Coleman Books

David Coleman, who was not "privileged" to be born an American, speaks for an awful lot of us ordinary ones! And he also already figured out a lot of Americans are notbig on reading to get information, but have opted for news-snippets and teaser blurbs while watching Idols or Survivors on the boob-tube, so he made this book really short!

I'll be ordering a few to distribute with the message "Read this, then pass it along"--because that's how I got my copy.

Americans have been lulled into the complacency of "nannyism"--far too ready to place responsibility for everything that happens to them on somebody else--usually, Uncle Sam.

Hopefully, we will take back our heritage, before we have to read about it in a pamphlet handed to us by someone from another government, written in another language--while we are serving them fast food!

As more businesses move to 24/7 operations, round-the-clock scheduling will become an hotter issue. This is not new. Some companies, some industries, have been operating with a 24-hour schedule since the 19th century. Now the issue carries greater importance since workers are increasingly concerned about work-life balance, career development, and alternative work schedules. The author of this book, Richard Coleman, is a consultant with over two decades of experience helping a wide range of employers develop the Best Cost schedule that balances business needs like productivity and profit with health and safety requirements and employee desires. All these factors must be taken into consideration, and there is an almost infinite number of designs that can be applied. Coleman's experience comes out early in the book. I was fascinated by all the factors involved in determining the right schedule. My learning was enhanced by example after example from the author's work that illuminated the reading. During the first few chapters, I felt like I was reading a continuous commercial for Coleman's consulting firm, but this barrage eased as the book moved into the latter chapters. While I am not by any means an expert in scheduling, I learned a lot from this book. OK, I didn't know anything about scheduling before I read this book. However, I now have a healthy respect and understanding for what goes into developing a work schedule for a round-the-clock operation. Human resource professionals, plant managers, and others with operational knowledge of staffing and scheduling will gain considerably more than I did because of their familiarity with the topic. Coleman covers all aspects of shift work schedules, even including Circadian rhythms. It's all here. Readers will learn how to better use time and human resources to maximize return on capital investment and equipment. They'll learn how to achieve greater results without overstaffing, certainly a serious issue in today's labor-scarce world. If your interest is in squeezing more productivity from every hour of the day-without squeezing employees, this book is for you. Ignore the 1995 copyright. The principles taught in this volume are high relevant, quite timely for what's happening in the early 21st century.

A scintillating work of literary and historical sociology, that takes you back to a time when times were tough and the people even tougher. "Acadie - Prelude to Derangement" tells the heartbreaking story of the Acadiens, who were eventually deported from Nova Scotia and scattered throughout the East and South in the United States. The authors uncover the story of the Acadiens and their hardships in North Amerian, and manage to shed new light on the world of Nova Scotia (and subsequently the Cajuns of Louisiana) and beyond in the 17th and 18th centuries. As lively and lucidly written as the characters' portraits of the well-born and the average man, this book is more penetrating, thanks to authors' rigorous scholarship, and best of all, it recreates the unyielding world of early North American settlement, and later, the derangement of the Acadiens, in vivid detail.

Many historical novels, perhaps most, focus on real-life, albeit dead, public figures who require the invention of minor characters to witness, narrate, and react to their erstwhile struttings. But sprinkled throughout "Acadie - Prelude to Derangement" is an ironic humor that flows throughout its pages but juxtaposed with the hardships the Acadiens faced with every challenge to their economic, religious, and political lives. And few historical novels will teach you actual history as well as this one. The authors make clear that only some of the characters are fictionalized, not the history itself. But they convey the bravery of the Acadiens well to do whatever it took to make a life for themselves in the new land. The sad thing is how the Acadiens were model citizens, but got caught up in a political and military conflict that turned their entire community into refugees almost overnight.

A strong plot and a vivid sense of place are never out of style, and the authors, Coleman and Dupuis, are very good at developing both. Coleman and Dupuis are adept at shepherding a large and colorful cast of characters through a complicated yet logical historical plot. And reminiscent of Conan Doyle, the authors can create lush atmosphere without resorting to overwrought description. Coleman and Dupuis are at their most effective, and engaging, when they shows us how fine the line is - if one exists at all - between religion and superstition; their 17th century is a mirror for our time.

Coleman and Dupuis have created an outstanding portrait here. It is a flawless trip, with the detail of good history, the blistering pace of events themselves and the charm of grand legend. I strongly recommend it!

This is a group effort from a trio of investigators at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, an institution whose researchers were among the creators of modern acoustic phonetics. It is almost a research monograph disguised as a textbook, published by a distinguished scientific publisher. This leads to frustration of the specialist reader at times, when one looks for technical summaries of the material which may be lacking. The book could be considered a complete revision of the classic Bell Labs book by Potter, Kopp, and Green (Kopp) under the title Visible Speech, published in 1947 and including with broader material on speech acoustics and its applications a 225-page description of the sounds of American English from an acoustic point of view.

