Public Interest Books

Exquisitely written, this book is superbly articulate advocacy in defense of the fundamental components of traditional liberal education. This advocacy of 'tradition' is all the more special coming from one of academe's leading true Liberals. As President of Dartmouth Universty, Freedman took on the hate-speech of Dartmouth's right-wing journal and made it stick. He held a similar position at the sometimes underrated University of Iowa, and was ombudsman and also law dean at the Universtiy of Pennsylvania. He truly knows whereof he speaks, and our policy makers would do well to heed his exhortations.

"Liberal Education" initially appeared promising. After an interesting chapter on the history of college presidents, Freedman discusses the current and future states of higher education. As expected he passionately defends liberal education and intellectualism. I was stunned, however, when in the middle of the second chapter (p. 42), he defends tenured faculty by drawing on the following statistics: there are perhaps "200,000 faculty members" at significant research universities and colleges in the United States, a country of "280 million people." He concludes that such faculty "make up less than .0001 percent of the nation's population." He repeats this assertion in the following paragraph, indicating that this was not simply a typo. He makes no small mistake: it is the equivalent of standing in Chicago and stating that Boston is about a mile away. Freedman attempts to mislead the reader (he uses these numbers to argue for academic freedom for a small proportion of the population); as my expertise is limited, I cannot tell if he has made other such mispresentations of facts, but one such significant mistake is enough to make me distrust the remainder of the book.

I initially purchased a copy of this book as a Christmas present for a family member with interests in both wine and architecture. These are two subjects I know little about but, despite this, I was so taken with Wineries with Style that I went back and ordered a copy for myself! It's a fascinating book with stunning pictures, well written and beautifully produced. It certainly boosts the culture rating of my coffee table and I would recommend it as welcome and unusual addition to any home's bookshelves. Well done, Mr. Richards!

There are a few books popping up on this subject and I found this one disappointing. The best photograph appears on the cover but the wineries included inside lean to the more traditional. If you are looking for a coffee-table book, I would suggest Wine By Design which has more extensive photographs, site plans, and drawings.

An excellent book that highlights how and why one can make decisions in end of life treatment. The book correctly sets aside the idiosyncracies of state forms (these are free from any doctor's office), and gets to the heart of _why_ to discuss this topic. This book is very helpful in starting and encouraging a conversation between family members and health care providers about what is important to the individual before and when the chips are down.

The author's comments are right on target. If you want to debate the reasons to have these documents, weigh ethical considerations, and write a values statement, this is the book for you. But if you buy the book already convinced you need these documents and what you want is a detailed list of suggestions, customized wording, state-specific information and forms, this book is disappointing.

No other historian has identified so important a piece of NYC's history on which so little is known, and written so lucidly about it. This is not just enjoyable history. You cannot understand New York City today without reading Derrick's book.

The greatest city of the modern era had its pivotal moment early in the 20th century with the decision in 1913 to double the size of its subway system: the largest public-works expenditure in the Western Hemisphere to that date. This decision, a dozen years and more in the making and led by Manhattan Borough President George McAneny, was propelled by the inability to resolve the problems of disease, crime, prosititution, overpopulation and poverty that overwhelmed Manhattan's Lower East Side, spilling into more affluent neighborhoods throughout the city. Getting employees out of impoverishment and to their jobs was now an impediment to development and modernization. The vision that turned farm lands into an urban center was a leap into the unknown and Derrick meticulously details this exciting chapter in NYC's history, a chapter that when fully understood, reveals how issues get resolved and great accomplishments propelled. In comparison, the highway system of the Robert Moses era was but an anxilary event.

Peter Derrick's book covers the "Dual Contracts" era of subway construction in New York, when numerous lines were built between 1910 and 1931 by the IRT and the BRT /BMT. Derrick focuses on the interactions between executives of the then-existing subway companies and municipal politicians. Only a few paragraphs cover the "Independent" subway system, which was built after 1931.

