Truman Books

I ordered this book expecting to find some good resources on OO design using C and how to use those methods to write embedded code. What I actually got though was a hardware engineer who was teaching terrible coding practices which I feel should not be followed by anyone. The way the author tried to make the OO design pattern with C code seemed backwards to the simple way I have seen in the past.

I'm an experienced OO programmer and an experienced embedded programmer who understands the need to "drop down to" 'C' instead of C++.

The contortions the author goes through to provide OO style inheritance are more appropriate for an academic exercise than real world code. The development cost, maintainance cost, & runtime overhead easily outweighs the benefits. It's ugly. At some point you just have to admit your stuck with 'C' and stop trying to turn a crescent wrench into a socket set.

The technique (which totally writes off data hiding, btw) is laid out in chapter one. The rest of the book consists of classes built with the technique. Since I couldn't buy into Chapter 1's technique, the rest of the book wasn't very useful.

This book provides a method of utilizing the advantages of Object-Oriented Programing (OOP) by using C rather than C++. This isn't of much use for people who program PC's where C++ compiliers are abundant. But if there are no C++ compiliers available or the cost is prohibited for the project, this book teaches an excellent way of adding OOP to you code. Like Van Sickle's other book "Programming Microcontrollers in C", the book is well written and easy to read. Concepts are clearly explained and examples are given to clarify the meaning. As an added bonus, you will gain understanding of what C++ compiliers do to your code when compiling objects since some of that work must now be coded by hand.

I have to read this book for my comp 2 class in college. It is horrible. Capote doesn't give a clear picture of what he writing about and he rambles on about his life that seems very dismal. If you want to read a good book try The Count of Monte Cristo or my favorite Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington. Those are books that get somwhere and are interesting.

Read this in my Freshman lit class and just loved it-I favor Children on their Birthdays,its a kicker.The title stories are lovely but a bit stagnent at times-I recomend it.

A scholar of the Truman administration, Ferrell has compiled six reworked essays that mainly concern the origins of the Cold War. The first three in particular lay waste to the arguments of leftist historians who blame the United States for the Cold War. More specifically, he exposes the inadequacies of their research and the way in which their political agendas pre-determined the outcomes and conclusions of their books. Ferrell points out that the revisionists constructed their arguments before State Department records had become available. He essentially asks, "If the United States was bent on using nuclear weapons to intimidate the Soviets after WWII, why did it do such a slipshod job of producing them?" Ferrell shows how puny the US military became between 1946-50, something which Truman would not have allowed if he had been pursuing confrontation with the USSR.
The only way Ferrell could have produced a better book would have been to synthesize his essays into more of a single entity that examined the origins of the Cold War.
His is a fine addition to the growing list of scholarship that is thoroughly refuting and disproving the evidence and the arguments of the Cold War revisionists.

Robert Ferrell, who for many years was a or the leading diplomatic historian of the U.S. has had second and third careers as a biographer of non Mt. Rushmore Presidents, such as Coolidge and Harding, and characteristics of presidential history such as presidential health, and finally as a Truman biographer. His many books on aspects of Truman's life (on the farm, with the Pendegast machine, getting the VP nomination)are nicely complemented by this book which simply and directly takes apart the revisionist claims re: dropping the bomb, starting the cold war, and other subjects.

As a Vietnam Veteran I waited to read this book with much anticipation. Sadly I was greatly disapointed with it's content and seemingly "contrived" stories. This reads like a rehash of every war movie ever made.It is no wonder that the author wrote it under a pseudo name and uses the cop-out that this was all very top secret so he has to "change" the names ,units and dates around. Nothing rings true. For instance, he was being trained in hand to hand on his third day in Fort Jackson??? Drank beer with hi DI during basic???
There are so many good books written by veteran's out there. I reccomend that you need to pass this nonsense by. It does descredit to all VN VETERANS...

I found this book to be fascinating, it gives a whole new perspective to the tragedies these men experienced..I felt as though i was sitting with the author and hearing his story, it was so honest and tragic..I would recommend it to anyone wanting the gut wrenching truth of the sadness experienced by the young men taken from society and trained to be killers.

