Howard Books

excellent service, would recommend this seller and use again, myself. Thank you for great service

All of the Heartmath Institute's information is wonderful. Another Heartmath publication, The Hidden Power of the Heart by Paddison, is one of my favorite books. I first encountered the Heartmath message at a Institute of Noetic Sciences Conference where they were teaching Freeze Frame. The Heartmath books hadn't been selling in the conference bookstore but after the Heartmath presentation, they flew off the shelves. Heartmath has done compelling, peer reviewed research demonstrating the connection between the heart and the mind - physically, emotionally and spiritually. If you can't afford to take one of their seminars, this is the next best way to begin. It will teach you the difference between care and over-care. Fabulous stress buster. Music on the included CD has been proven to have positive physiological benefits -said to boost immune system and DHEA production. If you are interested in the mind-body connection to healing, this book/program is for you. You can find out more about the Heartmath Institute's work on the web.

I had the privilege of being Dr. William A. Sessions' research assistant at Georgia State University, and I have never seen, before or since, a work of such outstanding scholarly research written in his unique style of combining scholarship with human insight -- making this work accessible to all, and extremely useful to the academic community. It is a fascinating story, well told--possibly the first academic "page-turner." This important biography is written with such insight and so compellingly one cannot put it down. It is an extraordinary work by a brilliant scholar who is also a marvelous writer.

The Earl of Surrey was the co-founder, along with Sir Thomas Wyatt, of modern English poetry; the whole procession from Spenser and Shakespeare down to Yeats and Eliot starts with Surrey and Wyatt. Surrey's most notable contributions were the creation of English blank verse and the development of the English sonnet from Italian models; without Surrey we should not have Shakespeare as we know him. Surrey was also a distinguished soldier and a loving husband, who was executed for treason at age twenty-nine.

The nineteenth century produced two excellent lives of Surrey, those of G. F. Nott and Edmond Bapst, the latter in French. The twentieth century had not done so well, as the principal accomplishment of Surrey's 1938 biographer, Edwin Casady, was translating Bapst's discoveries into English. William Sessions swings the balance the other way, his Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey being a magnificent tour of Surrey's life, his poetry, and his world.

Sessions offers the first fully integrated biography of Surrey, addressing his art, family, society, culture, religion, travels, and military career. The book is based on a massive amount of research, both archival and geographical, for Sessions visited virtually every site of importance in Surrey's life. The illustrations alone, some never published before or not properly identified, almost justify the cost of the book.

Sessions corrects many key facts of Surrey's unevenly documented career. He shows, for example, that Surrey was a moderate Protestant, whereas Nott, Bapst, and Casady simply assume that Surrey shared their own religious views--an approach complicated by the fact that Nott was a Protestant while the other two were Catholics. Getting Surrey's religion straight is absolutely essential to understanding a short life spent at the center of the escalating violence of the early Reformation. Finally, Sessions uses the full texts of the original documents concerning Surrey's downfall (instead of reading the published summaries), thereby untangling much of the mystery that occurred amid the religious strife, dynastic uncertainty, and naked ambition at the end of the reign of Henry VIII.

As in any edited volume the quality of the chapters varies. I found H. Simon's chapter excellent and it alone justified the (modest) purchase price. As a social scientist and a geographer I found value in the book even though most examples are far from my specific field of research.

Understanding the nature and dynamics of complex, hierarchically organized systems is crucial to understanding the origin of life and living systems. This 1973 collection contains key papers by some of the founders of hierarchy theory: The Nobel laureate, Herbert A. Simon's original paper on "The Organization of Complex Systems"; James Bonner's "Hierarchical Control Programs in Biological Development"; Howard H. Pattee's "The Physical Basis and Origin of Hierarchical Control" and "Postscript: Unsolved Problems and Potential Applications of Hierarchy Theories"; Richard Levins' "The Limits of Complexity", and the Clifford Grobstein's "Hierarchical Order and Neogenesis". Although Herbert Simon's fame is in theoretical economics and management, his thinking to understand hierarchy was an important contributor to this success.

Howard Pattee's work should be much better known than it is. Because his work connects the disparate fields of biology, epistemology and ontology at a biophysical level it has not been seen to be central to any of these fields. However, from working through Pattee's many papers in "biosemiotics" and hierarchy theory, I can attest that his works should be key readings in genetics and behavioral biology.

For anyone interested in hierarchy theory, this is where you should begin. Most of the papers are still amongst the clearest statements available the fundamental importance and roles of hierarchical organization in living things.

Absolutely the best source of material on hiking Big South Fork. Couple this with the Trails Illustrated map and you have everything you need but the ambition, and you'll need plenty of that.

