Pacific University Books

Professors Michael Doyle and Nick Sambanis have 'tag-teamed' to present an excellent reference work on the UN's attempts at Peace operations. Earlier works have set the scene in an introductory fashion, however this book examines in methodical detail why certain UN peace operations have succeeded and others have not been so successful.

The authors use extensive data and quantitative measures in order to examine every civil war since the end of the Second World War to establish why conflicts occur. I was particularly impressed at the level of statistical analysis employed; especially their concept of the 'Triangle of Peace'to examine such variables as the degree of hostility, local capacities in the country involved in conflict and how international capacities assist in the post-conflict processes.

The data supports the authors' arguments that the UN is not so good at attempting to enter existing conflicts in a bid to try and stop them. The UN seems more suited at provision of various support specialities in rebuilding after the conflict is over. The authors also provide extensive comparison of UN Missions operating under Chapter Seven and Six of the UN Charter. They contend that a UN Mission is successful only when supported with a good mandate and adequate resources. Comparison of the successes (East Timor and Cambodia) are contrasted with not-so-successful ventures such as Somalia, Rwanda and Cyprus.

I recommend this book to the student of UN peace operations, as well as researchers of this topic, as the authors give substantial data and research methodology techniques in their outline of the various case studies contained within. My one dismay in this book is that, even though it was released two years ago, it does not cover the more recent Missions such as Ethiopia-Eritrea and Sudan. An updated edition is hoped for!

In summary, a great referral source; rich in data and references. Good, authorative explanations on UN peace operations with a wealth of detail and additional reading sources cited in the bibliography contained at the back of the book. Well done, Professors Doyle and Sambanis!

This map will give you a good overview of the island. But there are better, more detailed maps available. Try the surt shops around Poipu and you'll find a wide variety of maps, some comical, some with enough quality to frame.

This book is good. It gives a look at the times.
In retrospect, it presents an alternative reality for a time that bordered on madness.
It gives a clearly biased view.
There is no logic to the marihuana or hemp issue.
People have aright to their own health care choices.
People who self medicate do so because they feel it helps them.
Government intervention has cost huge amounts of wasted dollars to incarcerate, hapless people. Hemp which has also been destroyed as an export crop is not presented ats much.
Thhe people who have chose to imbibe, usually ogt caught up in a time zone problem.
Having done socialogical research in San Francisco with people who use, I see the attraction of the lifestyle.
However, when trust was deliberately broken, time and again in the hippy,punk, experimental scene, to measure when the
user's would abandon the 30 year old pipe dream, we only found negativity, paranoia, and bad vibes.
Still If you ever went to a Gr8ful Dead show, there was a feeling of shammanistic joy, that bordered on mysticism.
Til this day the Haight Ashbury participants do not know of their involvement.
This book is good but not the best.
Dr. Brains Muffoletto
Vancouver B.C. Canada 2005(almost)

This is obviously one of Defoe's more obscure works. Part I begins in 1630. A young English nobleman, a second son, though his father's favorite, decides to see something of the world and begins traveling on the continent with a friend. He signs on with the troops of Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden, who's aiding German Protestants against, I think, the Catholics. This ten-year period occurs near the end of the Thirty Years War. My knowledge of seventeenth-century European history is practically nonexistent, so I didn't really understand the issues involved and didn't learn much more from this book.

In Part II, our nameless hero returns to England, where the Civil War between the Cavaliers (the king's troops) and the Roundheads (Puritans) is about to get underway. (It was at the end of the Civil War that Charles I was beheaded, after which the Commonwealth took over for eleven years until the restoration of Charles II in 1660.) I thought this part might be more interesting, as I do know something about English history, and it was.

Like A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR, this book, too, has a fictional narrator in a historical setting. If you like Defoe, you will not dislike this book. If you don't like Defoe, this book won't change your mind.

This book is a bit of an oddity. Mt. Rainer is such a presence, both on the horizon and in the coffee table book market, in the Northwest, that it's surprising that the writing in this book, treating a very large but so far as I know otherwise untouched topic, the early ascents of the mountain, is so unpolished. The original text was published some forty years ago, though, and writing styles have changed somewhat. I found the first chapter especially difficult, where you have to read pretty closely to keep track of which apocryphal climb is being discussed. I would have liked a bit more authorial opinion on how much validity to give the accounts of the pre-Stevens climbs. Dee Molenauer gives credence to the account of the two climbers guided by Saluskin, and it would be nice to hear Haines' opinions.

