Gregory Books

I hope some teacher education programs are using this as a text. Applying some of these strategies can decrease the number of referrals to special education of students who don't quite "qualify" when tested.

Visual Quick Tips is definitely is on my "don't leave home without it" list. It is an essential part of anyone's photo bag. For the beginner to expert, Visual Quick Tips stimulates your creativity, reminds you of solutions, and increases the "dynamic range" of your thinking! It is like having a professional photographer readily available as a mentor whispering in your ear "Try this". Easy to read, easy to find your topic, it concisely gives you the answer on how to get a WOW picture.
I have a library of photography "how-to" books, but this one, on two, pages, taught me more about depth of field and assessing the shooting conditions then all of them combined! Sometimes you need a book not to just give you the answers, but to help you ask the questions that will let you take better pictures.
Just when I thought it covered everything, I got to the back chapters on organizing, printing and creative ways of sharing photos! This is one book that will be well used! And the best part is its size is so easy to slip into a pocket or small camera case. I highly recommend it to all digital photographers! I know you will enjoy it. Joyce Carmel

It's comprehensive and written so that even someone new to the field can understand. The author clearly has a passion for the subject which he wants to share with his readers.

Given that we're all switching to digital TV in the next few years, this book should be considered a "must read" for anyone who wants to feel comfortable with all the new technologies available to them.

Surprisingly, I found this not only a facscinating but instructive study for me as a citizen of democracy in America. For beyond its merit as a description of democratic governance in Switzerland, Fossedal's study persuasively shows that we in the United States are behind the curve in the way we do democracy.

Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg address of a century and a half ago affirmed our stand for a government of, by and for the people. Fossedal's study of democracy in Switzerland makes it clear that while we may make a sustainable claim for having a government of and--less convincingly--for the people, ours is not a government at the national level by the people when in the U. S--in contrast to Switzerland--ordinary citizens have no way to establish policy or make laws directly.Having collapsed democracy, conceptually, into exclusively representative democracy,we have so much to wake up to in reading Democracy in Switzerland. And the author's exercise is a powerful wake-up call to this end.

Fossedal is not just a scholar in Democracy in Switzerland, but an advocate of direct democracy in partnership with representative democracy. Or more pointedly, he is an advocate of civically mature democracy which requires ordinary citizens, in a deliberative process to be directly involved in the central act of collective self-governance: establishing policy and making laws..

At the outset, I wondered:how necessary is inclusion of a history albeit brief of the Swiss people? .After reading Part 2. History, I came to see its value. Captivating are the anecdotal stories--scattered throughout the study--derived first hand by interviewing Swiss citizens and officials. These exhibit common sense in both attitude and in their way of doing democracy. They coalesce into persuasive support of Fossedal's thesis that: "the Swiss polity,as an historical and on-going exhibit of the exercise of a deliberative direct democracy is a persuasive rebuttal to the stand of elites from the Greeks of yesterday to the elites of today who hold that exclusionary representative democracy, in itself, is a better form of democracy than a direct democracy in partnership with representative democracy....In a word, an effective rebuttal to the stand; you can't trust the people...Switzerland answers the potential question of the political scientist or citizen: What happens if we place so much faith in the people that we make them lawmakers?".

The book is laid out logically and invitingly in five parts:

In Part 1 Conception, the author gives an account of his"pilgrimage" to the town of Schwyz where the "Bundesbrief, "the "charter of allegiance," or the "confederation bond" entered into in 1291, is preserved. Thus at the outset, the reader is drawn into the story aspect of this scholarly study. As noted earlier, this story aspect crops up via his many other encounters with the Swiss citizenry described.

Part 2: in three relatively short chapters Fossedal covers a thousand years of Swiss history. Throughout the focus is on how the Swiss confederation formed itself first by neighbors being forced by their own internal social and political oppression to look outward and confederating but in later times motivated to unite more closely by the attraction of the Swiss model of a self-governing people in itself

In Part 3: Institutions, Fossedal examines the Swiss Constitution, its structure, powers and procedures for its Executive, Judiciary and Parliament as well as the procedure and operation of Referendum.

In Part 4 Issues: he devotes a chapter to nine major issues of social and political life. Both via anecdote and reasoning this political journalist lays out the case that democracy really `works' when we place so much faith in the people that we make them lawmakers--supported by a functionally deliberative structure in which to make laws.

In Part 5 L'idee Suisse, the author does much more than impart information and make a `pitch' to the rest of democracies to follow this`new' idea: Here particularly his study rivals the analysis, critique and prognosis of democracy done by de Tocqueville in mid-nineteenth century America.

Among the numerous things that impressed me about Direct Democracy in Switzerland, I cite one of many benefits in reading it. At the head of the final chapter Fossedal states:"There is little point in studying Swiss democracy unless there is something distinctive about it--and not only distinctive, but importantly distinctive.If this is a bad assumption, then Switzerland is worth thinking about only for the specialist." Convincingly Fossedal shows there is an important practical Swiss lesson for democracies worldwide in the twenty-first century, that is, direct democracy in partnership with representative democracy works and is an idea whose time has come for us in the United States..

By way of conclusion, the advance exhibited by Swiss democratic governance which Fossedal advocates is, in fact, embodied in a project being sponsored in the United States by The Democracy Foundation (TDF) today. Moreover, we, as registered voters, will be able to vote directly in an amendatory election to put into statutory procedure this structural advance. The amendment and act is called National Initiative for Democracy (NI4D). In full disclosure I am Secretary of TDF. Don. H. Kemner

Complete First Edition, everything you want to know to be a director - and you know you do.