This is perhaps the sine qua non of trail guides. You will be able to explore the Big South Fork with comfort and ease using Deavers book. If you want day hikes or more challenging distance hikes, this book will help you make your plans. Trail sections are thouroughly explained. Interesting information about the geology and cultural history abound.

The book is an excellent text for undergraduate and graduate students pursuing Career and Technical education. The book is loaded with historical facts that were missing from previous text books on career and technical education. A good reference book for your collection. Excelent writing style and great photographs!

This is an easy read and well documented fact-based book. The author walks you through the roots, growth, impact and challenges of career-technical education in America. You are able not only to read about key scholars that impacted this field but you can also see their photos. The author brings a sound view of the value added of career-technical education, its importance and opportunities to address the needs of a changing global economy. This is a must read for anyone interested in having a better understanding of the history of vocational education/or career-technical education in the USA.

Cioran transcends the human mind. Cioran is a case. A case which originated in Transilvania, near Sibiu (Rasinari). Growing up surrounded by religous elements (his father was an orthodox priest) and in the tumultous political scene of '30 in Romania, Emil was early age influenced by the most bizzare things: 1) being a kid, he was playing soccer with human skulls 2) when he is 14 he gets angry with his mom, and says to her " I wish you hadn't given birth to me". He is part of a top elite romanian philosophers generation, together with Constatin Noica, Mircea Eliade ,and Petre Tutea.

Cioran moves to Paris after publishing 5 books in Romania. 10 years after, he writes his "Treatise of decomposition" in french, for which he receives the prize from the French Academy for the most promising french !!! writer. He refuses the prize, invoking the very essence of his book. He could not receive a prize after writing a book like "Treastise of decomposition". A crazy gesture of anguish and youth, as he declares decades later. He writes 10 more books in french.

This book is a delightful, thought-provoking journey from the simple and ordinary questions of existence, to the most intense and shivering forms of lucidity in analyzing culture, society,and history. His reply-letter to his friend Contantin Noica is really moving, displaying a well anchored sense of reality. The letter presents his opinion on comparison between societies.

Cioran is more lucid than the lucidity itself :).

I would highly recommend this book to all the thought-consumer beings out there.

In this book Cioran continues to devalop his peculiar philosophy of despair. He focuses here on human obsession with history. He somewhat confirms Joyce's vision of history as a nightmare from which one wants to awake. He also knows that Utopia is - in translation from its Latin origin -a place that is nowhere. Once more Cioran is great. One more must-read for all fans of "Tears and Saints" and "Anathemas and Adirations"

This book left me breathless....absolutely beautiful. The faces of the homeless were indescribable and brought tears to my eyes. It's hard to imagine what these people have gone through...but this book portrays it. An excellent buy!!

The images in this collection are stunning. The text equally so. (Schatz has provided the photo images and the subjects dictate their own text). The result is a very compassionate look at a real human dilema - this work will both challenge your stereotypes of homelessness and confirm them. For writers, preachers, speakers and those engaged in the fight for human justice, you will be afforded a broad and insightful glimpse into the world of homeless persons - one that will either enflame your heart or cause you to bolt.

from The NYTimes- April 24, 2007

Medicine and the Drug Industry, a Morality Tale
By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D.

It was in 1949 that Elvin Stakman, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, issued the membership their marching orders: "Science cannot stop while ethics catches up."

And sure enough, from bombs to clones, the ethicists have generally kept to the rear of the scientific parade: they are the ones with the big brooms trying to restore order after the floats and the elephants go by.

Those brooms sweep slowly. Often, by the time the ethicists finish laying out facts and weighing relevant moral values, the worst of any given crisis has passed. But recently, those who work in medicine have moved closer to the fray: they staff acute-care hospitals and monitor events in real time, aiming for a little less retrospective philosophy and a little more damage control.

In this proactive spirit Howard Brody, a medical ethicist, has brought his discipline's tools to the relationship between the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry. This problematic tangle of moral compromise (or triumphant health-promoting collaboration, depending on your point of view) has inspired several polemics by physicians in recent years, all of them straightforward indictments of the pharmaceutical industry and its for-profit webs.

Dr. Brody is also a physician, but he aims for the measured cadences of the ethicist instead, calmly laying out the relevant facts and then reasoning from basic principles to determine whether the medicine-pharmaceutical relationship, as it stands now, is an ethical one or not.

That Dr. Brody manages to deliver a hundred-odd pages of determinedly objective analysis before he, too, lets the righteous indignation roll should not really be called a failure of methodology: even as he carefully lays out the facts in this impressively comprehensive book, those facts begin to speak damningly for themselves.

