Wagner Books

I have most of the books in this series and each one is a delight. Full of ideas for making the gifts you give really stand out. When I make something from one of these books I always take the recipe with me.. I know I will be asked for it! The only draw back is that some of the recipes call for several ingredients and unless you have a well stocked pantry it can be a tad costly. However do not let that stop you. These books are a great source of inspitation and ideas.

Mr. Wagner has shared some very insightful and helpful information that extremely valuable for those who feel led of God to plant new churches. Some of the suggestions are so simple one might overlook them, others are obviously those of one with experience in the field. The information presented was informing, and easy to read. I could'nt put the book down, I read it cover to cover in the course of a two or three days. Excellent book! I highly recommend it!

The Church You've Always Wanted is a wonderful book. It paints a hopeful picture of a church where disciples of Jesus grow in spiritual strength and maturity through life-giving relationships with God and the Body of Christ represented by the church. In such a safe pasture, we find rest, fulfillment in ministry, overwhelming joy in the love of Jesus and confidence in entrusting your spiritual life to those who minister in this type of church.

How do we find a safe pasture? Part One of this Book explains that we need to search for a church that focuses on the basics of being children of God - to worship, pray and care for one another. The church must draw its essence from the righteousness and holiness of God and reflect God's glory. The church should attempt to meet the real needs of its people - not simply felt or perceived needs. Wagner identifies our ultimate real need: to know and honor God and obey him by bearing spiritual fruit. When this need is met, the church becomes a haven of safety and significance - a safe pasture.

What happens in safe pasture? Wagner writes in Part Two that a safe pasture helps its lambs to rest and be renewed and energized, and creates a pervading sense of joy among its flock. It helps those who are bloodied and battered by life. Compassion, gentleness, kindness, humility and patience are the earmarks of this flock. The church takes seriously God's instructions for us to love one another. It also helps people step out of the shadows and into the life of the church. The focus is more than merely sin management. Its goal is a deeper, more fulfilling relationship with God that brings about a transformed heart. The ultimate purpose of it all is to cultivate a humble dependency on God. Such a safe pasture cannot help but irresistibly attract wandering sheep. As we love one another and display the work of God in our lives, outsiders will want to join.

Finally, the Book describes how to create safe pasture. The church must have a God-centered emphasis of getting closer to Him and others in the Body of Christ. It also must focus on the real Jesus - the One who suffered and endured the cross for each of us. The church as a whole should take up the Cross and walk with Jesus. Safe pasture captures all of life, including the difficult and painful. It also celebrates God in authentic worship and helps us make deep connections with God and His people. It further leads people to maturity in Christ.

Who wants safe pasture? Need help finding it? Read Wagner's Book and start your journey.

I love to read a book that is motivating and keeps you reading while you are taught in-depth principles regarding a specific subject. That is what Peter Wagner did in creating this book. The book motivates you toward a deeper prayer life and it also equips you to put that new prayer life into practice.

This book is an excellent read for an experienced spiritual warrior and for a new Christian as well. The instruction regarding spiritual warfare keeps the focus on the one being prayed to rather than the one who is doing the praying. That is an important aspect of Peter Wagner's books.

The book claims that this is the book the devil most wants you to avoid. I think that might be true for many people because the principles are so simply stated that all who hunger for a greater prayer walk and are led to this book, will be a spiritual force in their church, family, and community.

Having recently moved to Denver, I wanted a good book on Denver history and places/things to do, not only for myself but for visiting friends. I think the book is excellent and found my internet provider (listed as a Top 10 Denver bargain). I signed up immediately.

This book has beautiful pictures, is a great gift for those who have a passion for classic cars. It is divided in cars from the United States, France, United Kingdom, Germany and Italy, is worth every cent!

Though this book is starting to show its age, it still provides a fine overview of the first-generation jetliners, which are become rarer and rarer each day.

The pictures are of high quality, but there are several two-page spreads.

The authors divide the book into chapters describing the Boeing 707, Douglas DC-8 (both short-body and stretch variants), trijets (Boeing 727 and HS Trident), twinjets (Douglas DC-9, Boeing 737, BAC-111, and Caravelle), and such rarities as the Vickers VC-10, DH106 Comet, and Convair 880. Soviet types, however, are underrepresented, which is a pity. You will find a small selection of pictures of the Tu-104, Tu-134, and Il-62, but no Tu-154 or Yak-40. I do, however, really like the flight deck shot of the Interflug Tu-134 preserved in Augsburg, Germany.

The authors include detailed and interesting annotations for each picture, with information on individual aircraft and where it was photographed, making this book a pleasure to read. I would happily recommend it to any civil aviation enthusiast.

After just having read The Tristan Chord by Bryan Magee I happened to buy this book, which is somehow a complementary vision to the Schopenhaeurian's, brilliantly given in Magee's book. But I really was not ready for the big surprise.

By concisely beholding Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung in terms of Aristotle's elements of tragedy as expressed in his Poetics - plot (mythos), music, speech, thought, character and spectacle - Jeffrey Buller makes the most precise, lucid and revealing analysis of Wagner I've seen in a long time.