Endnotes, bibliography, etc., comprise 155 pages of this book, or nearly a third of its pages. There are eight maps and 24 period photographs. There is nothing in this book about station design, track layouts, operating procedures, or rolling stock. In fact, the book ends when construction began. It was a worthy endeavor of historical research to document the political deal-making of this period, but some readers may be disappointed that the author's interest was solely in the back-room political gamesmanship that preceded construction

The intro and first chapter was excellent and indeed made me really look at how much of an 'eager beaver' I was.

Perhaps the book should have stopped there...isn't that what a sloth would do? But no, the publisher wouldn't have published a pamphlet as part of a multi-book series. Ironically, the writer ambitions, using various unnecessary reframing techniques like most authors do, to expand the wisdom of a fortune cookie into a book on sloth...which is so unslothlike. Here it is in a nutshell: the opposite of America's uptight unhealthy culture is NOT sloth; the opposite is peaceful and healthy; regardless, the uptight unhealthy industry will call you a sloth.

We know that health is based on diet, exercise, and lifestyle. There are a gazillion books that really address diet and exercise, but few that realistically address lifestyle like Sloth. The book instantly clicked for me and I let go of so many worries that frankly I never really had. My emotional eating went away, the unnecessary stress at work went away, concerns about political stuff that I never really understood nor could do anything about went away. Thus I was able to get healthier on all levels, do more things that I truly wanted to do, and so on.

So the book isn't about sloth so much as it is about letting go of all the unnecessary stress that we put on ourselves. At least that is what I got from it.

I read this work after I read Gluttony which was sharp and acute. This work by Wasserstein by contrast is sort of like the subject she chose 'sloth', that is to say sloppy and without effort. This work is not funny, has tired joke themes from some of her other work, sags, is inert, not sparkling. Contrast with Hunter Thompson, a sharp eyed and sharp minded satirist. Or with Mencken. I'm sorry this work is disappointing; her Heidi Chronicles, even though it is now a sort of aged romantic comedy about a very narrow class of women in America, was fresh to the East Coast audience in its time.

I read this book on the heels of Gluttony in the same series, and so was looking forward a serious treatment of the subject. The self-help book parody was amusing, but it went on a little long. I don't feel I know much more about sloth than I did before I read this book.

I almost never give a book just one star in my reviews. If a book is so bad that it rates no more than a single star, I generally leave it unreviewed. The only times I violate this rule are when I run across books that not only are bad but also, in my judgment, harmfully bad. Wendy Wasserstein's little volume on sloth fits that description.

Wasserstein (who, since this book, unfortunately has died) was a brilliant comic playwright. On stage, her satiric wit in plays such as "The Heidi Chronicles" is wonderful. But why she was asked (or allowed) by the 7 Deadly Sins series editors to write on the vice of sloth is a mystery. She's clearly out of her depth. Alone of all the other authors, she has no obvious qualifications.

Instead of thinking deeply and writing cogently about sloth, Wasserstein shoots for the easy laugh. Her approach to sloth is to write a mock-manual on how to cultivate it, filled with faux easy-steps-to-laziness advice. Given that contemporary American culture is so obsessed with busyness and careerism that fewer and fewer of us actually know how to enjoy leisure time, Wasserstein's jabs at the fast-paced and frenetic life are well-taken.

The problem is that you get the point in the first five pages, and after that you look, without success, for substance. Even worse, Wasserstein mischaracterizes sloth from the get-go. Sloth isn't merely laziness; in fact, it's not clear that sloth is laziness at all. Sloth, as commentators from the desert fathers in the first centuries of the Christian era to psychologists and philosophers today maintain, is a form of despair, the inability to feel joy or gratitude. Sloth can lead to a dispirited lack of energy that leads to behavior frequently thought of as lazy. But lazyiness connotes a relaxed internal state that the person suffering from sloth simply doesn't enjoy. Neither is sloth leisured, nonbusy time. The latter is an opportunity, as Aristotle noted, for enrichment. The former is always a state of alienation and interior impoverishment. Wasserstein's failure to make these sorts of distinctions leads to a caricature rather than an analysis of sloth.

