Clarke Books

Jung said if we want to study dreams, a dream series is better than isolated ones. The book under review is a good illustration of that, being composed exclusively of dreams of the author and his comments on them. This is a rare achievement, very challenging and very instructive. Verily I learned from the book some of the pitfalls to avoid when dealing with our dreams, but that is enough in itself to make a treasure. When we offer our dreams to the world, we must accept the possibility that they will be diverted of their way.
Clarke presents himself as Jung's successor, but I have my doubts about that. He talks all the time about the `Higher Self', but as far as I know Jung never did. Jung at the end came up with the equation psyche = matter, Clarke wants to be all spirit, a Priest of the unconscious as he says. When he writes "Jung speaks of the ferocious conflict between the sex instinct and the love of God" (p. 230), or "Jung states that we must live by the higher Lord of Spirits, but that modern man has fallen into the dark, negative side of Mercurius" (p. 346), I want references because I don't recognize Jung in that. But this is a lesser evil. After all everybody is entitle to follow his own way. The greater evil in the occurrence is not listening to our dreams, and I think Clarke falls badly here.
If we amplify a dream with collective material, be it Christian, Egyptian, alchemical or what not, we will end up talking only about our readings if we don't come back to the dream. What it has to say to the dreamer - before the Western man or humanity - might well lie hidden precisely in the little details in the dream that differ from the collective material. Jung said (well, I don't give the reference) that every dream talks about something the dreamer doesn't know, otherwise it won't occur at all. It may be debatable, but it makes a good tool in understanding dreams. For instance if a dream agrees completely with the conscious attitude or thinking of the dreamer - many dreams in the book are of this type - then, according to the tool, something must be wrong with this attitude or thinking.
The `moral quest' with dreams consists in taking them personally and doing something with them, otherwise we get stuck with the shadow - even if God himself appears on our bedside. What is missing throughout the book is the feminine in its totality.

The Four Gold Keys is the best book on Christian symbolism I have ever read. Clarke does not merely explain the symbolism. He shows how the symbols and archetypes of the individual and collective consciousness are meant to transform our lives, to individuate us into the types of spiritual heros described by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. I recommend this book for those who desire to transform their lives for the better by using the wisdom hidden in the Christian mysteries. Jim Marion, author of "Putting on the Mind of Christ, the Inner Work of Christian Spirituality."

I'm trying to learn Spanish on my own using an assortment of dictionaries, CDs, language guides and texts, and a couple of phrase books. In my search for learning aids I examined a number of phrase books; none were perfect, but this one seemed to have a better balance of features than most:
- Pocket-sized, with good quality flexible paper (not too stiff!)
- A Spanish-English & English-Spanish dictionary, with words indexed to phrases
- A basic language and grammar guide, incl. common verbs and conjugations
- Straightforward clear translations on a broad variety of topics
- Well-organized, clean layout, helpful pronunciation guidance
- Uses illustrations as an aid in appropriate places (e.g. body parts, parts of a car, etc)

Like most phrasebooks, the dictionary section is limited by the space available, but this one seems to include most of the words that are mentioned in phrase section. Still, you'll want to have a real dictionary to supplement this (or any) phrasebook.

What would make this worthy of 5-stars?
- Each section is color-coded along the edge, but there is no color key along the outside cover of the book. This would make it easier to quickly find and locate sections.
- The introductory sections on "Survival Spanish" (key phrases) and the language overview should be beefed up a bit. The grammar section has a surprising amount of useful guidance on verbs, but is much more sketchy about other rules of the language. Another 5 to 10 pages on grammar would go a long way toward making this a near-perfect phrase book.

After carefully examining a number of Spanish phrasebooks, I'm not sure that any of them are quite worthy of 5 stars... but the Frommer's is *very* good and has been the best that I've found.

... Neither do I. But it's amazing how much comes back to you with this little book gem. I just spent 5 days in the guts of Mexico City on business and I really enjoyed this book. It's small enough to carry around discretely and well organized (like "stuff to say in restaurants" and "stuff to say at hotels"). Really nice for short trips to Mexico. If you ever had high school Spanish - even a million years ago like me - this is a great book because you will kind of remember how to talk Spanish but you'll have forgotten the words. I highly recommend it.

