warning system (such as the development of Doppler radar). Recognizing that the book is intended to present the history of the process of developing a tornado warning system and not about the science behind it, I feel a little more attention could have been given to some of the more relevant scientific aspects with a few diagrams for clarification as to what forecasters look for when developing a tornado watch or warning forecast.

If you are interested in tornadoes or in disaster prevention and warning programs, I think you will find Scanning The Skies an enjoyable and informative read. Scanning The Skies is a well- written historical account of the rise of the modern tornado forecasting and warning system as well as a peek at the workings within government as agencies vie for control and funding while simultaneously trying to avoid criticism.

awfully thin "book" - more of a pamphlet really.

This is an extremely valuable book. The web is a critical sales channel for me, and the nuggets of hands-on wisdom I have found in this book have already paid off handsomely for my company and me. I am a long-time reader of Inc. magazine, and it is clear that Brad Ketchum has a gift for distilling the most pertinent content from the magazine in a very user-friendly format.