Burke Books

Not really much else to say about a humor book...

well, my boyfriend of 5 years and his best friend wrote it, and i think its pretty damned funny. you should buy it, go do it. NOW.

Burke and Flateau have put forth an extremely acute yet absent-minded commentary. They are keenly aware of the lack of idiotic behavior in American society, and the Idiot's Handbook is a valiant attempt to remedy that situation.
Everything from historic idiotic literature to idiotic music, from examples of idiotic behavior to the science and universe of the idiots, is included in this exhaustive compilation of every stupid thing the authors thought up over their high school years. There are even (fake) advertisments to show the reader all the products that Burke and Flateau would, had they the means, make available to the general populace in order to help them become better idiots.
In order to understand it, one must first realize the nature of this work. What the authors have actually done is to make idiocy into an institution: many of the catch phrases, silly habits, and crazy tendencies that we all display have actually formed this manual for idiots. It is also necessary to employ all of one's imagination in reading it; in order to get most of the jokes, one must imagine the situations, the sounds, and the sights. In this way it is also a modern "interactive" book.
The Idiot's Handbook is, in a word, stupid. But in two words, it's ingeniously stupid...

Use this book, and you won't need to open the text book. I got an A!

This was the one and only book required for my Real Estate Transactions course so I have nothing else to compare it to. Nevertheless, I have used plenty other Examples and Explanations books, and have always been pleased. However, this book is the worst one I have encountered. The style of writing is confusing. It is poorly organized. Quite simply, avoid it at all costs.

As a law student, I have often sought books which are willing to explain difficult material in the clearest terms possible. With most textbooks there is no hope. However, this Real Estate Examples and Explainations book was fantastic. It is written clearly and yet deals with some of the most complex material in real estate law. For persons seeking a grasp of the fundamentals of real estate law and finance, this book is of infinite value. For others seeking a more detailed analysis of complex real estate issues, this is a good starting off point. I would highly recommend this text.

Nicholas Dirks is an outstanding scholar who undermines his case with a mistake no first year graduate student would make. On page 22 he refers to Governor General Wellesley as Arthur, Marquess Wellesley --later known as the "Iron Duke". The Gov Gen of India was Arthur Wellesley's older brother Richard who at the time of appointment was Lord
Mornington. He only became an Irish Marquess after HIS CAREER IN INDIA ENDED. Arthur Wellesley served in the army in India and later in Europe where his success against Napoleon led him to the peerage as the "Iron Duke" of Wellington. This ridiculous confusion is repeated in the index. How Dirks could have allowed this error to appear is beyond me, especially as he cites over twenty names of people who supposedly read this manuscript. How could an editor at Harvard U.P. allow such nonsense? Dirks take many scholars to task--perhaps justifiably- in this book, but how can we believe anything if the simplest information is just wrong?

Scandal of Empire is a disturbing book.
Disturbing because it goes back to the earliest times of English presence in India and pieces together events at a level of detail unheard of in Indian history texts (which are mostly written by "eminent historians").

Dirks explains how cleverly England converted an open grab of resources into a civilising mission first in the eyes of its own citizens and then even in the eyes of the citizens of occupied India.
The whitewash was so effective, that India's most recent (and arguably her worst) Prime Minister actually claimed, in Cambridge itself, that india benefited hugely from Colonial occupation (which was estimated to have resulted in the vacuum cleaning of resources and economic value of over 10 trillion dollars in today's monies, not including the cost and pain of lives lost).

Replete with references to actual notes and documents, this is a solid piece of work.

A must read for every Indian.

Scandal gets only 4 stars for Dirks' writing style; his sentences are over-long and his style academic. Readers will have to work to extract his messages.

To a layman like me this book offers an interesting glimpse to a dark side of the birth of british India. At the same time it provides a vivid account of the battles engendered by indian affairs in british politics in the second half of eighteenth century.

These disciplines are what take a company from "Good to great". The book is intense and filled with priceless intelligence that can make your organization a global force and remind you that only hard work and efficacy will get you there.

As a Six Sigma Black Belt in an organization that is looking to expand outside of operations, I thought this would be a good book to give me some examples to help sell Six Sigma to my marketing colleagues. But rather than show how DMAIC can improve marketing cycle time, productivity, ROI, etc or how DMADV can lead to better new product launches, it laid out three stage-gated processes to run a marketing organization. DMADV / DFSS was barely mentioned, if at all. This book will not help a marketing organization implement traditional Six Sigma and it will not help a current Six Sigma practioner expand their program to Marketing.