The book is laid out pretty strictly chronologically, which makes it a little difficult to follow the different threads of narrative: the story of the establishment of the national park, and the stories of the formation and collapse of the various climbing clubs, appear and disappear through the book.

The book is heavily footnoted, and the footnotes are pretty strange. Sometimes they contain information that really belongs in the text, other times they are the bibliographic references that you'd expect, other times, they are just odd. In some places, Indian guides' words are printed in their native language, and the English translation is saved for the footnote. In another place, a passage involving an uncomfortable bivouac around Camp Misery is footnoted with a passage from The Bible.

There is a lot of quite interesting information in here. Over the course of the book, we see climbs evolving from two-week expeditions into the unknown to comfortable travel along well-maintained roads up to the trailhead, followed by a predictable (often guided) ascent to a summit increasingly littered with artifacts of previous ascents.

The story of the "first ascent" of Stevens and Van Trump is well known, of course, including the fact that they had to take refuge in a summit steam cave to survive the night. But I had no idea that overnighting on the summit was a normal part of the climb for decades after.

Another aspect that emerges is the glaring difference between the physical fitness of everyday people then and now. The folks who climb Mt. Rainier these days are athletes. RMI and the park climbing rangers emphasize the difficulty and the need to work long and hard to get into first-class shape before attempting the climb. But the climbers of a century ago were apparently just everyday folks. There was an early climb by a group of newspaper reporters, there were climbs by doctors, and soldiers, and there is no indication that people spent six months at the gym working on the stairmaster to prepare for their climb, they just hiked in there, slogging up much more altitude than today's climber with much heavier and poorer quality gear. Imagine a climber of today hauling firewood up to Camp Muir! You're left with the impression that in a world without elevators and cars and power lawnmowers, climbing a 14,411 foot mountain isn't a tremendous feat of athleticism, it's just a slightly eccentric pursuit for people with some free time and a taste for adventure.

I enjoyed the book immensely, on balance. If you're interested in climbing Mt. Rainier, or have already climbed it, this is a book that will greatly enrich your experience.

I have 2 other mushroom guides, Mushrooms Demystified and All the Rain Promises (AWESOME PICTURES) and this was a great supplement for my area to distinguish local mushrooms. Used the content of this book with info gained from the other two and pictures and were able to enjoy some new varieties of edible mushrooms this year since morels were in short supply in our area. Great reference!

John McGinley of the Sacramento Poetry Center reviewed "My Shepherd" by David Humphreys in the March issue of Poetry Now, 1998 writing, "David calls his style of writing "roller coaster collage" and I tend to agree. Reading him is quite a ride. Some of his poems, like "Firestone Library" and "Magpie" are so comfortable and familiar that you feel as if you might have helped write them. Others, like "Six Way Bypass Over Coffee At The Bookstore" are so tense and painful that you finish the poem with a sense of relief that it wasn't you who had to live through that particular experience. He'll relate the wild conversations of children at play and inventory the absurdities of their discarded and jumbled toys in "Several Obscurities" and then take you off to some equally odd adult universe in his "Space Cowboy". He does quick-witted satire in "So?" (Subterfuge Satire): "I feel like the programmed ignition of a personal singularity, big bang cosmic robotic spot-weld, titanic collision with the fog as well as the iceberg, becoming the event" and then he comes up with heartfelt lines like those in "She Is There": "Watching her as she leans on the swing she looks off at the roses and I see that she has taken on the dimensions of her life at school which has drawn shadows along her edges so that a flat surface no longer contains her." There is much more in this book that makes it well worth reading. Whatever you do, buy a copy of it and share it with others. This is a strong voice indeed!"

I happened to come across this book while actually in Koror, Palau (Koror was the capital of the Nan'yo, the Japanese governing body for Micronesia) during a vacation and read it while I was there. In general, it is worth reading if you are are a student of Japan's occupation policies of southeast asian countries during the war. It is very detailed but could have focused more on military strategy, but the book is not really about that, its about how Japan built up, governed, then lost its colonies in Micronesia-- colonies which would most likely be in a much better economic state than there are in now, arguably, if the Japanese were still there running things.

I bought this for a class, but enjoyed it so much that I decided to keep it rather than just disposing of most of my text books like I usually do. Great information on Alaska that is more widespread than just the Klondike.

This book provides a lot of documentary material from the beginning of the Marshall Islands colony relating to the annexation of Nauru and goes to 1900. The German texts are from the archives at Potsdam, and have Englsh translations in a separate section. The text is vital for the understanding of the early history of Nauru, an the Anglo/German agreement relating to the spheres of influence in the southwest Pacific. Basically a source of primary research and historical information not easily available elsewhere.