The small-time operations that grew up into modern medicine and Big Pharma joined together back in the late 19th century, allied in the name of scientific medicine against a variety of dubious health-care entrepreneurs. The A.M.A. actually called the early pharmaceutical companies the "ethical" drug makers, to distinguish them from unscrupulous patent-medicine peddlers.

Over time, this casual alliance has been reinforced with such complex and often invisible bonds that, in Dr. Brody's title metaphor, medicine and pharma are now "hooked" like two pieces of Velcro, tethered by a million barbs and as dependent on each other as any addicts are on their substance of choice.

Dr. Brody systematically analyzes the levels of connection, from the lowly drug salesman buying lunch for a roomful of medical students (future customers all) to the lucrative contracts and patents that simultaneously fuel medical research, fill corporate coffers and give us, as the industry doggedly and quite correctly points out, dozens of truly miraculous life-saving drugs.

Many of these interactions are probably now familiar to most readers: the omnipresent logo-bearing trinkets festooning medical offices, the free samples of the latest, most expensive drugs, the "ask your doctor" television ads.

Less familiar may be some of industry's other friendly overtures: the lavish junkets and cash rewards for some "high-prescribing" doctors; the subtle manipulations of research data; the way-too-generous financing of postgraduate medical education; the very cozy relationship with the Food and Drug Administration and its physician consultants; and a casually Orwellian interference with the average physician's prescription pad.

A drug salesman recalls for Dr. Brody the time his company asked a local doctor to evaluate various sales presentations for a particular drug: "He'd been selected because our data showed that he was a relatively low prescriber. ...Basically, the company was willing to bet $500 or $750 that if he heard the same drug pitch all day, by the end of the day he'd be so brainwashed that he could not possibly prescribe any other drug but ours."

All this mutual back-scratching would be fine if patients' interests were indeed being served. But ample data indicates quite the reverse. Patients, after all, are the ones who pay for expensive drugs when cheaper would do as well, and the ones who swallow dangerous drugs nudged to market by their manufacturers.

Many individual problematic drugs make an appearance here. Chloromycetin, a toxic antibiotic from the 1950s, was relentlessly promoted by its manufacturer for routine use until the day its patent expired. (Still available in generic form, it is now used only as a last resort.) Thalidomide never caused an epidemic of birth defects in this country, as it did in Germany, only because a single stubborn F.D.A. officer was dissatisfied with the drug's safety profile, despite the manufacturer's repeated assurances that everything was fine.

The epitaph of the recently withdrawn painkiller Vioxx, whose virtues were subtly spun to the medical community in prestigious research journals, is still being written in litigation around the country.

"Research that is driven by marketing rather than by scientific aims would seem, in the end, to be low-quality research," Dr. Brody comments mildly about the Vioxx fiasco.

His overall conclusion is similarly low-key: "A profession is not just a way of making money; it's a form of public trust. ...Medicine has for many decades now been betraying this public trust."

It is not a particularly surprising conclusion, and, in fact, there is relatively little in this book to surprise anyone familiar with the territory. Rather than new material, it provides a meticulously referenced compendium of all the relevant history and commentary (including, for full disclosure, excerpts from one of this reviewer's columns in this newspaper).

Its breadth translates into a lack of depth in some areas, especially the final section, in which Dr. Brody tries to outline a feasible solution to the mess. His suggestions are cogent but a little skimpy, given that absent an act of God, it will probably take an act of Congress to pry medicine and industry apart someday, preferably as part of thoroughgoing health care reform.

Still, for a detailed overview of this very jagged terrain, if not for a map of the pathway out, a better general guide than this one is hard to imagine.

Abigail Zuger, a regular contributor, is a physician in Manhattan.

The kind of book I normally like has lots of car chases, gun fights, and amusing dialog as the good guys and bad guys struggle. This book opens with an amusing "Car Talk" anecdote, but sadly has no gun fights. What it does have is the bizarre and fascinating story of the way the pharmaceutical companies have gotten in bed with the medical establishment. Dr. Brody is a medical ethicist, and he paints a very balanced picture of what's happened since the establishment of "ethical" drugs. I assume if you're academically inclined, you'll be convinced by the evidence presented. It's exhaustive. If you're like me, however, what you really want is an entertaining read that tells you something you really ought to know, mainly that a lot of medical research is profit-driven crap, and that many physicians are prescribing expensive name brand drugs because they're being influenced, although they claim not to be, by their drug reps, or they're simply giving in to patients who have seen an ad on TV for a miracle pill.

Although the book for 15 chapters carefully builds the case against the current cozy arrangement between the drug companies and the medical profession, it does so not only in a rigorous manner, but more importantly to readers like me, it sprinkles the chapters with real cases, including dialog from real people that will definitely get your attention. Before the table of contents, the lead quote from a drug company president sets the tone: "If we put horse manure in a capsule, we could sell it to 95% of these doctors." And there are plenty more outrageous statements made by real people.

