Independents Books

This is an exciting look into the demise of the Soviet Union. Oberdorfer was a journalist for the Washington Post and had as close a view to the 1980s US-USSR foreign policy process as anyone outside of the government could have. With his fine writing skills, he offers the reader a balanced account of the changing relationship between the superpowers of the Cold War. Of course, the powerhouses of Reagan, Gorbachev, Gromyko, Dobrynin, Shultz, Bush, and Shevardnadze are the focal points; but there are many other important players who contributed no small amounts to what happened at the tail end of the Cold War.

Ronald Reagan was no doubt an important force in American government: all presidents are. However, there is and forever will be controversy over his impact on events. The right wingers want us to believe that he single-handedly brought down the Soviet Union by being tough and forcing them to spend money until they collapsed; the righties also believe Gorbachev had nothing to do with his country's implosion. The left wingers want us to believe that Reagan had nothing to do with what happened and that Gorbachev deserves all of the accolades. As with all debates among the two ends of the American political spectrum, the truth lies somewhere in-between. And Oberdorfer offers us a look into a process that was bigger than the two leaders, albeit a process that was greatly impacted by all involved. As America continues to debate Ronald Reagan and what he left us, maybe some day we can all accept that he was something more complex than the right-wing and left-wing want to believe. But until then, there is this fantastic book. Enjoy.

Great book. This book allows the student to find many other hard to find location. Excellent.

This book is part of ISA's (formerly "The Instrument Society of America", later "The International Society for Measurement and Control" and now known as "The Instrument, Systems and Automation Society") Independent Learning Modules on Fundamental Instrumentation.

This book was designed to be an introduction to the basic principles and practices used in the different flow-measurement techniques. Since it is and introductory and self-study guide, mathematical development is kept to a minimum and is only used to emphasize the underlying physics and theory of operation for a particular flow measurement device. Consequently, the mathematics presented deals only with the fundamentals and the actual working equations are omitted in most cases.

The book is written in a clear and practical language, and I believe it will be useful for beginners and non-experienced engineers and technicians wanting an introduction to flow measurement. The only regrettable thing is that gas flow measurement is only briefly introduced, and the methods and practices are not discussed in great depth.

I am an Industrial Practitioner of Process Measurement & Control who has been working in the Process Industries for more than 16 years as an Automation, Instrumentation, Process Safety and Process Control Engineer. I have found this book useful when preparing training material for new technicians, engineers and operators.

If you need more in-depth information, or if you specify, install, maintain and operate meters not only for measuring Flow but also other Process Variables, you might want to consider Bela Liptak's Instruments Engineer's Handbook Volume 1 - Process Measurement and Analysis, as I consider it to be the most complete reference in the field.

Being an IMG who graduated a few years ago, I did not have a very good grounding in Genetics. I found that the subject was tested quite a bit on the USMLE and to prepare myself for the test, I used this book and found that this book made the subject both interesting and gave a lot of detail too.

The Atlantic February, 1991

We think of them as relatively new situations: Russia shaken from autocratic isolation by new forms of communications; the spread of concern for human rights and constitutional rule from West to East; America's efforts to maintain good relations with autocratic rulers while helping democratic protesters. Yet these are precisely the issues that defined the career of the first American Russia expert, George Kennan, a century ago. M ore than any other single American, this first cousin twice removed of our own era's George F. Kennan "discovered" and described Russia for America during the more than half a century between the American and Russian civil wars.

Kennan was a child of the new communications revolution, first visiting Siberia as part of an ill-fated telegraphic expedition, then making Russia the subject of one of the great lecturing careers of the late nineteenth century and one of the great journalistic careers of the early twentieth. Having discovered Siberia as an adventuresome frontiersman trying to forge a European-American cable connection the long way, across the Bering Strait, Kennan returned to expose the czarist prisons of Siberia and to become perhaps the leading champion in the Western world of democratic revolutionary resistance to the czarist authorities. As such, he struggled against a well-established official American policy of friendship for that particular autocracy. He mobilized American popular opinion in behalf of Russia's suppressed political opposition, and eventually helped change U.S. government policy as well.

IT IS A GREAT strength of this extensively researched new biography by Frederick Travis that we discover how little Kennan really studied Russia, how many mistakes (including deliberate ones) he introduced into his journalism, and yet how little challenged his authority remained within the United States. This was an age when America was absorbed in its own interests and inclined to read foreign countries, if at all, in terms of its own institutions and aspirations. Until the early twentieth century the study of Russia was almost totally absent from universities, and serious literature on Russia almost totally absent from libraries. Dilettantism could triumph if accompanied by the kind of arrogant tenacity and rhetorical panache that Kennan possessed. He presented a picture of Russia that was more a projection of characteristic American hopes, fears, and fantasies in an era of exuberant self-confidence than the product of had-earned knowledge.