Sloth, when understood as despair, may be the single one of the 7 deadlies that most characterizes American culture. How doubly unfortunate, then, that the volume on sloth in the 7 Deadly Sins series is so inadequate. Its easy conflation of sloth with laziness only legitimizes our present-day tendency not to take it seriously. And this is where Wasserstein's bad book graduates into the harmful book category.

I found this book by chance at the library and I am now considering purchasing it for some folks. I kept reading parts to my husband (he was forced to listen)and I was howling and doubled over with laughter. I have read tons of self-help books and found this satirical book FABULOUS! What a fun read.

Thanks Ms. Wasserstein, I plan on looking up your other books.

I came across this in a summer course on multicultural worship, a week in which I was the only representative of a liturgical tradition; my other classmates were about half Baptist, and half from the wider free church tradition. Basden's concept of conversation and response was a really fruitful way to begin, but I had one very serious reservation.

The representative speaking on behalf of the liturgical (specifically Anglican) tradition is Paul Zahl, an American priest from what would be widely understood as the "low church" tradition. In short, his spirituality is based in Sunday worship using Morning Prayer (a service of word, music, and preaching), a tradition most familiar to contemporary American Anglicans through the service of Evensong, even as the standard Sunday liturgy has moved strongly toward celebration of the Eucharist, as envisioned in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer.

As a result, Dr. Zahl's contribution mentions the Eucharist (also known as Holy Communion, or the Lord's Supper) quite minimally, as he presents his own spirituality as a broader norm. To be sure, this tradition is a venerable one, dating back to the earliest reforms of the 16th century, when the infrequent reception of Communion of the pre-reformation Catholic tradition remained strongly ingrained in the culture, with Morning Prayer (or Matins) as the normal Sunday worship form, with the Eucharist celebrated only on major feast days.

However, as the sole representative from any liturgical church (as no Lutheran or Roman Catholic voices are part of this conversation), it means that this "worship spectrum" is quite severely truncated. While this may make the liturgical traditions more accessible to those which are even less Eucharistically-centered, it also does a serious disservice by leaving out the vast (95% or more, I'd say) majority of the Sunday worship of that tradition in contemporary America.

I can't speak to the comprehensiveness (or lack thereof) of the other contributions; they certainly presented engaging, if necessarily-broad, visions of a wide range of sensibilities with regard to worship. And I do want to emphasize that the format of allowing each contributor not just to speak, but to respond to each of the other contributors, was a very productive concept--rather like an extended roundtable discussion. I simply regret that the liturgical element of this discussion is, frankly, impoverished, shortchanging the book as a whole.

Exsploring the worship spectrum is a very advanced look at how worship has changed in today's world. You may be a pastor that has only been exsposed to one style of music all your life. In this book, you may realize that there is no right or wrong way to worship God. Each church makes a descision on how they want to apporach the throne of grace. This book gives a layout for each style of worship as well as the points and counter points that go with each view. This book is a must have to truly understand what it means to worship God.

First let me mention that the product arrived very timely and as described.

The book is a bit too lengthy if you asked me. I would have preferred more of a concise interview style narrative. However the information was incredible, and the multiple perspectives were great.

Zondervan has been publishing the Counterpoints Series edited by Paul E. Engle in which conflicting views of different topics are laid out in one volume. Each view has a prominent author compiling arguments supporting it, and then each alternate view's author writes an evaluation of the arguments. Exploring the Worship Spectrum: 6 Views was edited by Paul A. Basden, and it presents six views of worship: formal-liturgical, traditional hymn-based, contemporary, charismatic, blended, and emergent.