This book is spectacular. As a 4th year history major (with an emphasis on Canadian military history) I can assure anybody who is looking for details on what it was like for the CEF in the trenches, Bird captures it perfectly.

Other books by CEF Books are just as worthy and deserve to be checked out.

A remarkable tale of trench warfare written in exceptional detail. Throughout there are bits of humour as well as showing the horrors of combat. The camaraderie between the soldiers is strongly demonstrated as well. A book hard to put down and one is compelled to read it a second time. The author had a brother killed in the First World War and tragically his son was killed in the Second World War. This man knows what he is writing about. Another great book by this author is No Retreating Footsteps.

I think this book is really brings to the surface many of the failings of grant books. I highly suggest it. I also suggest another book linked below. The "Government Funding and You Series" is also excellent.

Check out this product here:
Government Funding and You: The Workbook (Government Funding and You)

A helpful guideline to clean up your writing and thought skills. It pointed out mistakes such as giving too much information in a disjointed manner. I think it is useful. I am new to grantwriting for a small art nonprofit and reading lots of books. I did read the whole book so that is a star in itself. Reading for information is a lot different than reading for pleasure and one tends to skim informaiton.

This was a carefully considered and well balanced introduction the the subject of Strategic Management and the role that Information Systems can play in an organisations approach.

The concepts are brought up from basics and although an understanding of organisational behaviour, management theories and change management concepts are helpful they are not required to understand Robson's book.

She introduces the major players int the field well, and puts their work clearly and easily within the reach of beginners. An example of this is Porter's five forces of competition, Robsons cuts through his waffle to outline the theory clearly.

Although the examples used are primarily relevant to the UK the concepts are put so anyone could understand them.

The book is well laid out and uses diagrams and charts wherever possible.

This book/text is one of the most complete treatments of the total Information Systems environment from the strategic management perspective. It answers the question: What tools are available to IS/IT managers to evaluate, analyze, monitor, and manage Information Technology to achieve sustainable strategic advantage? An extensive use of tables and diagrams makes it a wonderful reference book. Also, the format is straigtforward - simple paperback, black & white with line drawings. This makes for a compact, but easy to navigate reference book. The current 1993 edition is somewhat dated and I hope a new edition is in the works. I am using this as a reference book for an accelerated Information Technology Management program I am in currently developing for Daniel Webster College in Nashua, NH, USA.

As a long time breeder of warmbloods and author of bloodline articles, I recommend this book to anyone considering breeding sport horses with European bloodlines. The book is well written and easy to follow. It covers each of the 'breeds' and the most successful performance lines, up to the publication date. The book is an excellent reference; however, the development of the top internationally successful horses today is proceeding at an incredible rate with new sires establishing themselves regularly. To keep current, breeders should subscribe to individual breed registries and/or the World Federation of Sport Horse Breeders through BCM in Holland. They produce an annual update on leading sires.

As the owner of The Warmblood Connection, I refer buyers and prospective breeders to this book on a regular basis. The authors offer the most impartial information related to the different Warmblood breeds. The authors do an excellent job of presenting the significant Warmblood bloodlines (in terms of performance) and then tracking these bloodlines to stallions and mare already imported to the United States. This is a must-have resource for anyone who wants to purchase or breed Warmbloods. Karen Jackson

This book is something quite different from the usual text on knowledge management. It is a collection of articles from KM practitioners around the globe whose main desire, but not their only one, is to show that knowledge management is a process that uses and is influenced by both the social and technical.

Although I wouldn't recommend it as an undergraduate text there are plenty of really interesting ideas that I will be exploring with my Knowledge Management Technologies class when it runs next year (2003). It will certainly find a place amongst my reference books.

If this book isn't near the top of the KM best seller list then it deserves to be.

For those in a hurry: I enjoyed this book; if you're interested in knowledge management, you probably will, too. Those with more time, read on...