His authority was, however, based on firsthand observations, though they were largely focused on the exotic. Kennan first arrived in Russia in 1865, and only after spending two winters in hitherto largely unknown parts of Siberia (later described in his first major book, Tent Life in Siberia) did Kennan visit Moscow and St. Petersburg. On his second trip he passed rapidly through Petersburg in order to reach the Caucasus, describing himself as "a vagabond ... who travels without any definite utilitarian aim ... the vagabond is never a spcialist ... he is ready to become all things with all men and to make himself equally at home in all places." His early travels in Russia were thus a kind of romantic Wanderjahre for a young midwestern Calvinist who was losing both his boyhood religious faith and his adolescent enthusiasm for scientific and technical expeditions. But he developed what grew into a lifelong fascination with the Russian people. There was, initially, no political or social content to his interest, although he generally shared the vague Russophilia in some circles that followed Russian support for the Union in the Civil War and the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867. Throughout the 1870s and early 1880s Kennan defended Russian policy even when it proved expansionist, first in the Balkans and then in Central Asia, and he also tried to propagate the glories of Russian literature.

His ten-month-long trip to Siberia in 1885 and 1886 turned him from a defender of official Russia into a self-appointed spokesman for the political exiles and prisoners that he discovered there. Romantic infatuation was part of it all, as Kennan himself acknowledged: "With many of them I simply fall dead in love as if I were a girl of eighteen." But he was also moved by the moral purity of the exiles--their continued intellectual earnestness under difficult conditions and their combination of inner dignity and outward affection for this mysterious visitor from distant America. Kennan was particularly impressed by Catherine Breshkovsky, the populist "little grandmother of the Russian Revolution." She bade him farewell in the small Transbaikal village to which she was confined by saying, "We may die in exile, and our grand children may die in exile, but something will come of it at last." One of the Russians explained that until they had met Kennan, "we had been talking either to acknowledged friends or to prejudiced enemies, but never to an impartial observer, who would take on himself to bring the case before the tribunal of universal conscience." Kennan devoted much of the next twenty years to pressing their cause, mainly from the lecture platform.

He lectured before about a million people in the course of the 1890s, inspiring in one of them a "curious craving to see this gaunt land of Siberia and let my own eyes gaze on the starved wretches sent to a living death." Victorians loved to feel both superior to and shocked by distant outrages like those Kennan recounted. A taunt thrown at Victorian liberals--they "cross equinoxial lines in search of objects of charity"--brings to mind the "radical chic" of more recent times: North Americans incensed by events in Southeast Asia, South America, or South Africa.

Travis astutely observes that Kennan "saw in the political exiles the same heroic spirit that had attracted him to Caucasian mountaineers, wandering Koriaks in northeastern Siberia, and reforming drunkards on New York's Water Street." It was something like the spirit that another great journalist, John Reed, later sought first in the Wobblies, then in Mexican revolutionaries, and finally in the Bolsheviks about whom he fantasized so appealingly in Ten Days That Shook the World.

BUT KENNAN'S infatuation with Russia was informed by a sterner moral purpose, which Travis describes as a sense that Kennan was always on the side of civilization against barbarism. His long campaign in behalf of political prisoners was expanded to include persecuted minorities in the Russian empire--particularly the Jews--and the Japanese, who warred with the Russians in 1904-1905. He helped in a fascinating, little-known campaign to educate and politically mobilize Russian prisoners of war in Japan. And he attached great hopes to the Russian Revolution of 1905 and even greater to the democratic revolution of February, 1917.

Kennan was a perceptive analyst of the practical need for democratic and constitutional reform. He was particularly distressed by the czarist repression of student activity after the upheavals of 1905. "A university is a barometer which shows the state of the public mind," Kennan quoted a Russian surgeon as saying. "A wise man does not break the instrument, but learns from it what the weather is likely to be." He accused the czars of breaking the barometers rather than read them. He saw that all russian involvement in modern wars concluded with a period of reform or revolution--in effect, "a recompense for their sacrifices and losses."