The strength of this book lies in having in one place the concise reasoning for each view as presented by its supporters. One can reference quickly the primary arguments for certain worship styles as argued by those who promote and use them. Furthermore, with a critique of each argument available, one can easily assimilate a vast amount of information and views on the topic. In this area, the book excels, although one must read the entire book to access all of the arguments and views pertaining to each style of worship. Embedded in many of the critiques are further supporting arguments for each view, so one will not have the entire picture through reading only the chapter pertaining to his or her area of interest.

The weakness of the book is an extension of its strength, and can be summed up best by Best: "The current worship scene, to my way of thinking, is more an apples/oranges affair than a right/wrong one." (p. 237). One almost gets the idea that the writers are all part of a gentleman's club and are afraid to really stand against the shortcomings of the other views, although some genuine differences do surface. They spend so much time patting each other on the back that it gets rather tedious by the end of the book.

A second weakness of the book is that it fails to really deal with the fact that the theology of worship cannot be compartmentalized from other theological and practical views. Every contributing author presents solid arguments for theocentric worship; so why does this all look different? Charismatic worship is founded upon the Spirit emphasis theology of charismaticism and the view that I Corinthians 14 is the model for NT worship. Emergent worship denies the superiority of the written and spoken word as it plunges into the realm of the arts. Blended worship presented a view that was, quite frankly, not rooted in the reality of what is actually blended worship--the mixing of traditional and contemporary to make everyone happy (practical pragmatism). Hymn-based worship rests upon church tradition and the greatness of hymn texts with the practical use of the hymnal, while liturgical worship focuses on the transcendence of God and the Eucharist. Contemporary worship is most concerned with relevance and evangelism. The theological bent of each group contributes to their ultimate view of worship, but this is glossed over.

A further theme that surfaces time and again: the church lost connection with the generations coming of age in the second half of the 20th century. From each author who espoused this view, it smacks of pride: what is so different about the last couple generations that make them special? Somehow Protestant believers kept the old and incorporated the new for 500 years, but now the old was out; the church was the problem. I would submit that the real problem was twofold: [1] mainline churches had no saving gospel, so their progeny rejected a false church (in other words, their gospel, or lack thereof, was the problem, not their worship), and [2] the progeny were immersed in the world and would not leave it behind, therefore a new church and worship paradigm--one that would allow them to live in their previous entertainment and lifestyle with "Jesus" attached. Neither one of these areas (the theological problems with mainline churches and the rebellious worldliness of those claiming to be saved) are addressed, and both of them have a tremendous impact on the current worship landscape.

At the end of the day, everyone is OK, and we all feel good about each other; that is the message of the book. It does, however, give what it sets out to do: six views of worship. May God give us the wisdom and knowledge to understand what He desires from us as worshippers, and the grace and humility to be open to the weaknesses of our own view.

My guess is that if you're thinking of buying a book by this title, you have probably been bothered greatly by the worship wars of the past couple of decades. Further you're probably wondering who, if anyone, is right. Most of all, you're probably wanting to figure out what, if anything, you can do about it, if not in a church-wide sense, at least in the sense of how you personally should worship, what kind of church you should be attending, and so forth. You won't find these questions answered here.

Pretty much all the contributors here follow the same pattern and have the same problems. The pattern: They wax eloquent about the nature and importance of worship. (I don't mean that totally sarcastically. Some of these guys really are eloquent.) Then they move into what they and the participants in their preferred worship styles are particularly concerned with -- the things they want to accomplish, the problems they want to correct. Then they spend some time describing what their preferred worship "looks like." The problems: The actual connection between the goal of the worship stlye and the methods used in the worship is rarely made clear. What's worse, pretty much every "worshiper" here claims much the same goals, such as "bringing the congregation into an awareness of the presence of God." But never do any of the writers actually say clearly how their own particular style accomplishes these goals in a particularly effective way.

Nevertheless, the book is not entirely unhelpful. Though the writer's are not particularly good apologists for their own styles, they are pretty representative of the mindsets behind the communities that support each style. So, even though you probably won't find here any compelling reason to abandon (or retain) your own preferred style of worship, you may come away form "Exploring the Worship Spectrum" with a better understanding of why your spiritual brethren might want to worship differently form you.