The `graffiti' subtitle of this volume indicates its link with an earlier book on sociotechnical systems in the same Springer series on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. (See 1.) This book maintains the sociotechnical viewpoint, this time concentrating on knowledge management.

Because of this shared viewpoint, the different chapters are far better integrated than in most contributed volumes. The contributions have also been kept short and to the point, the longest being 17 pages, and taken together these make for an easy but stimulating read.

The contributors form a diverse group, with half being based in the UK and the others hailing from Australia, Scandinavia, Singapore, South Africa and the USA. The majority are academics, but there is a sprinkling of practitioners and consultants. There are 14 substantive chapters, plus introductory and concluding chapters by the editors. JORS readers may find some of the material familiar, as several of the authors gave presentations in the Learning Organisations and Knowledge Management streams at the OR42 Conference in September 2000 at Swansea.

After the Introduction, Coakes herself succinctly describes how the principles of sociotechnical systems apply to knowledge management in Chapter 2. The succeeding chapters are then divided into four parts: know-why, know-what, know-who, and know-how, although many of the chapters cut across two or more of these headings. Parts 1 and 2 mainly discuss theoretical foundations, while parts 3 and 4 are substantially based on case studies.

`Know-why' (part 1) comprises four chapters. Binney complements Coakes's chapter by explaining the human and organisational significance of his own `knowledge management spectrum'. Goldkuhl and Braf look at the relationship between the individual and the organisation, and thus at the relationships between individual knowledge and what they term organisational ability and organisational action. Chapter 5 is entitled "managing knowledge in a knowledge business"; the business in question is a university, and unusually the author (Scholtz) is one of the university's IT managers rather than an `academic'. Yoo and Ifvarsson emphasise the importance of discussing knowledge and learning in organisations as something dynamic, rather than static. They also make the telling point that a `best practice' approach may sometimes constrain the individual rather than enabling her, echoing Scholtz's view that the academic peer-regulation system may fail to recognise true creativity.

`Know-what' (part 2) is represented by chapters 7 and 8. Phillips and Patrick explain an agent-based model for investigating how cognitive style affects the development of groups, effectively developing a research agenda, while Pemberton and Stonehouse address the situation of the individual in the knowledge-centric organisation. I was a little worried to see the commonly used but unhelpful phrase "extracting individual knowledge" appearing in the latter chapter, despite the book's sociotechnical standpoint.

The three chapters in part 3 cover `know-who'. Chapter 9 by Huang and Pan concentrates on the vital, but relatively under-researched topic of managing knowledge about customers. Their case study of Boots the Chemist illustrates very well the importance of face to face interaction, and the limitations of IT. Yi examines the functioning of a pilot community of practice in Motorola and reports the outcomes from its operation. Ericsson and Avdic develop and justify a simple prototype system to help in managing knowledge relating to errors in the manufacturing process for a Swedish SME.

Part 4 contains five chapters, including the Conclusion, grouped under `know-why'. Here the general JORS reader will find some familiar techniques from soft OR and systems. Cuthbertson and Farrington use Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) in chapter 12 to appreciate a problematic knowledge management situation in one of the Royal Navy's training schools. SSM rich pictures also feature in Chapter 14, by Al-Karaghouli et al, as part of an approach which also advocates the use of group facilitation techniques in requirements elicitation for information systems. The retail sector is the example used here. By contrast, in the intervening chapter, Kazi et al offer something highly unfamiliar: a model of knowledge creation and management based on a palm tree, yielding (eventually) its knowledge coconuts. [This came as somewhat of a surprise to this reviewer, who previously associated Finland more with `track and field nuts' than coconuts.] This novel image is applied to a Finnish engineering firm, and for this reviewer was perhaps the most thought provoking image in the whole book. Kazi et al also link explicit knowledge to programmable decisions, but it is not apparent that they are aware of the OR/MS heritage here in the work of people such as Herbert Simon. Chapter 15, by Coakes et al, compares the management of tacit (and explicit) knowledge in two consulting companies, with a particular focus on whether there is a role for IT.