All the more bitter, then, was the Bolshevik betrayal of a revolution that Kennan had encouraged in its democratic phase. Unlike John Reed, Kennan vehemently rejected the October Revolution, both because of the Bolsheviks' renunciation of the Allied cause in the war and because the Soviet government lacked the "knowledge, experience, or education to deal successfully with the tremendous problems that have come up for solutions since the overthrow of the Tsar." Kennan criticized Woodrow Wilson for being much too timid in intervening against Bolshevik power, and persisted longer than most Americans in the belief that the Siberians would hold out against the Bolsheviks, because they were a "bolder and more independent people than the Muzhiks of European Russia." Travis tends to be rather condemnatory both of Kennan's extreme opposition to the Bolshevik takeover and of his insistence on the moral obligation to defend the provisional government. Kennan's last epitaph on the Bolshevik Revolution was written in a small-town newspaper, the Medina Tribune, in July of 1923:

The Russian leopard has not changed its spots... The new Bolshevik constitution ... leaves all power just where it has been for the last five years--in the hands of a small group of self-appointed bureaucrats which the people can neither remove nor control.

He died not long after Lenin did, having just finished an article on Japanese education--finding more hope for the future in Japan than in Russia.

ONE IS RELIEVED that Travis's biography does not include the kind of psychological probing or moralistic preaching that has too often been directed at Victorian figures, though his tendency to make this account an exhaustive inventory of Kennan's acquaintances and views results in a certain blandness. Kennan's larger-than-life and even heroic qualities--his physical endurance on Siberian trips and on lecture tours, the majesty of his moralism--never quite come across. But Travis perceptively identifies Kennan's flaws. There was more than a little blindness in the man. He was sympathetic chiefly to political prisoners, who represented a minute fraction of those in Russia's vast penal and exile system. As far as we know, he never visited any prison outside Russia for comparative purposes. He confused political exiles in East Siberia with administrative exiles in West Siberia, and at times he misled his audiences in other ways to dramatize his cause. Kennan never probed deeply into the views of Russians working within the system, whom he could have helped and learned from. Nikolai Yadrintsev, for instance, one of the most interesting and sophisticated publicists in behalf of a semi-independent Siberia, urged a different, more open style of development there. Kennan met him early but seems never to have talked seriously with him or with a number of others who saw then--as many do today--that Siberia itself might ultimately become an example of the kind of liberal democratic development that its prisoners advocated.

The fact remains, however, that Kennan created American public interest in the internal conditions of a remote country, and the story of how he did so supplies an impressive first chapter for a history, yet to be written, on the effects of American journalism on foreign policy. Kennan catalyzed a range of things that eventually helped to change policy: the first English-language opposition journal, Free Russia; the Society of American Friends of Russian Freedom (involving such luminaries as Julia Ward Howe and Mark Twain); and a public campaign against a Senate-approved treaty that would have exposed Jewish emigres to America to possible arrest if they re-entered Russia. State Department officials in the late nineteenth century were as annoyed by Kennan's attempts to affect intergovernmental relations as their successors were many years later by the outcries over immigration and human rights which led to the Jackson-Vanik amendment of 1974. It is easy to forget now, in the wake of the victory of the human-rights agenda in Eastern Europe, how doggedly most of the American foreign-policy establishment resisted the intrusion of such concerns into its realpolitik agenda of security, political, and economic questions. It was Western Europeans, rather than Americans, who took the lead in assuring that human rights were included in "basket three," which became part of the international obligations of all signatories of the Helsinki Final Act. Leaders in the newly emerging democracies of Eastern Europe today express more admiration for moralistic journalists than for realistic diplomats. They are likely, too, to feel greater sympathy for Kennan's buccaneering spirit and his fierce denunciation of autocracy and Bolshevism than for the more cautious and moderate positions taken both by his opponents then and by his biographer now.