This book, Six Sigma for Marketing Processes, differs from most Six Sigma books. Its purpose is to introduce 3 new proactive methods to focused on improving core marketing / business process areas: Strategic Planning (for Portfolio Renewal), Tactical Offering Development & Launch Preparation (developing an offering), and Operational in a Post-Launch environment (managing an offering through its lifecycle). It mentions the importance of the more traditional Six Sigma methods, and discusses selecting and using the appropriate method at the right time, for the right business need.

Although enjoyable, this is not James Burkes best work. This does indeed seem more like "Six Degrees of Connections" at times. Without revealing any sequences here, there are cases that demonstrate Burke's "Trigger Effect". Unfortunately there are too many (for my taste anyway) cases of Mr. X was working on this invention and then he was walking on the sidewalk across from Mr. Y who became famous for something completely different. Because this work concentrates on torturously linking together people rather than connecting the innovations the narrative tends to blend together.

The unexpected origins of the modern world. If you've ever played the game of "Six degrees from Kevin Bacon" you'll at least understand this book. Whether you enjoy it or not depends on how much you can focus your attention because this is one hop, skip, and jump book. The author takes an event and shows how it is connected to another event much later in time by a series of meetings, mentors, friends, coincidences, etc. Then another such series is also described with the same start and end point. Wow! Isn't that amazing! And he does this again and again and again. Like "six degrees" you find that almost anything in this world is related to almost anything if you draw our the relationships thin enough. After the third or fourth thread I was exhausted at trying to follow the bouncing ball and gave up on the book.

Burke is an excellent source for people getting an introduction to what is interesting about the history of ideas- in particular the history of techological and scientific ideas.

The reviewer Loveridge suggests that the connections are something like a superficial hopping about, and that really everything is related to everything using the principle of 6 degrees of freedom. This is a superficial analysis and unfair. Without giving away sequences in this book, consider a well known sequence of Burke's related in his popular Connections series. Use of the water wheel in medieval europe employed a cam to lift hammers for use in things like beating metal. This mechanism of cams as used by complicated bell ringing instruments that used a rotating drum with pegs to trip the bell at the correct time. This system of using trips recorded on a passing pattern of "0"s and "1"s, (do something or don't do something) was used in the Jaccard loom to create complicated patterns in woven cloth. Punched cards were used as an innovation and later were used by tabulating machines to conduct the 1890 US census. The tabulating company created by Hollerith later evolved into IBM. It was a simple matter to jump from storing numbers to storing instructions in these binary patterns.

Is the sequence an exercize in 6 degrees of freedom? Not at all. Just because there is no linear causality or intended outcomes between these innovations, does not mean that they are not an accurate recording of a complicated stream of dependencies between these events. The way we came to computers was dependent on the development of the cam. It is possible that we would have come to it by an different avenue, but that is not the point. This is the way it happenned, and it was cirucuitous, and like following a bouncing ball.

I read this novel back in highschool. It was a delightful find amongst the various Dungeons and Dragons books and encyclopedias. The story telling style is unique. Burke's wordplay continues to amuse me, lyrical and somewhat similar to that of a beatnik poet. The characters are lively, and the plot so familiar and touching but at the same time saddening and eerily disconcerting. In the beginning it seems to be a story about a girl struggling to find herself in an era of pop star deaths, feminist movements, and political scandels. Burke weaves the herion into each of the time period's monstrous events, as she marches in protests, watches Marilyn Monroe sing to President JFK and has her little talk with Nixon. But as the story unfolds it reveals itself to be about more than the herion, but about a family altogether, each cultural event a metaphor about her life and really life in general. It's about her parents relationship, her relationship with her parents, and the death of the american dream.

When I finished this book, I was gripped with a stirring of passionate emotions and to this day am still spinning from the impression it made upon me. I will praise this book until the day I die, and gladly proclaim it one of my favorites. If you have a love of a good story that is out of the ordinary, I highly urge you to pick up this book and indulge.

Atomic Candy does a great job of placing the reader in the middle of many important cultural events in the post-WWII era but does nothing beyond that. The book disintegrates into a ho-hum story of a woman trying to find some purpose in life and concludes with a puzzling encounter with Richard Nixon. I finished reading this book on a trip and spent the entire ride back trying to figure out what exactly the point of the story was. I'm still scratching my head.

I loved this book! Somehow, we missed it on our prior trips to DV. It covers all the basic hikes, plus a few more. The authors' clarity about length of hike, elevation gain, and optional additional hikes are all very useful. We carried it with us everywhere. I need to get my hands on their Utah book, Wild Utah!

The book is written well and very attractive.
But it is unreliable and potentially dangerous. For example, it encouraged taking a regular car (and driving carefully) on a road the National Park Service says is only good for SUVs or ATVs. This was risky advice. It was hard to find some of the trailheads the book mentioned, though that might simply be because this year 2000 book might already be out of date.