Covers the play, blocking, stability & sequence, the actor (all types, method, etc), communication, rehearsals, types of auditions, types of play. Best of all, the appendix includes a complete interpretation & analysis of The Wild Duck, as a way to put it all together.

Out of print, hard to find, highly recommended.

I'm told this is the most comprehensive text in the field, period! And I know that it has been painstakingly assembled by the World's foremost experts in Disaster and Emergency Medicine. Wherever there has been a disaster - Dr. Ciottone has been there. The editor and contributor list reads like a who's who in Disaster Medicine. This will surely remain The Definitive work on Disaster Medicine for years. Whether you work in Emergency Medicine, the Military, public service or even as a parent, this is a must have. I love it!

Knowing the author personally, it am slightly biased, but the book was very enjoyable.

Set in the United Kingdom, A Disguise For Death is the large print edition is a dark murder mystery about the distant aftermath of a deadly bombing. When a former IRA cell leader writes a best-seller about the tragedy, Superintendent Gregory Summers attends a reading; the situation soon turns violent, as old wounds are inflamed, and Summers becomes involved in one of the most difficult and labyrinth cases of his career. An intricate mystery about grudges that time won't heal.

If you've never had a chance to know them as individudals, as I did while working as an editor of Hard Hat News, unionized construction workers in New York City tend to be generous, brave, articulate, with a caustic sense of humor, proud of thier skills, and filled with the sense of accomplslihment that anyone would feel at looking up at Gotham's magnificent sksyline and being able to say, "I built that."

How come then, collectively, they've created what are probably the most exclusionary, politically-backward, corrupt, mob-dominated labor organizations in the advanced capitallist world?

The consequences are huge. The construction trades control the city's best blue collar jobs -- thousands of six figure positions. It's hard to step into one of these jobs without union clout. And although they represent less than a quarter of all the unionized workers in the city, the trades are the power center of the city's labor movement -- aand arguably -- the nation's. George Meany went from head of Plumbers' Local 2 to head of the aFL-CIO. Peter Brennan jumped from the boss of the New York Center Labor Council to a job as Nixon's Labor Secretary. Neither could have gained or stayed in power without the support of racketeers and mobsters. Brian McLaughlin, the present head of the New York City Central Labor Council who comes out of the Electricians, had his offices raided by the FBI in March 2006. Allegedly, the G-men were searching for evidence of labor racketeering.

Local 608 carpenter Gregory A. Butler, whom I first met while reporting for Hard Hat News, has now written his first book. It's also the first book that really grasps the gigantic but largely unrevealed power dimensions of the city's construction trade unions. Butler knows how the corrupt and discriminatory goverenance system works first hand. He's an outspoken black communist, who runs Gangbox Construction News Service. Disunited Brotherhoods, his important new book, originally appeared as articles on his rank-and-file website.

Besides unprecedented courage in speaking out -- Butler may be the only working member of the trades to have ever risked blackllisting by actually writinig a book-- it's not his only virtue. He also has the ability to appreciate the system's grim paradoxes. Yes, his own union -- the New York District Council of Carpenterss has been a plaything of organized crime; every Executive Secretary Treasurer since the 70's has been either murdered or indicted (including the present incumbent who was convicted last year of taking bribes from a crime family associate). But the carpenters, he allows, were actually stronger when mob domination was at its height.

As the Carpetners became weaker, and their power of exclusion waned, the geometry of racial exclusion changed. Once almost totally white, Butler estimates that minorities now constitute about one third of the membership. Instead of keeping blacks, women and Hispanics outsidew the union, by the 90's, some of the trades -- particularly the Carpetners and the Laborers -- began to bring them in. But basically as low wage workers, as "B" men. By giving contractors cheap black and Hispanic labor, the union contractors were able to more effectively compete with contractors employing non-union labor.

But the unions were not only responding to the changiing economics of the industry. Butler shows too that the unions were being pressured by a militant civil rights movement --"The Coalitions." Starting in the '60's, organizations like Harlem Fight Back, Brooklyn Fight Back, Black and Latino Ecnomic Survival "shaped" the job sites and stopped work with their demands to hire minoritites. Yet Butler -- who acknowledges he owes his own job to the Caolitions -- refuses to over-similifiy their role.

Although they began as civiil rights organizatins and many of the leaders weres communists and socialists, the coalitions gradually became very much like the organizations they fought. Many leaders were on the payroll of the contractors. Several took orders from the Mafia. IN 1999, two of the coalition leaders pled out. Others took their chances in a jury trial. They lost. One of the most prominent, Trevor Johnson, head of Brookliyn Fight Back got 20 years.

Butler doesns't offer much in the way of prosposals for union reform -- he's very critical of those I offered in Solidarity for Sale. Nothing short of a Marxist -style revolution, he says, will improve conditions. But he does suggest readers contact him with their ideas. For his physical and intellectual courage alone, Butler deserves many readers.

I am an individual investor, I followed in the past different investment approaches! The one outlined by geraldine weiss is the better for the prudent investor; After the recent stock market turmoil my portfolio is still on the plus side thanks to the stocks selected using the criterias outlined in the book; Anyway it is a matter of choice, other investment approaches lead to greater performance over the years but at price of much greater volatility and risk, the final outcome might be you can lose your principal!