I wrote "authorship" above, but perhaps it should be "editorship," since Suppes and Storvick are listed on the title page as "Editors." However, no other authors are acknowledged in the preface nor listed on the first pages of chapters, so I assume the title-page listing simply represents another example of the collapse of corporate-level editing during book production. Academic Press is by no means alone on this!

I'm a PhD physicist, so I presumably have a better shot at understanding a book like this than do most of the intended audience, which the back cover lists as "engineers, scientists, and energy professionals." For laypeople, this book is a no-hoper.

There's definitely interesting and important material in the book. The authors (editors?) invite the reader to regard the book as a collection of free-standing chapters, so I skipped around and didn't slavishly read everything.

The two best parts, substantively, are their discussion about how U.S. transportation could be largely electrified -- no, not through electric trains and buses but via plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) with battery range matched to typical trips -- and their description of how the nuclear fuel cycle could be improved by a large factor, probably 10 to 50 times. I'd say these two topics also constitute the core of the book.

Improvement of the nuclear fuel cycle means processing of spent reactor fuel rods to remove the small percentage of fission products that constitute true waste -- the stuff that really needs to be sequestered from the biosphere for hundreds or thousands of centuries. Most of the "spent" fuel rods consist of still-usable uranium 238, uranium 235, and plutonium 239. (The Pu239 results from neutron-bombardment of the U238 and is a more-useful nuclear "fuel" than the starting U238. This is the idea behind the breeder reactor: Speaking simplistically, it makes more fuel than it starts with. But that can't work forever; eventually the U238 supply runs out!)

So, to summarize the authors' claims (which I find credible), reprocessing today's nuclear fuel rods turns today's "spent" nuclear fuel into an energy source that would cover **total** U.S. use for some centuries at current rates. Plus there's a huge shrinkage in the amount of truly hazardous nuclear waste that needs "permanent" storage. Plus, this is all available without further uranium mining.

The authors' optimism thus seems to have some basis. However, there are a number of questions that seem obvious to me but that go unaddressed. Chief among these is what would the requirements for power-plant cooling water be in a nuclear-electrified economy? (And what would be the effects of the resulting evaporated water on continental meteorology, including the greenhouse effects that nuclear energy is said to obviate -- since water vapor is also a greenhouse gas?) Water is going to be more and more of a problem already, without this burden. (And I expect that sea water won't do ...)

I also think the authors may be too glib that safety concerns with nuclear powerplants have been put to rest. Is it really possible to build something that's foolproof -- since [we] fools are so ingenious? Ecologist Garrett Hardin has written eloquently about the safety problem of operating nuclear power plants as a systemic risk -- we want to make things safe, but then how does one keep the operating staff alert and challenged enough to rise to the occasion if they ever have to?

Back to book **quality**: The book is replete with painfully amateurish writing and illustrations whose details are, in significant fraction, unlabeled and whose captions are often unhelpful. See, for one example among many, Fig. 11-4.

The book is largeley non technical and devotes a lot of space to economic considerations and non nuclear energy sources. It presents a solid arguement for fuel reprocessing and reactor technology updating to provide an energy source for millenia. Engineers however are not at their best when writing about economics.

No sooner had George Adamski published a brief account of his telepathic communion with an entirely human-appearing space alien from the planet Venus, entering bookstores in November of 1953, than a whole lineup of fellow "contactees" as quickly as possible got their own similar volumes off the press. Bethurum, a mechanic on roadbuilding crews, was the second of the 1950s contactees to make it into hardback print, if I'm counting right.

James W. Moseley, who met almost all these contactees in the flesh at the time of their brief burst of fame and publicity, shrewdly notes in his book SHOCKINGLY CLOSE TO THE TRUTH (2002) that Adamski in particular was a forerunner of the 1970s Creationists. So is Bethurum, very much so... he hasn't been talking with lovely space alien Captain Aura Rhanes very long before she assures him that despite being 1000 years old and living on the planet Clarion, she is a devout Christian and goes to church every Sunday! All of the 1950s contactee books I have seen, and I think I've seen most of them, come across as an attempt to incorporate and rechannel the space-travel and science-fictional excitement of the early 1950s into a variant of fundamentalist Christianity. [The other, very different fundamentalist tactic was to claim that flying saucers were piloted by imps of Satan and were a devilish plot to misguide confused Christians into thinking that life existed on other planets and that evolution was a fact.]