Overall, there is plenty of material here for both academics and practitioners interested in knowledge management. The book will also serve as useful source material to support knowledge management teaching. One unusual stylistic feature is the highlighting of key points in "speech bubble" call-outs from the main text. It took me a little while to get used to this, but by the end of the book I was finding it helpful rather than intrusive. As I said at the beginning, I enjoyed this book, and I think most people interested in knowledge management will.

John Edwards
Aston University

Reference
1. Coakes, E., Willis, D. and Lloyd-Jones, R. (Eds.) (2000) The New SocioTech: Graffiti on the Long Wall. Springer Verlag, London.

I've already sent feedback. I received the book in great time. However, I was a little disappointed in the condition. Bothe the front and back cover and binding were worn and bent. I'm not sure if it occured during shipping and handling. Some of the books were sent in envelopes. I'm not sure if this was one of them. I don't think so.

I was able to get the book I need in the condition promised and timely! Just in time for class!

This work chronicles the relatively rapid dissolution of the British Empire as a consequence of already existing nationalistic pressures within its component parts and the drastic diminution of British power ironically brought about by World War II. Though a victor, Britain was dwarfed by the size of its debt and the might of its partners, the Soviet Union and the United States. Mr. Clarke delineates glimmers of decline by detailing internecine rivalries between British and American commanders, how they grow and impinge operations as Allied forces move beyond Normandy. The gradually overwhelming preponderance of American forces and equipment is resented and in cases resisted, but eventually has to be accepted: the might of the arithmetic cannot be ignored. The diminution of British power is nowhere more painfully shown than at the Yalta conference where it becomes obvious to everyone, perhaps more desperately so to Churchill himself, that the Big Three had become the Big Two, though not rudely so. (There is ample, at times ironic discussion of Churchill's positions on post-war European boundaries and the issue of which Polish government to recognize). America was clear and unanimous (Democratic and Republican) in its political judgement when it joined the war that it would save Britain but not its Empire.

Even at its height, during the Edwardian era, careful observers had noted that the British empire could not be sustained. The gradual evolution of concepts such as Dominion and Commonwealth attested to the futility of trying to exercise central control far removed from robust constituent nationalities or original settlements such as Canada, Australia and South Africa which had developed their own ways. Their loyal and quick supportive response to the challenge of WWII, though touted by Churchill as evidence of the inherent "goodness" of the British Empire, indeed manifested most enlightened self-interest, as no one doubted the debt incurred by Britain would pave the way to greater power and independence once the wartime emergency had passed. Indeed, with the fall of Singapore to the Japanese, an outpost of empire such as Australia could no longer look to Britain for support and defense, only to itself and to the United States.

Mr. Clarke's book is faithful to its title. It shows how and why it came about that the British Empire was dismantled in the aftermath of World War II. It does not discuss whether such dismantling would have come about anyway, indeed that it was contemplated even at the end of the nineteenth century. Rather, the emphasis is on the acceleration provided by the conclusion of the war, the indebtedness Britain had incurred, the new multinational world aspired to but the bipolar one which ensued. The higher up in the ranks the tale goes, the smoother it is told (e.g. the interactions between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin). The narrative gets a bit confusing and the details messy when it gets into military history such as the discussion of Operation Market Garden. In fairness to Clarke, it is difficult to discuss strategies and operational details while trying to illustrate rivalries, pettiness, egos, wounded pride, concurrently at play, as the British gradually realize that their relative power is diminishing and that the final defeat of Germany from the West is emerging as primarily an American show. After all the pain and privation, somehow it did not seem fair.

India and Pakistan are obviously covered, but those histories are better served in stand-alone texts than in survey, though what is here is apt. There is an interesting section on Palestine, the termination of the British Mandate, and the grave political and moral questions it posed for Britain in dealing with post-Nazi European Jewish emigration to a land where they were not welcomed and which was under their administrative control. There is discussion of Arab political ineptness, Zionist terrorism, Arab recalcitrance, occupying authority anti-semitism, the President Warfield SS ("Exodus") incident, etc., cumulatively leading to partition, war, the emergence of modern Israel and the growing problems America, as a power with interests in all sides of the conflict, still faces in the Middle East.