The tone of the book is usually warm and genial. The fur flies occasionally, but most of the authors are pretty respectful most of the time. The one unforutnate exception to this rule is Sally Morganthaler and her defense of worship in the "emerging church." I was actually most interested in reading her contribution because, after hearing of "the emerging church" quite a bit, I still don't know what it's really about. And after reading this book, I still haven't the foggiest. But I could not stomach Morganthaler's unremitting arrogance. As far as I can tell from her writing here, she thinks the emerging church is the first and only church to get worship "right" since the Reformation or before. I also object to her apparently uncritical embrace of postmodern culture. (I also object to anyone uncritically believing that there actually is such a thing as postmodernism in the first place, but that's a much longer story.) Also, she seems quite erudite regarding modern media, but entirely ignorant of the work on its potentially debilitating effects done by Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, and, from a Christian perspective, Os Guiness. (Though she does at least know the title of McLuhann's book.) So she wants us all to get with electronic music and digital images, and she reflexively (as far as I can tell) attributes any and every preference shown by the other writers for more traditional church music to nothing but bias, pure and simple. She is completely unfair in this regard.

So, what you will get here is a sampling of pretty good representatives (Morganthaler excluded) of most of the important worship movements in evangelical Christianity today. Which, I guess, is an OK thing. I give it three stars.

In the introduction the author apologizes to the reader for not being able to include 'every shipwreck' in the text. Some readers, he noted, were bound to be upset that a particular sinking was left out. Now of course we all know no book could cover every shipwreck or every disaster at sea, but certainly one could do better than this. As it is, all but a very few are given no more than a paragraph, making this more of a dictionary than encyclopedia. On top of it all, the book is filled with errors. The reader might just as well stick to the list of sinkings provided at the end, and ignore the text. Ritchie writes well, and could have produced an exellent work if only he had spent more time on the research and organization.

Set out like a dictionary, each section commences with a capital letter of the alphabet under which a limited number of shipwrecks and other subjects are included in strict alphabetical order. Under "B" for example there is the heading "bodies" which commences with the words "Shipwrecks commonly have resulted in loss of life." Whilst this is just one example of how the publishers have wasted printed space in stating the obvious, it is also an example of the way in which this book is very poorly written. On the very same page one shipwreck which resulted in the loss of 125 lives in 1892 is afforded no more than 5 lines and another (with 92 people lost) gets just 3 lines. From these and other entries the reader will learn nothing of those disasters or even of the ships themselves.

More frustratingly, many a good shipwreck - famous throughout the world of those with an interest in this absorbing subject, are not included at all. Whilst some accounts of certain ships do seem to get better than average coverage, for the most part, this book is not even a collection of short stories to entertain those who like a good read and is, therefore, likely to become a book which is put down unfinished.

In short, great subject, good layout, pretty awful content, nothing here for the serious researcher and could so easily have done so much better.

NM.

This book is written by a popular science journalist. It's a fact-filled reference of shipwrecks, mainly from the last few centuries. Here you can read the stories of the Wilhelm Gustloff, Titanic, Central America, and others.

The cover is global but the focus is on American wrecks and wrecks from the last two centuries. The book does not cover warships sunk in battle. Hundreds of ships are listed alphabetically and described. There is also a chronology and a keyword index. All this makes the book a useful reference.

The illustrations are few, consisting of simple drawings and black and white photos. More illustrations and a few colour photos would have made the book better.

A few comments:

- On keyword sheathing, the book gives the impression that lead sheathing of Spanish ship hulls ceased in 1567. That is not true. In 1999 I was diving on the remains of San Pedro de Alcantara. It was Spanish, lead sheathed and built on Cuba in 1770.

