Floyd Books

McClung starts the book by explaining a theological concept: cities are ordained by God. He explains that while the Bible starts in a garden, it ends in a city. He also reminds us what that garden might have looked like if people never died and never sinned against each other.

The book contains an extensive section on the "myths" Christian's have about the city. For instance, it debunks the myths that the city is a dangerous place and that it isn't a place to raise children.

It also offers soime practical advice to those who are willing to hear the Holy Spirit's call for the Church to return to the city. I recommend it for anyone who feels they may one day live in a city.

A complete study of Galatians. Police examines the intricacies of the book and analyzes what this means for Christians. A great read.

I orginally purchased this book for my Mom who is a real huge Elvis Presley fan. She was delighted to add this book to her evergrowing collection of Elvis thins. One day, while listening to an Elvis CD - my four year old started asking questions about Elvis. Talk about coincidence! We pulled out the book and Grandma read the story based on Elvis's beginnings. She had tears in her eyes remembering how Elvis came from nothing and rose to such awesomeness. My four year old loved the book too. A great gift for an Elvis fan or for reading and teaching a young child about his life. Nicely written for children to understand and beatuifully illustrated. A must have!!!

The author comes from a distinguished line of Brooklynites who came of age during the haunted fifties, when McCarthyism and the Korean War dominated the headlines. A smart, introspective only child of struggling middle-class Jewish parents, Fried paints a vivid picture of daily life in Flatbush during its heyday, the rites of adolescence, from the Bar Mitzvoh teacher to the discovery of girls, fishing in Sheepshed Bay, and the discovery that a distinguished medical school was not beyond the reach of a poor boy with no pedigree but a first-rate education at Brooklyn College. A memoir of uncommon modesty and grace, Fried's slender volume is compelling reading for young and old fans of true adventure stories.

An invaluable guide and reference source. Includes UV spectrum and chemical structure. Text describes dye type, use, history, and other pertinent data in an alphabetical listing of compounds. Also contains a color chart describing use concentration and transition intervals of various indicators.

Julia Floyd Smith gives an account of the evolution of plantation development in antebellum Florida. We might associate Florida with summer homes instead of slave cabins, but Smith tells us of a slave system firmly planted in the sunshine state, particularly in a cotton belt on the Florida Panhandle. The narrative includes a discussion of the conflict between white landowners and a small but striking community of free people of color.

Smith's work is well-written and well-researched. Her style is engaging, her scholarship impressive.

Those interested in plantation development in Florida might also consider the essays edited by Jane G. Landers, Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida. The essays anthologized therein consider much of the period preceding Smith's study.

In Julia Floyd Smith's book Slavery and Rice Culture in Low Country Georgia, 1750-1860, the unique economic system that developed in the tidewater region along Georgia's Atlantic Coast is carefully evaluated. According to Smith, the geographic and economic nature of rice cultivation fostered the development of a distinctive plantation culture, the characteristics of which were drastically disparate from that of cotton, indigo and tobacco plantations within the same state.

Rice cultivation, being a highly labor-intensive enterprise, required the employment of a more efficient system of slave labor than that of the gang system, commonly found on upland cotton plantations. Instead of the gang system, coastal rice plantations utilized the task system, whereby slaves were assigned specific tasks each day "designed to produce effective performance and served as a convenient measurement of labor requirements on various projects." The precise workmanship necessary throughout various stages of successful rice cultivation was more suitable to a single slave as opposed to a gang of slaves. Smith asserts that the task system provided advantages for rice plantation slaves, who unlike their counterparts laboring in the gang system, did not have to work from sunup to sundown. Task system slaves were able to engage in leisure time or recreation once their task was completed.

Tidewater rice plantations cultivated suitable tracts of land carved out of coastal swamplands. The unique geographic limitations of tidewater farming fostered the development of larger plantations with dense slave populations requiring efficient managerial oversight. Smith contends that not only did slaves influence the methods used in rice cultivation, where she is in agreement with historian Daniel Littlefield, they also played a valuable role in effectively managing plantations. Smith challenges the stereotyped image of the uneducated and brutal overseer by painting a picture of an experienced manager, successfully directing the operation of plantations and slave labor. Interestingly, Smith contends that many tidewater plantation owners relied more on drivers, themselves slaves, than on white overseers. According to Smith, "Overseers came and left and seldom developed a close bond with the owner. Reliable and trusted drivers remained on the plantation for a lifetime and were of invaluable service to the owner."

In Slavery and Rice Culture in Low Country Georgia, 1750-1860, Julia Floyd Smith argues that the slaves of coastal Georgia exercised more religious freedom and autonomy than slaves in other parts of the South in addition to developing a distinctive African American culture. Smith states, "Negro slave preachers had to be cautious and stress a doctrine approved by whites..." Smith adds that in addition to stressing a doctrine approved by whites, black slave preachers also aided in controlling slaves. Smith has potentially overestimated the religious autonomy of tidewater slaves by neglecting to fully account for the fact that the religion exercised by these slaves was one restricted by whites. By closely regulating religious freedom among slaves, slave owners were able to exert substantial control over their slaves, encouraging them to seek salvation only in God's heavenly kingdom. Smith contends that slaves were aware of this fact, and actually went to painstaking lengths to meet secretly and conduct services.