The final sections of the book deal with the economic consequences of the war (pace Keynes), and to America's role in rescuing post-war Britain, much to the chagrin of some. There's an Epilogue that aims at analysing what is referred to as the "special relationship" between Britain and America, more than just a literary conceit but, now that the power scales are so tilted, certainly not always a mutuality of interests. One cannot help but recall Hans Morgenthau's realistic dictum that countries have no friends, only interests.

Mr. Clarke's preference for detail over analysis, working by inference, so to speak, is helpful but at times proves distracting from the general thrust of argument. Churchill appears central to the narrative, as indeed he was, even when dismissed from office. The portrait that emerges is less iconographic than usual, but more human. In some ways closer to what one gets from Lord Moran's memoirs without the medical detail.

This is a valuable guide to how British imperial power came apart. It passed to no inheritor, though American interests are significantly present in most of those areas of the mapa mundi which used to be colored red. Strongly recommended.

This book is a splendid achievement. In it, Peter Clarke, former Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, examines the last thousand days of the British Empire (1944-1947) in its personal as well as in its economic dimensions. Demonstrating a comprehensive grasp of the facts and macaulayan narrative skill, Clarke shows us with what astonishing rapidity the Empire was given up, once the elites had grasped the hopelessness of the situation. Though he describes the birth of Israel and an independent India, his focus is on the troubled relations between Britain and the US in this period of world-historical transition. The timing of this book's publication was apt (2007 in the UK edition), roughly coinciding with Britain's final payment on its war debt to the US (December 2006).

Clarke sketches Churchill and FDR with light, economical strokes, bringing them to life in a way that no historian has done heretofore and showing them for the first time as, to use his phrase, "fully plausible human beings." He displays a quite remarkable capacity for stepping into the shoes his actors, major and minor, and seeing the world through their eyes. His prose is a delight--precise diction and wonderfully varied rhythms. Flashes of wit catch the reader unawares and the author's gift for phrase-making relieves a long journey (about 526 pages). It cannot be said of Clarke that his "tired tropes succumbed to repetitive strain injuries through over-exercised metaphors," though his metaphors do get a vigorous workout.

Clarke does not press the point, but his story resonates powerfully with current events. In the end, though, his message is not entirely clear. His strictures against those who, like Ghandi, were willing to indulge romantic notions if it cost a million lives, are strangely suspended whenever Churchill comes into view. Can myth-making be excused when things happen to turn out well?

I was pleased with the book because it was being discussed by a church book club.Those who discussed it are big fans of St. Therese and although I was new to the life and work of this saint, it brought me close to her and her life, great struggles, and inspiration for others. I didn't really know the scope of the book or its style before I bought it. I would have appreciated an excerpt from Amazon.com

This authoritative translation of the second volume of the critical edition of the letters of St. Therese and those written to her is an unprecedented breakthrough in the field, and a delight for her new and old friends. For the first time in English, one can read Therese's letters from the time of her final vows in September 1890 until her death in 1897. Readers can accompany her through the most hidden years of her Carmelite life, the election of her sister as prioress ("Mother! ah! how sweet it is for your child to give you this name!"), the death of her father ("Papa's death does not seem like a death to me, but like a real life . . ."), her letters to her missionary brothers, Adolphe Roulland and Maurice Belliere ("Ah! Brother, let me tell you: the good God is reserving for your soul very sweet surprises."), her letters to her sisters Marie ("what pleases God in my little soul . . . is that He sees me loving my littleness, my poverty, the blind hope I have in His mercy"), Leonie and Celine ("Yes, it is enough if we humble ourselves and bear with our imperfections; that is real sanctity,"), and her growing sense of mission ("I would like to save souls and forget myself for them; I would like to save them even after my death."

The letters written to Therese deepen the reader's knowledge of her milieu and the persons who surrounded her in the Lisieux Carmel. The notes are a marvel of depth and precision, enabling the reader to see Therese's words in the context of her real life. An index to both volumes of Therese's letters is a great enhancement. I cannot recommend the book highly enough.