The particular copy of this book I obtained via Amazon had a typewritten note from an early 1950s reader clipped into the front. He basically says, "It didn't ring true, I couldn't finish it." One problem is that the account, ghostwritten by a female, causes the hardbitten, bald roadcrewman Bethurum to sound very much like a middle-aged spinster... incongruous, to say the least. But in fact all the 1950s contactee books were ghostwritten. In every case it would be a fascinating literary study to be able to compare the original material supplied by the "author," if any, to the "authentic" account as published.

Walton's book is meant to be a vigorous defense of Henry Wallace and the Far Left during the 40's and 50s. But, intended or not, what Walton inadvertently reveals is that Wallace was a pompous fool. If not a "fellow traveler," then he was one of the "useful idiots" on the left that Lenin laughed about. Wallace is revealed as so pro-Soviet as to be blind to the true nature of totalitarian communism, naive to the point of being dangerous and reckless, arrogant and haughty, and driven by passions the author does not want to delve into. The book also reveals, inadvertently, the duplicity of intellectuals on the left and the stars of the entertainment world who, knowingly or not, were essentially working on behalf of Stalin. This is the huge dirty secret the Left continues to lie about, distort, and suppress. Walton's attempt to defend Wallace and the left backfired admirably.

I only read the half about Truman Capote. Windham really revealed more of himself than of Truman - seems to me to be the archtype of a gay man - too, too sensitive to remarks about himself, either verbal or in print. Actually uses the phrase "conspiracy against me". I think a very biased portrait of Capote.

This very short book had one good fact -- review multiplication tables twice a day. Other than that there was not much "meat" to this book and it could easily be (and should have been) a chapter in another book regarding effective teaching methods.

Something NOT being disproven[sic] doesn't make it true. Example: You can't prove there isn't a tooth fairy.

This appears to be an unedited reprint of Bethurum's last published book, THE PEOPLE OF THE PLANET CLARION, which first appeared in 1970 shortly after his death. Bethurum was the second of the 1950s "contactees," curious characters who claimed to have met and talked with completely-human-appearing space aliens from other planets in our solar system. The first and best-known contactee was George Adamski, whom Bethurum seems to have been on fairly friendly terms with.

The first 44 pages are mainly an autobiography of Bethurum, and evoke a fairly interesting time in the early 20th Century history of a rural part of California. The text sounds as if it had been dictated by Bethurum to a tape recorder; alas, no one seems to have cared enough to ask him to elaborate in the many places where he lapses into unintelligibility. The next few chapters sort of orbit around the events of Bethurum's first book, ABOARD A FLYING SAUCER (1954), getting eventually to a space alien "commandment" of December 1955 for Bethrum to found a religious commune, the "Sanctuary of Thought."

The rest of the 139 pages are a random grab-bag of newspaper clippings plus a FAQ section about the planet Clarion and its people. I found it amusing that although "Tru" claimed to have chatted with the lovely Captain Aura Rhanes of Clarion nearly a dozen times, for substantial parts of an hour each time, the "information" about Clarion consists of a few isolated and generally incomprehensible sentences, already contained in ABOARD A FLYING SAUCER, repeated over and over. One gets the impression "Tru" and Aura spent most of their time together breathing heavily instead of conversing.

The 1950s contactees have generally been dismissed by those in the field of "ufoology" as harmless and often charming charlatans. Others have depicted them as evil tools of the CIA, who deliberately set out to convince the public of the inherent absurdity of any attempt to "study" flying saucers. It's only necessary to read the books of the contactees to see that essentially all of them were in fact motivated by deeply-held religious convictions (and most already led, or came ot lead, a religious cult), and that they were trying in their own way to bring simplistic, fundamentalist religious concepts into some kind of harmony with the science fiction/space travel ferment of the early 1950s.