The book is a systematic description of the phonetics of American English based on acoustic data from one male informant, a native of Pittsburgh, with limited data from a woman speaker. This is a weakness shared by most of the literature on speech acoustics; because the fundamental frequency of women's speech is higher than that of men, women's speech is technically more difficult to analyze precisely in acoustic terms. The limitation to one main subject is far outweighed by the precious systematic data which the book contains for most aspects of American English phonetics. Of course, it also suggests further investigation of the ways in which humans speaking somewhat different versions of the same language understand one another, which could be said to constitute the other, perceptual, side of the subject matter of this work. This aspect, by the way, is well reviewed in the excellent chapters on perception in J.M.Picket's revised book The Acoustics of Speech Communication (Allyn and Bacon, 1999).

The Bell authors provide valuable introductory chapters on basic concepts of phonetics and phonology, and speech acoustics. There is a growing literature on the basic concepts of acoustic phonetics, such as the new editions of the well-established books by Ladefoged (1996) and Kent and Read (2001), which some readers may wish to consult. Then follows a chapter on the static properties of speech sounds; many treatments of acoustic phonetics never get past this elementary level. However, the book by Olive, Greenwood, and Coleman makes a precious contribution in the systematic following chapters on the treatment of English sounds in context. Many individual aspects of this topic are well treated in the research literature, but
this comprehensive investigation of the speech of a single speaker is unique. There is broad treatment not only of formant transitions between consonants and vowels, but also of consonant clusters and interactions, contextual variants of sounds such as [l] and [r](using standard notation for phonetic units), and a long final chapter on acoustic variability of sounds and dialectal variability. A precious feature of the index is that it not only includes a detailed phonetic and technical listing but also gives the location in the text of treatments of individual sound sequences, shortening many searches.

Apart from its merits as a research monograph, this work
also works well as a classroom text. The reviewer has used it in a class on applied English phonetics with extensive spectrographic lab experience, in which the students studied their own speech acoustically and compared it to the results described by Olive et al. A particularly valuable role of the book is for non-English speakers who are able to use the objective character of the acoustic analysis to bypass the obstacle of uncertain perception of English sounds and assist themselves in improving their mastery of English phonetics. Elementary speech acoustics on this level is not difficult, and this aspect of the work was very much appreciated by foreign students in my class.

This is a work of enormous value to a variety of students and specialists, particularly in phonetics, linguistics, and speech pathology, but also for engineers and the increasing ranks of those working on speech recognition. The reviewer finds that he has had to gradually increase the number of loaner copies of this work on his office shelf, because the Olive book is not in the local library, and his students want prolonged access to a work which describes English acoustic phonetics competently and(within its limits)comprehensively. This book is is not as well known as it deserves to be.

The reviewer has some complaints. In general, the articulatory discussions are not as accurate or precise as the acoustic ones; of course, that is not what the book is about. If one must mention published collections of papers on speech acoustics, the indispensable book Readings in Acoustic Phonetics edited by Lehiste (1967 with several reprints) which preserves publication format is more useful than the one cited. It is regrettable and puzzling that there is not a single first-author work of Gordon Peterson in the bibliography. These are minor details. This work deserves to be well known, and to be in all major university libraries and institutions in which linguistic or clinical phonetics has significance, as well as in scholars' libraries. It should be read carefully and repeatedly until its pages are dirty and scribbled on, like my copy. The first acoustic specification of sounds of a language known to the reviewer was the publication of formant frequencies of whispered vowels published by Samuel Reyher in 1679. The book by Olive and his colleagues reflects a long and proud past, and its subject matter seems at present to be enjoying a deserved revival of interest.

In my opinion, this is the most important book about education ever written by a sociologist. It has influenced the way sociologists and many others think about education and adolescence.

I loved this account of Aviators. Rock On

It is the aim of the sourcebook, "The Age of Dolls", to assist the searcher in the dating of the many unmarked antique dolls. Through the years the types and styles of commercial dolls for play have changed. These changes are graphically portrayed in contemporary catalogs, advertizements, etc. This source book covers the entire 19th century and illustrates numerous examples of dolls for sale at various times from 1800 to 1900. Not only can the age of dolls be determined more accurately from these primary sources than has heretofore been possible, but also the importance of dolls and their history can be better understood.
--- from book's forward

Clear activities and assessments for creating a living curriculum. My students loved it! Hands-on

This is a comprehensive, well researched book on a spectacular collection. Miss Ima had a great eye for fine furniture and art of the American Federal Period. This collection is second only to the great Winterthur Collection as a repository of American Federal furniture. The setting for this collection is breathtaking, the mansion is beautiful and the setting, in Houston's finest area has to be seen to be believed. Miss Ima's collection is huge and the house, though large, is not big enough to showcase all of it, so when one visits the house they may see different items then they would have seen months earlier. To visit Bayou Bend in the Spring is to experience heaven on earth. This is a great guide to a singular collection in a unparalled setting. I highly recommend this guide and make a point if you are in Houston it visit this amazing house and collection, I assure you, you won't be disappointed.

This is the best book on the American Revolution I have every read. The writeing style of Kenneth Coleman is easy to read and understand. I highly recomend this book for anyone interested in the Revolution and the early days in the state of Georgia.