- On keyword Grand Congloue, the ancient wreck site is described as one wreck. But today's archaeologists agree that it's actually two wrecks on top of each other. The author refers to a book from 1971, which may explain why the text is out of date.

- On keyword Magna Carta, there is no mention that this famous document is from the 13th century AD. That is a pity. Readers who don't know about Magna Carta might get the impression that it's a modern text.

Despite these complaints, the general impression is good. The author has assembled an impressive amount of information in an easy light style. The book is a straightforward and useful reference for both professionals as well as for school kids. It is useful for readers anywhere, but considering the lack of ancient and European wrecks, the book may be best suited for American readers.

David Ritchie has produced a good basic reference work on shipwrecks throughout the world.

It is a bit uneven in concentrating on New England, the Outer Banks, the Great Lakes, the Columbia River bar and the Caribbean. Other areas of the world, by comparison, receive relatively short shrift.

I was particularly puzzled why Ritchie left out some shipwrecks that were very well-documented and dramatic. The one that immediately comes to mind is the burning of the immigrant steamer Volturno in the mid-Atlantic in 1913. Hundreds of the ship's passengers were rescued thanks to the bravery of the ship's captain and crew and those of the rescue ships that steamed to the scene.

I also would highly recommend that in subsequent editions, Ritchie consider a detailed entry on the Derbyshire, a mammoth freighter that disappeared during a typhoon in the South China Sea in the 1980s. The recent discovery of the ship in water nearly two and a half miles deep helped solve a mystery, bring closure to a horrible loss for the crew's families and offered engineering lessons that may well save the lives of hundreds of seamen in the years ahead.

If you want good narrative (and aren't too finicky about accuracy of detail), try to obtain a copy of Jay Robert Nash's book on disasters. (Hint to a publisher: This one urgently needs to be dusted off, updated and republished, as do Dwight Boyer's works) Until that happens, Ritchie's book will do yeoman service in your reference collection.

The book is quite good as far as it goes. The writing is good. One wonders at the author's choice of shipwrecks as some wrecks with considerable loss of life are not included.. It would seem that too extensive a listing is given to some obscure wrecks. Also, a number of entries are not on shipwrecks but associated items and places, perhaps too many such entries.

Also, in my opinion, a number of articles were too short, and a number of shipwrecks that should have been included were omitted.

Too Short: Third World wrecks that are included, Estonia, Exxon Valdez, Flying Enterprise, Wilhelm Gustloff (shipwreck with the most victims), Lakonia, Mikhail Lermentov, Morro Castle, Noronic, Oregon, USS Pollux, Princess Sophia, Princess Alice, Principe de Asturias, Principessa Malfala, Queen Elizabeth, USS Squalus, Sultana, HMS Thetis(sub), USS Truxton, HMS Vanguard , HMS Victoria.

Left Out: Athenia, Baychimo, USS Cairo, Derbyshire, HMS Edinburgh, Farallon, Grosvenor, HMS Hood, CSS Hunley, I-52, Iron Mountain, Joyita, Laconia, Lancastria, Achille Lauro, Mary Rose (Tudor), Melbourne, USS Memphis, HMS Natal, Oceanus, Ohio, Pacific (Collins Line), Princess Victoria, Prisendam, HMS Royal Oak, Royal Charter, Veendam, Volturno, Yankee Blade, and probably any number of wrecks occuring in Third World countries.

I ordered this book and when I received it the cover had fallen off and there was sticky glue all over the spine. I would have thought it was an isolated incident if I had not read the other review about the same problem.

The photos in this book are beautiful. The information in this book is excellent. The cover on this book is terrible. I opened this book a few times and the cover fell off the book. I re-glued the cover and the problem with that is the old glue marks show. Improve the cover and this is a completely wonderful book about Paris.

As some of the other reviews have stated, the cover falls off of this book. Also, unless you are interested only in architectural detail and not the whole picture of Paris with its more famous landmarks, then you are not going to be very interested in this book. Considering the book's title, I was expecting a showcase of the city. Instead, I got an architectural design mini-textbook. I feel I could've put together a more interesting book of Paris with my own tourist shots. Save your money and get a better constructed and more interesting book.