Here's my disclaimer. I knew Dr. Brody as an undergraduate many years ago and I was curious about what he was doing and about this book. I probably wouldn't have purchased it otherwise because I read almost no non-fiction, except work related technical material, far from the medical profession. I don't know any more about drugs and medicine than the next person, although I have been bothered in the past when I signed in at the doctor's office, using a clipboard with a prominent drug displayed on it, and then been prescribed that same drug a half hour later. But I do read the paper, and over the years there have been an awful lot of drug scandals, enough to make you wonder what's going on. A few months ago Merck agreed to pay $4.85 billion to settle thousands of cases of heart attacks and strokes brought on by their painkiller, Vioxx. And a few days after reading the book, Merck agreed to pay $671 million for overcharging government health programs for 4 of their popular drugs, including Vioxx and Pepcid, when it was still a prescription drug. And this is just one drug company. The book lists many examples, sprinkling them in the chapters like short stories from hell.

The odds are you've probably taken some of these drugs before. Although suspicious of whether this book was worth my time, in the first chapter I was "hooked" when I read about Claritin, a very common antihistamine that I've taken in the past, and its shady history. Like a good mystery, I won't spoil the story by explaining what happened with Claritin, but if you've ever taken it, you should read how marketing triumphed over science.

There are a few places in the book where, by necessity, it bogs down a little in setting the next stage for the extended academic treatise that it is. Chapter 2 was the low point for me, but after a few examples in chapter one I already had an idea that the rest of the book would be more entertaining, an admittedly shallow view. In fact after that the book keeps building outrageous case after case, and letting the facts speak for themselves. In this day and age of hype, both political and marketing, it's hard to read something that is balanced when the conclusion you're being led to is incontrovertible.

So, if you want to learn more about the subject, this is an entertaining book, albeit one that makes some very important points. And if you're a member of the medical or pharmaceutical establishments and you're reading this because it affects your livelihood, then you have all the endnotes and citations that you'd ever need, and I'm pretty sure that Dr. Brody makes his case convincingly. I can guarantee you that I didn't stop to look up any of the endnotes while reading the book, and I was even a little put off that every chapter had pages of them at the end, but I must admit I couldn't help peeking at some of the longer ones when I found they contained interesting mini-stories in their own right. So for the rest of us who need a break from Clancy and Grisham, and yet want to be entertained as well as informed, I'd highly recommend "Hooked".

I can give this book no higher praise than I have read it every year for the last 15 years, and have never tired of it. It describes my utopia.

The highly mannered style and aggrandized gaze of Nicholson's world nevertheless delights and enchants the reader with the silken kaleidoscope of sensory values pulled through narrow golden hoop of the written page. Indiana's lace-edged tintype history gleams with romance, mystery, substance. I am proud to own this signed first edition, and collect Nicholsons where others have imprudently overlooked them. The story begins as the hero enters the scene, nodding at the criminal foil, the stately and perfect heroine(American style if you please,) and the lifelong friend of the old school. Never again shall a writer look to the future and look back over the shoulder of American History with such finesse. A grand mystery, may Hollywood never grab it!

I enjoy collecting old books and liked the look of the cover on this one. No other reason, but there it is. Adrift without a book to read, I picked this one from my bookshelf and gave it a good try. It was not difficult - the book grabs hold of your heart and imagination from the very first sentence. You will find yourself taken back in time to when a very young (only three!) Sara Rainborough is about to see the Queen for the very first time and visit the Crystal Palace. Within a few short pages you know her well and love her. And you find youself taken on a ride that lasts for 96 years - throughout her entire life. The people and places that you meet along the way are as deep and complete as Sara herself. Howard Spring leaves no quirk of personality unturned and you know these dear souls as if you had seen them in living flesh a hundred times. But what is the book about you want to know? Well, it is about life itself, about death and birth, about divorce and marriage, love and hate, lessons learned well and some learned too late. As I said, perhaps Gone With the Wind is my all time favorite book (the movie paled horribly in comparison -yes, a sacriledge in celluloid I know, but sadly, terribly true - the movie is poor if one has read the book beforehand and if you've only seen the movie, do yourself a favor and read the book - marvelous! But I digress...) however, this book The Houses in Between has made itself companion to GWTW on the bookshelf as one of my favorites. A true classic and would make an incredible movie - are you listening Mr. Spielberg? And wouldn't Emma Thompson make a wonderful Miss Whale? And Keira Knightly as a young adult Sara....read it - read it and find yourself wishing that it could go on a few hundred more pages....

This is one of the greatest books I have ever read! I just happened to come upon this book and I've read it three times since. It's really profound...