Do not pick on Bangladeshis, Mr.Green Tiger. To me as a foreigner a completely new world opened up with this book! I never use obscenities myself, but it is good to be aware of signs and gestures that can be interpreted as such in different cultures. After all, where else will you find so many "bad words" printed legally on a paper?!

Great book if you're an ESL student. For writers and research, though, it sucks (author's term). If there's an American out there who doesn't know EVERYTHING in this book by the time they've reached 18, they're either in a convent or heavily drugged.

Cardiff's rough and a tumble docksides have been the setting for some excellent crime fiction by John Williams (the author of Cardiff Dead and Five Pubs, Two Bars, and a Nightclub-to whom the book is dedicated), and Bill James (Middleman). Butetown appears again as the background for this dark book set in 1989. Mostly told through the eyes of a weary Irish-Catholic alcoholic pharmacist, the story follows the aftermath of the gruesome murder of a local prostitute. Jack wakes up the next morning in a haze, his clothes covered in blood and with no recollection of the previous night. Fortunately for him, local gangster brothers Carl and Tony Baja are soon arrested for the killing. Unfortunately for him, their arrest is more a matter of wishful thinking than evidence, and soon the whole community is talking about what the Baja boys are gonna do. But ultimately, who actually did the killing is presented as almost beside the point. The police are keen on the Bajas and lose interest when they are released. The pharmacist doesn't seem that keen on figuring it out until near the end, and although he knows his friend Jess is involved, he doesn't seem that bothered to learn why until other factors come into play.

Indeed, while Burke's portrait of the downtrodden Welsh/Jamaican/Italian/Arab/etc. waterfront community of Butetown is interesting, none of the characters are developed very well, nor do they have very clear motivations for anything. The bleakness and despair are powerful, to the point where everyone seems to be adrift in this hopeless purgatory of drugs, violence, and awful sex. Which is not to say that every book must have a hero, but it would be nice if there was someone to at least care about. It's not even really about the loss of friendship or trust, since the relationship between Jack and Jess is shown as a sham from its earliest days. Nor is Jack's marriage to Victoria ever shown to have held any happiness. Everyone and everything seem doomed and decomposing.

There's mood to spare, but the story lacks pace, plotting, and character, all of which makes more sense now that I know that Burke is an lit/philosophy academic. Let me put it another way, when someone's first two books are The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida and Authorship: From Plato the the Postmodern, it shouldn't come as a surprise when their debut crime novel doesn't quite cut it.

When Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" first opened at the local multiplex it played to an audience of twenty. As we left the cinema, each member of the audience wore a mask of what can only be described as haunting, horrified bliss. There was a sense of excitement that we had witnessed a fresh and dangerous talent but also a certain unease - the rules had been changed and the crime genre would never really be safe and comfortable again. Readers of Sean Burke's debut novel "Deadwater" are in for a similar treat.

The premise of the novel is simple. A young prostitute is murdered and the next morning Jack Farissey, an alcoholic self-medicating pharmacist, wakes up covered in blood and unable to remember a thing about the previous night. In a conventional thriller Farissey would be one step ahead of the police, desperate to prove his innocence before the handcuffs were slapped on but this is a novel that rarely chooses the obvious path. The police, led by detective Hargest, have little or no interest in the truth. They are pursuing a different kind of justice and begin a relentless campaign to frame local gangsters, the Baja brothers, for the murder. Things are complicated when Jack's wife Victoria returns and joins the Baja's defence team. Although the plot twists and turns like a Russian gymnast on speed, the reader though frequently breathless is never left behind. There is a lyrical despair to the writing and a depth of characterisation one doesn't find often in thrillers but this is more than just a thriller, it is a deep and penetrating look into the soul of the marginal, disenfranchised and desperate inhabitants of Butetown, an area of Cardiff which makes the mean streets of New York look like EuroDisney. Imagine "Heart of Darkness" written by Raymond Chandler and set in Cardiff and it becomes possible to glean some idea of a book that is doomed, haunting and unforgettable; a book that makes the darkness seem bright in comparison. "Deadwater" is a novel that is both literary and gripping and, in Sean Burke, readers of James Lee Burke, Ian Rankin and James Elroy have found another name to put on their shelves.

When I first read this book I was expecting a story about "a lesbian mother's fight for her son." In reality, very little of this book deals with the author's family situation and relationship with her son. Most of the book chroncicles the author's political activism and there is compartively little dealing with her partner or child. A profound disappointment

This book tells two parallel stories: the author's struggle to adopt and raise the son she had with her partner, and the story of Queer Nation - San Francisco from about 1990 to 1992. It's an excellent documentary of both her personal story and the historical events of those years: protests against the Gulf War, christian evangelists, and the film "Basic Instinct." I participated in the protests and am mentioned in the book, but that's not why I like it. It's funny, accurate, touching and dramatic.