If you are the kind of person whose travel photos contain lots of shots of interesting doors, building facades and architectural details you should find this book delightful. The book contains a large number of color photos and also some very interesting short paragraphs on the history of building styles and design in Paris.

This little book of photos by Matthew Weinreb is perfect to take along for inspiration while visiting Paris.

Matthew Weinreb takes extraordinary photographs of the beautiful city of Paris from many different perspectives and angles. He allows the city of Paris to come alive and show off all of the little intricate details that make this city so mesmerizing. The Eiffel looks like lace, Notre Dame becomes a sanctuary of light, doors to Parisian buildings become entrances of art, towers, stain glass, bridges and domes become perfect masterpieces.

If you have ever been to Paris this book will transport you back in time with beautiful memories or it will inspire you to visit the city in order to find your own inspirational moments. Weinreb will certainly aid in rousing a better view of this city of light. His photographs will romance you and might even convince you to take a few of your own in a different light, changing forever your future scrapbooks.

"Curb Rights" tries to answer the problem of subsidized transit, but offers too much economic modeling, which would not necessarily work.

The book is founded on the theory of bus and jitney operators having rights to own the curb for bus stops. This brings about too much free market optimism, but very little assurance that public transit would actually be improved.

It's no surprise that free market public transit is advocated, one of the authors is from the Libertarian Party think tank, the Reason Foundation.

The authors also mention that in places where transit was deregulated, there was no survey on how riders actually felt about service before and after deregulation. So there is no guarantee about improvement.

The authors suggest a hybrid system of urban mass-transit consisting of both privately-owned, flexibly-scheduled & routed and public-owned, fixed scheduled & routed bus systems. In order to prevent the flexibly-scheduled system from parasitically skimming passengers from the fixed route system, the authors suggest the promotion of "curb rights" to separate the operations.

This would allow the predictably high-volume routes to be served by the high-volume, large bus & cost overhead municipal operation while allowing the service increases possible through the addition of smaller and possibly innovative operators.

Makes sense to me. While clearly advocating their position, the authors recognize and address the ligitimancy of the municipalities' concerns over service preservation. With sensible implentation, I'm sure it would work to improve urban transit which (it seems to me) currently consists of balancing the interest of car-driving taxpayers to limit transit subsidies and the interests of Municipal Transit Agency employee unions to maximize employee wages and benefits, with the transit customer well down on the list of concerns.

I wouldn't spend any money on this book. The theory espoused in this book is so far from reality, it isn't funny.

This book promotes the notion that "free enterprise" must be inserted into public transit so as to maximize the benefits to passengers and society at large.

However, this notion is demonstrably wrong.

For example, local bus operations in British cities outside of London were completely de-regulated in the 1980's by the national Tory government, e.g., public funding was almost entirely cut off and private bus companies were allowed to compete freely against one another (as opposed to "privatization" in the U.S. which has mainly meant a public agency putting service out to competitive bid). Regional pass schemes allowing passengers to freely transfer from one route or operator to another were abolished.

The results are conclusive. Bus patronage in British cities dropped more than 30% by the early 1990's. In London, bus patronage over the same period actually increased somewhat, despite major cuts in subsidy funding. The difference was that London retained regional governmental control of fare and service decisions, despite putting much of the service out to bid.

The disaster of British local bus de-regulation has also been repeated in spades by the ill-considered "privatization" of British Rail. Rail privatization has been a big enough disaster to become one of the hottest public issues in Great Britain.