Particularly striking are the chapters on Speech, where alliteration or "Stabreim" is exposed; Thought, where "sleep" as a mythic entity is showed to be the key idea of the whole Ring - I'm still mind-boggled by the sheer brigthness of such an insight; and Character, where the idea of the mesianic hero is lucidly unveiled. There's even a pairing of Siegmund as mesianic hero with Hagen as his exact counterpart which never occurred to me.

In chapter 1, the problem of Wagner's early classical education is cleared out.

This book has given me many a precious clues to better understand a work so great as Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung.

I do heartily recommend it to anyone that cares about Wagner's work.

Simply put, this book is brilliant. I've seen it work in person. It definitely makes for a more "Christian" discussion, as opposed to screaming at people or waving bibles in their faces. Anyone who doubts the approach should consider the results of those that use it. This book has helped me go to the next level in establishing common ground with even the most extreme pro-choice advocate.

As a field of applied mathematics, computational biology has exploded in the last decade, and shows every sign of increasing in the next. This book overviews a few of the topics in the computational modeling of cells. I only read chapters 12 and 13 on molecular motors, and so my review will be confined to these.

Nanotechnology could be described as an up-and-coming field, but in the natural world one can find examples of this technology that surpass greatly what has been accomplished by human engineers. The authors begin their articles with a few examples of natural molecular machines, including the "rotary motors" DNA helicase and bacteriophage, and the "linear motor" kinesin, the latter they refer to as a "walking enzyme". Important in the modeling of all these is the theory of stochastic processes in the guise of Brownian motion, which the authors hold is the key to understanding the mechanics of proteins. In chapter 12 they give a detailed overview of the mathematical modeling of protein dynamics, followed in chapter 13 by an illustration of the mathematical formalism in the bacterial flagellar motor, a polymerization ratchet, and a motor governing ATP synthase.

To the authors a molecular motor is an entity that converts chemical energy into mechanical force. The production of mechanical force though may involve intermediate steps of energy transduction, all these involving the release of free energy during binding events. But due to their size, molecular motors are subjected to thermal fluctuations, and thus to model their motion accurately requires the theory of stochastic processes. Thus the authors begin a study of stochastic processes, restricting their attention to ones that satisfy the Markov property. Starting with a discrete model of protein motion as a simple random walk, the authors show that the variance of the motion grows linearly with time, which is a sign of diffusive motion. The partial differential equation satisfied by the probability distribution function, in the continuous limit where the space and time scales are large enough, is left to the reader to derive as an exercise.

The authors then consider polymer growth as another example of a stochastic process, a kind of hybrid one in that it involves both discrete and continuous random variables, the position of the polymer being continuous, while the number of monomers in the polymer is discrete. The authors derive an ordinary differential equation for the probability of there being exactly n polymers at a particular time. From this they show how to obtain sample paths for polymer growth and give a brief discussion on the statistics of polymer growth.

Attention is then turned to the modeling of molecular motions, with the first example being the Brownian motion of proteins in aqueous solutions. The (stochastic) Langevin equation is given for the motion of the protein, both with and without an external force acting on the protein. To find a numerical solution of this equation is straightforward, as the authors show. But they caution however that simulation of this solution on a computer is liable to introduce spurious results, and so they derive the Smoluchowski model, a somewhat different way of looking at random motion via the evolution of ensembles of paths. In this formulation the Brownian force is replaced by a diffusion term, and the external force is modeled by a drift term.

The authors then consider the modeling of chemical reactions, which supply the energy to the molecular motors. Because of the time scales involved in these reactions, a correct treatment of them would involve quantum mechanics, but the authors use the Smoluchowski model. The simple reaction model they consider involves a positive ion binding to negatively charged amino acid, and using as reaction coordinate the distance between the ion and the amino acid, study the free energy change as a function of the reaction coordinate.

The numerical simulation of the protein motion is then considered in much greater detail, using an algorithm that preserves detailed balance. This involves converting the problem to a Markov chain and a consideration of the boundary conditions, which the authors do for the case of periodic, reflecting, and absorbing. Euler's method is used to solve the resulting equations for the Markov chain, and after dealing with issues of stability and accuracy, the Crank-Nicolson method is used. The last few sections of the chapter are devoted to the physics of these solutions and the authors give some intuitive feel for the entropic factors and energy balance on a protein motor.

In the last chapter of the book, the considerations in chapter 12 are applied to concrete molecular motors. The first one examined is a model for switching in a bacterial flagellar motor, which involves the protein CheY as a signaling pathway. The binding of CheY to the motor is modeled as a two-state process, with the binding site being either empty or occupied. The resulting set of coupled differential equations for the probabilities is solved for when the concentration of CheY is constant. An expression for the change in free energy is obtained, and the authors give a discussion of the physics in the light of what was done in the last chapter. The switching rate is computed, along with the mean first passage time.

Some other examples of molecular motors are also discussed, including the flashing racket, the polymerization ratchet, and a simplified model of the ion-driven F0 motor of ATP synthase. This latter motor is fascinating, since it describes the electrochemical energy involved in mitochondria for the production of ATP. The authors do a nice job of showing how the techniques of chapter 12 are used to solve this model, and also give an analytical solution for a certain limiting case.