A distinct African American culture developed in coastal Georgia. This culture reflected the African origins of the slaves, including song, dance, language and family relationships. According to Smith, "They have created a cultural blending of the African and Anglo-American to form a distinct low country society in which the contributions and traditions of both may be seen." Although the slaves of coastal Georgia undoubtedly created a unique culture, this culture must have been fragile and subject to disruption. Instead of simply describing the nature of the distinct culture established by slaves in coastal Georgia, it is necessary for Smith to discuss the factors that challenged the establishment of this culture and contributed to its inherent fragility.

Finally, Smith merely alludes to the "matriarchal concept of the family as an institution" in coastal Georgia. This statement requires further analysis by Smith. Historian Orville Vernon Burton describes the patriarchal nature of slave families inland from the Atlantic Coast in Edgefield, South Carolina. According to Burton the slave owner acted as the patriarch of the slave family. Smith needs to elaborate by possibly attributing the remoteness and seclusion of many of the tidewater plantations with their matriarchal nature, given that slave owners often did not reside on the plantation itself.

Julia Floyd Smith presents a significant contribution to the study of the South. Recognizing the distinctiveness of the economic and social makeup of coastal Georgia enhances previous assessments of plantation society and challenges historians to reassess certain aspects of the antebellum south.

This book is an interesting collection of essays on the soft elements of software engineering. Most of the essays deal with organizational and process aspects from a cross-functional perspective, and there is an emphasis on requirements and business/IT alignment in the overall theme of this collection.

Each of the five parts and 21 essays are grouped by a book structure that aligns to cross-functional cooperation from a software engineering point of view:
Part I Deconstructing
Chapter 1 -Developing and Embedding Autooperational Form Chapter 2 -On Foundational Categories in Software Development Chapter 3 -Making Use of Social Thinking: The Challenge of Bridging Activity Systems Chapter 4 -Challenging Traditions of Inquiry in Software Practice
Part II Informing
Chapter 5 -On Retrieving Skilled Practices: The Contribution of Ethnography to Software Development Chapter 6 -Representing and Modeling Collaborative Practices for Systems Development Chapter 7 -The Locales Framework: Making Social Thinking Accessible for Software Practitioners Chapter 8 -What Doesn't Fit: The "Residual Category" as Analytic Resource
Part III Grounding
Chapter 9 -On the Intertwining of Social and Technical Factors in Software Development Projects Chapter 10 -Software Practice is Social Practice Chapter 11 -"Yes-What Does That Mean?" Understanding Distributed Requirements Handling Chapter 12 -Doing Empirical Research on Software Development: Finding a Path between Understanding, Intervention, and Method Development
Part IV Organizing
Chapter 13 -Changing Work Practices in Design Chapter 14 -Information Systems Research and Information Systems Practice in a Network of Activities Chapter 15 -Reaching out for Commitments: Systems Development as Networking Chapter 16 -Participatory Organizational and Technological Innovation in Fragmented Work Environments Chapter 17 -Large-Scale Requirements Analysis as Heterogeneous Engineering
Part V Reorienting
Chapter 18 -Useware Design and Evolution: Bridging Social Thinking and Software Construction Chapter 19 -Discontinuities Chapter 20 -Localizing Self on the Internet: Designing for "Genius Loci" in a Global Context Chapter 21 -Intent, Form, and Materiality in the Design of Interaction Technology

Anyone who is concerned about business/IT alignment and software process improvement, especially readers who are working in a CMM Level 3 or above environment or in an IT or consulting organization that is a profit center will benefit from the many (if not all) of the ideas in this book. Even if some of the information is not actionable in your organization, it will cause you to view software engineering from multiple perspectives.

After more than 42 years as a writer and editor, Floyd McCracken couldn't turn off the memories or his desire to write about them. Though he retired at the age of 70, he continued to write for the San Diego Union for 12 more years. His columns touched on a wide range of subjects from homesteading in the Pacific Northwest to people and places in the Southern California of yesteryear.

You will read his account of an adventurous couple who sailed their canoe from San Diego to Panama in 1933; of his own adventure during Anaheim's disastrous flood; of the day lightning struck the oil tank farm in Brea; of failed dreams and of dreamers who struck it rich.

He pays tribute to the simple things in life: to haywire, the ragbag, grandma's featherbed, to fronteir ingenuity and hard work.

His writings are informative, delightfully brief and laced with homespun humor.
--- from book's back cover

Since reading the McGann's first volume on the Tour, I have been eagerly awaiting Volume 2, which I received a few days ago. Volume 1 documents the beginnings of the Tour de France and the early years (through 1964), and covers the race and it's context better than any other book. Volume 2 is even better; more robust and with greater detail; and it is the best piece on the world's greatest sporting event ever. Each year's Tour is recapped, but more interesting are the rider descriptions, tactics, and color. As an example from the 1992 Tour:

"Claudio Chiappucci was what Miguel Indurain wasn't. Where Indurain was cold, calculating, riding only to win and no more, knowing that whatever time gaps he had allowed could be closed with a display of brute horsepower in the time trials, Chiappucci was the opposite. The Italian was willing to gamble, to take magnificent chances to gain time. He had to run these big risks knowing how vulnerable he was in the time trials. Indurain said that he had to have eyes on the back of his head when he raced Chiappucci." The book is busting with observations such as this. How entertaining!

If you are a racer or a casual rider, you will love this book. And if you are a Lance Armstrong-era noob, you will gain more insight into that period from this book than from any other.

Highly recommended from an old Category 2 racer.