McDonald's Books

This book, while written specifically for therapists and counselors, is accessible to a mainstream audience eager to explore pressures faced by gay men and women in today's society. I am not a therapist, but I greatly enjoyed its balanced view.

It is an excellenct tool to teach global marketing for a class. As a teacher, I need more information on teaching material. Without the additional teaching package, it would work by itself.

A very interesting book. I found it quite difficult to get into at first yet the stories and information in the book are excellent. The Stories of the Ball players themseleves were spell binding and gave a great insight into their love of the game. His poems also are a treat and written with great Love which stand for all the Negro Leagues and what they stood for, and also for the sport of Baseball itself.

Good book on developing processes and alot of excercises were helpful, however it was like being forced to read a MBA text book again. i was hoping to get some more correlations to Six Sigma and others but overall it is a good read...but be ready to feel like you are studying again.

I think the reader from the bronx is mistaking this book with another. I do agree about the print being difficult to read however the layout is typical for a tactics book. Every chapter is based on a common tactical theme such as pins, forks (knight, queen), skewers, and what have you. Neil starts off each chapter with 2 or 3 very basic examples, but then he jumps right into top grandmaster games. No intermediate tactics which is why I only gave it three stars. The examples are very complex and sometimes require over a page to illustrate why and how it works. Most of the examples are in cluttered middlegames, a couple of which gave me headaches just by looking at them. This book is good for anyone who wants to improve there ability in finding tactics in tough middlegames. To be honest, some of the games are genuinely brilliant in that the tactic seams to be pulled out of thin air. This book is not for anyone rated under 1600 and I think 1700-1900 rated players will benifit the most from it. I like the fact that he gives complete games because it teaches you how to convert a material advantage into a win. Nothing aggrevates me more then an example that leaves you hanging by not giving thorough enough analysis. Don't get me wrong though, this isn't like a Nunn or Dvoretsky epic but it can at times require more work then you might be willing to put in. The work problems are much more simple than the illustrative games but give the reader enough of a challenge so that they learn something. Overall this is a good book and I guarentee that any reader within the ratings listed above will benifit from reading it.

"Nara Encounters" is a collection of pretty photographs, combined with short quotes or poems from various writers and wits. The focus of the book is on Nara City, rather than Nara Prefecture.

The photographs are nice, although nothing particularly unique. Close-up shots of flowers, long shots of sweeping terrain, the burning fields, the lanterns, the deer, and of course, the enormous Great Buddha. This is not a photo-journalist's guide to Nara, but instead a photo-romanticist's guide.

The writing ranges from pithy and interesting, to as frothy and decorative as the photos. Nara City is an important piece of Japanese history, and this is represented through eyewitness accounts from across the centuries, and delicate Haikus. Rudyard Kipling is one of the featured writers.

All in all, "Nara Encounters" is a nice book, short on depth and thin in length. It takes the view that Nara is a fairy-tale land of Castles, deer and flowers, with no actual people living in the City.

Colin Renfrew's introduction (about 14 pages) provides a fine short exposition of the Nostratic hypothesis. Aharon Dolgopolsky then lists etymologies of 124 words believed to have been in the original Nostratic language derived from desendants found in daughter languages. From these words he deduces the location of the Nostratic speakers' homeland, and their cultural characteristics. From the technology he then deduces the approximate date (e.g. Neolithic vs. Mesolithic vs. Paleolithic). He settles on the late Paleolithic as the epoch of Nostratic's origin. The book proper consists mostly of the 124 words and their etymologies, interspersed with interpretations concerning culture, technology, etc. The "index" merely lists the words. The etymologies are only of interest to professionals, but the deductions from them are interesting, as is Renfrew's concise presentation of the Nostratic hypothesis.

It should be noted that this book served as the focus of a Nostratic Symposium in Cambridge England during July of 1998 at The MacDonald Institute for Archeological Research . The papers presented at the symposium have been published as "Nostratic: Examining a Linguistic Macrofamily" edited by Colin Renfrew and Daniel Nettle. These papers shed a great deal of light (as well as some heat) on Dolgoposky's volume, in addition to discussing some criticisms and defenses of the Nostratic Hypothesis. The version of the book published for the symposium participants runs over 400 pages.

In short, the casual reader will probably find the word lists heavy going, with Renfrew's summarization of Nostratic and Dolgoposky's deductions/speculations a little to skimpy for the price. Specialists will want both this book and the Renfrew/Nettle book. Anyone who is interested enough in the Nostratic Hypothesis to buy this book should seriously consider buying the Renfrew/Nettle book as well.

After my review of McDonald's short story collection, Speaking in Tongues, several people, among them Michael Sumbera, recommended to me what they felt was McDonald's best novel, Out on Blue Six. There was also some attention focused on the novel on rec.arts.sf.written, because of its similarity to Terry Gilliam's "Brazil." The comparison is not misplaced, although McDonald has a different agenda than Gilliam. Both stories feature a huge government that relegates people's lives, in which a small mistake can wreak human lives. That is, both stories are satires on present governments and governmental ideas. But whereas Gilliam plays the satire to the hilt, and goes beyond simple governmental poking, but also poking at individuals within it, ultimately ending on an extremely cynical note, McDonald still feels there's hope to be had. Out on Blue Six is an extremely pyrotechnic novel, full of unknown words and weirdly impossible SF ideas; again, like Snow Crash, this isn't a hard SF novel, but rather a novel of adventure and philosophy. Stephenson pulls it off slightly better, mainly because he isn't concerned with wrapping things up in a denoument, which McDonald does with his story.

The author's key point is that positional sacrifices differ from combinations by the degree of uncertainty inherent in them.

Including chapter 1, The Psychology of Sacrifices; chapter 2, Theoretical and Standard Sacrifices; and the final 20 element quiz, this book has all of nine chapters. The middle 6 chapters make up the meat of the book and include

chapter 3, Sacrifices to create a passed pawn
chapter 4, Sacrifices to destroy the opponent's center
chapter 5, Sacrifices to open lines

chapter 6, The Indian bishop
chapter 7, The "Karpovian" exchange sacrifice
chapter 8, Queen for Rook and Bishop sacrifices

This book covers pawn, exchange, piece, even queen sacrifices in different circumstances and to different ends. Some of the examples are truly amazing, well beyond anything that I could ever conceive. A good grasp of positional considerations is needed to appreciate some of these, even though the positional elements and why they are important are generally very well explained. Any tactical variations are given at length, and this defintely helps the reader come to terms with the examples.

Where I think the author misfires, is in pursuing each example game to the very end. This leads to some very complicated alternatives being explored, many of them well past the point of the sacrifice. If you need closure on whether or not the sacrifice proved successful, this may be good. But it limits the number of examples given.

I think the content of this book could help most players below expert rating appreciate some ideas for the first time. Seeing a winning passed pawn motif conjured out a position that contained not even a wisp of such a possibility is truly enlightening. Also includes fine examples (and explanation!) of the compensation arising from certain pawn and piece sacrifices.

Of course, you can always ignore the indepth variations until you are in the mood and simple read the text and get a lot out of this book.

Handy size, well-written, few if any typos. Three and a half stars, rounded down to three.

If you are interested in Quilt History, this is a good read. It can get a little dry here and there. Nice Photos.