This is a detailed and carefully documented history of American-Soviet relations during the Reagan and Bush administrations. As such, it covers the period of relative confrontation during Reagan's first term, the re-emergence of a form of detente during his second term, and the expansion of detente under Bush 1 into a form of cooperation with the Soviets in ending the Cold War. Written clearly and organized well, this is a fairly dense read because of the level of detail and documentation. It is also quite long at 800 pages. The organization of the book is interesting. The first 500 pages are a detailed, chronogically ordered account of Soviet-American relations. The remaining 300 pages are a series of more topically oriented chapters beginning with an summary/analytic chapter on Soviet-American relations during this period. Chapters on European-American-Soviet diplomacy, Asian-Soviet-American relations, and American-Soviet competition in the 3rd world follow, with a concluding chapter that gives an overview of the Cold War.
This is an outstanding work. The author's background is unusual. Garthoff was a career diplomat specializing in Soviet and Eastern European affairs who became a scholar after retiring from the Foreign Service. Garthoff brought long personal experience with diplomacy as well as considerable analytic intelligence to this task and the book reflects a tempered and critical approach to a number of contentious issues.
Garthoff's analysis of the Reagan administration is rather critical. While he employs moderate language, he faults the Reagan era policy makers for being unduly alarmist and unecessarily confrontational. He makes a very good case that Reagan's policies towards the Soviet Union were much less consistent than is commonly thought. He shows also that the Reagan administration was internally divided on important issues and that this reduced policy coherence. Reagan himself comes off as well intentioned but frequently out of touch and perhaps even willfully ignorant. Garthoff's most negative comments are directed, though the quality of his language remains neutral at all times, towards the more conservative ideologues with the Reagan administration, particularly those with positions at the Pentagon. Garthoff's depiction of the Soviet leadership during Reagan's first term, whose personnel changed considerably as aged leaders died in serial order, is somewhat surprising. Despite the changes in leadership, Soviet policy makers were in several ways more consistent than the Americans and in a diplomatic context, even somewhat more moderate. Despite oscillations in American policy, the Soviet leadership continued to seek accomodation in important areas like arms control and had a relatively moderate response to the American increases in defense budgets, which they (and others, for example, many European governments) found threatening. Policy realities eventually forced the Reagan administration to embark on a defacto course of detente in his second term.
Of course, the heart of this book are the parts dealing with the end of the Cold War. In Garthoff's view, the key actor was Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev is presented as a transforming figure, determined to change the basic features of Soviet society and international relations. American policies and American policy makers, like Reagan, are presented as playing an essentially reactive role in the events ending the Cold War. This is quite controversial in many circles. Garthoff was actually subjected to vilification by American triumphalists and in particular, by the substantial number of people who see Reagan as the architect of the Cold War victory. Readers interested in an example of attacks on Garthoff should look up Richard Pipes review of this book in the journal Foreign Affairs which contains some unjustified and nasty personal attacks. I can say only that Garthoff makes a compelling case for his conclusions, cites a great deal of evidence, including quite a bit of Soviet documents, and I think his analysis makes sense in the context of the entirety of the Cold War. Some of Garthoff's conclusions may be revised as more documentation emerges, particularly from Soviet archives, but its unlikely that the overall analysis will be shown to be incorrect. A nice feature of this book is that the publisher has placed all footnotes, and they are extensive, on the same page as the intext citations. This has become increasingly uncommon in the publishing industry but really enhances readibility.
This book also has an interesting contemporary resonance. There are clear analogies between some Reagan and Bush 1 era policy positions and those of the present Bush administration. This is not surprising as some of the major actors in the earlier administrations, like Dick Cheney, are also important in the present administration. The emphasis on military force, unilateral American action, obsessive concern with state-sponsored terrorism, and reluctance to test ideological concerns against reality are common themes of both Reagan 1 and Bush II. Even the establishment of the Dept. of Defense as a stronghold of strongly ideological right wing views is similar in these 2 eras. Its a cause for concern when two very different sets of problems evoke a stereotyped policy response.

I have choosen to write a review of the book I edited because I truly feel that the interested reader will find various topics and orientations related to the specialty of group psychotherapy. The included authors are leading professionals in their specialties who have generously given their time to making this book an interesting and worthwhile edition to the library of the serious and erudite group therapy practitioner. As you are aware, very few people live in total isolation but interact with the society in which they live. Group therapy is a microcosm of that society and thus elicits for the therapist and patient/client the opportunity to analyze the nature of those interactions creating an awareness for the possibility of change in ones interpersonal relationships. After reading the galleys of this book, I walked away feeling most satisfied and respectful of the efforts of my colleagues.

I recently started an online retail business and purchased Mr. Maher's
book among a number of others as guides and references in setting up,
structuring, and promoting the company. "How to Grow a Winning
Business" was particularly helpful because of its clear, concise, and
practical approach to what often seem like overwhelming tasks.
Because of the nature of my business, not all the chapters were
applicable, but the book is set up in such a way that you can read it
in its entirety, or simply hone in on a specific area.

The chapters on "Copyright Registration," "Credit Cards, Checks &
Online Payments," "Employer Identification Number," and "Website
Development" were the most helpful to my venture and undoubtedly saved
me time and money.

Much to my surprise, the book did indeed come signed.

The book was thoroughly concise and anyone could follow its instuctions. A pleasure to read and enjoy!

This is an excellent guide to the snakes of the entire island of New Guinea (including West Papua / Irian Jaya).
It includes good keys down to species level, beautiful photos of the most important species, and excellent distribution maps.
There are also chapters in snake bites in PNG and the role snakes play in local culture.
To round it up, there is a ckeck-list of New Guinea snakes and a useful bibliography.
Long out of print on Amazon, this book is availably cheaply from http://www.andrewisles.com
Highly recommended!