The successes obtained by "centralized" regional planning and decision-making authority in elected government hands is quite conclusive in other countries. In Zurich, per capita transit usage is among the highest in the developed world, exceeding a number of Japanese cities. Zurich's success--in one of the most affluent, high auto-owning urban areas on the planet--is based on centralized planning at the canton level, plus generous government funding. Zurich has managed to retain very high transit market share despite rapid motorization since the 1960's. The reasons that Toronto, Canada's past success with generating high transit usage levels, are essentially the same as Zurich, though the current pseudo-free market provincial government in Ontario is too boorish to understand this.

"Free market" economists like Klein often cite the "success" of private transit in Southeast Asia; however, those "capitalist" bastions of Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia have relied on centralized planning and sufficient funding to allow new transit systems to function through selective privatization, but not anywhere near the model that Klein espouses. In effect, government transportation policies in Hong Kong and Singapore guarantee the transit market (e.g., car use is restricted, heavily taxed). The Zurich and Toronto models have proven to be less authoritarian.

Klein proves how blinkered economists--particularly those who espouse "libertarian" views ("new right" in British and Australian terms)--are very shortsighted about public transit and other similar public policy issues.

For one of the few books that I've seen that "gets it right," I recommend "A Very Public Solution" by Paul Mees, a professor of Planning and Public Policy at Melbourne University, Melboune, Australia (yes, Amazon carries it).

Mee's point about urban transit is best summed up by this from one of my unpublished papers:

Flexibility would be the greatest benefit of improved transit to "transit dependents" and would-be "choice" users. This is clearly explained by the book "A Very Public Solution" (Page 289; Dr. Paul Mees, Melbourne University Press, 2000. Melbourne, Australia):

(Mees' excerpt):

With public transport itself, the critical issue is flexibility. And the key to flexibility for passengers is simplicity and predictability, not a bewildering array of constantly changing options. The latter produces confusion, not convenience. Paradoxically, to be flexible, public transport must also be rigidly predictable: perhaps the best analogy is with the road system, rather than with cars themselves...

This means that frequent service on an easy-to-understand, predictable, and reliable network of regional and local transit services delivers vastly superior flexibility to the customer. Such transit systems typically service a far higher percentage of "choice" patronage. Compared to an infrequent, specialized, hard to understand jumble of routes, such transit networks compete successfully with automobiles.

A Very Public Solution's prime case study is Toronto, Canada. Toronto has significantly higher per transit usage per capita than many European cities, an order of magnitude higher than most U.S. urban areas. Toronto's exceptionally high transit use occurs despite millions of residents living in dispersed suburbs essentially indistinguishable from the American norm. Canadian fuel prices are only slightly higher than the United States. There are more similarities than differences between Canadian and U.S. culture. Toronto's transit usage remain high, despite service cuts caused by an early 1990's recession.

There would be no need to take a "survey on how customers felt before and after deregulation." The "survey" would be expressed by customers voluntarily using the service, i.e. whether they were willing to purchase rides on deregulated transit vehicles. If customers were satisfied, the transit company would prosper. If not, they would go out of business and another company could enter the market and provide satisfactory service. That is the only survey that counts! If that's too much Econ 101 speculation, then you just don't get it!

This book is a problem. It presents itself as book in the public interest, but it really does a disservice to the public. Gigantic corporations reaping billions of dollars off propaganda machines of immense proportion--this story should NOT be humanized or told in such simple form. Liberal journalists are the ones who will faithfully detail how and why your flesh is being flayed off your body by the corporate-government elite. Thank you, very much. By presenting all sides, we get no ground to stand upon, no point of view. We get some critical remarks tossed off next to corporate jargon about competition. Problem is, Aufderheide should have long agon seen beyond such a lame category as "competition." If you want to see a real journalist in action, watch Bill Moyers examination of the 1996 telecommunications act in a video you can probably get at your library.

I found this book to be an easy way to understand the policy and legislation passed by congress on the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

This book helped to explain exactly what came out of this Act and where the act came from. It also gave a great understanding of where communications stands in America and what our main goals for the communications industry are.

It was an excellent way to view what the gov't wants out of the communications industry and what the future holds for the consumer.

Great Buy!