This one is not a good book to review
353565
A member of our Photography Club wrote this : This one is not a good book to review. It's part of a series and has only ten pages of text. It's almost all photos.
4294215
Not buying this book because too many of the 5-star reviews have been submitted by individuals who have written only one review - this book.
4030142
I want to give it a 2 star just to call out that this book should not be purchased, but that would mean it is a poor book. It is not a poor book, it is very well written, organized, and there are no mistakes that I saw. However, like a previous reviewer mentioned "This is a dumbed down version of the Lindeburg". This book reviews select items briefly...Does an example or two and on to the next subject material. They jump around a lot also from subject to subject. It does not cover nearly the material that the CERM book by Lindeburg covers. I used it as a back up reference book during the PE exam. I used it on one problem about eccentric loading on a shallow foundation and after reading up on the subject...it didn't even help me. I went back to the Lindeburg CERM and found out what I was doing wrong. I used my CERM about 65%-70%...Another note is I read these reviews just like you are now and said "I am going to buy it anyways, it will be a good 2nd reference." Well now I am selling mine, because it was useless during the exam and won't need it in the rest of my career, because everything you need is in the Lindeburg. The Lindeburg is a huge book, but once you start using it you get used to the layout. Plus, the Lindeburg index system owns any index in any review book. I recommend you save your money and go get yourself a hotel near the test site and a nice steak dinner.

P.S. Buy my book! Haha jk.
4643171
It baffles me that there's some titles by Devyn Morgan that are quite good, and then there are some that are just so poorly written that I can't finish them. Unfortunately this is one of the bad ones. I honestly don't understand how there are so many high reviews for this, it's just SO poorly written!
2979844
I have not finished this book as yet, but the subject is not one that I usually buy to read. I would never buy this book but I did not realize it had this type of subject in it. I wanted to read the finish of the last book but the other investigation in this book is not to my liking and I will try to avoid any book with this subject again from this author!!!!!!
16534
The author wrote about some topics that are good to consider but are were not, by any stretch, news to anyone in my book club. Most of the good things were expressed more as would be written in a standards handbook were the author to be the head of a department, not a book to be read to improve developers in the general sense. The content was then made dangerous because interspersed with all these things that seemed like good advice were tidbits of bad advice. These little bits of bad advice surrounded by what seems like good advice are what make this book a danger to read.

In the end I felt that I didn't learn very much and what I did learn was in the shape of "I want to not do that" ... which isn't always a bad way to learn. It's not what I want to get from a book written about how to be good (as opposed to one written about how not to be bad).
4654263
Well, first of all, I want to let you know English is not my first language. So my reading experience may not be representative for mother tongues.

I finished the 'decision point' by G.W.B. and got interests to know more about the BUSH. Russ's book got a pretty good review. I bought it. However, I am not happy with this book.

 I am not sure whether Russ's writing style is formal or more oral like. Whatever, often it is hard to understand what his points are after hundreds of words. Sometime, Russ is trying to be accurate and out-of-fact like, when making his judgement. To achieving this, he makes sentences wordy and boring.
Using of slang and foreign words makes me lots of hassle. For example, he describe Al Ulmer "... having filled the position of 'at-tach' and 'first secretary' at the U.S. embassy..." . I have no idea what the at-tach means.

This book is not well structured. Russ is trying to do a huge puzzle job. But it is not organized.

Whatever, I finished 1/10 of the book now. Really don't know whether continue or give it up.
131922
This is very much a review book, and I would not use this as a primary source for understanding the underlying physiological concepts.
1809952
The illustrations are nice.  It is not a book that we will read over and over.  It is so, so.  I do not recommend purchasing this book.  You are better off checking it out from a library if you can.
1688875
I don't want to review this book but to go to my reading list. For some reason I must rate this book to proceed.
3902365
I have ready many good books published by Llewellyn, This is not one of them.  This book is not a good reference on Celtic ways.  The myths are very touch and go, and written in a way that wold be confusing to someone  not familiar with them, and if your familiar you won't learn anything.  The  table of correspondences is not a druid one, but a modern one having  nothing to do with tradition, one fact evident of this is that aluminum  which is named in the table was not invented for centuries later.  Book is  worth reading, but not entirely true, take everything with a grain of salt.  I did enjoy the section on the Ogham Alphabet, but it alone is not worth  ordering this book considering much more in-depth coverage of it is  available.  I would say if you are new to Celtic ways, and don't plan to do  much other reading on it, get it, otherwise don't waste your time.
1665426
I don't understand how some people can give 5 stars to this book...it's very judgmental. A religious book especially one bearing this title should be unbiased. This is not the case of this one!
2051996
I'm a librarian who specializes in selecting adult material for a number of public libraries across the country.  I've been covering science topics lately and have noticed many titles in the Demystified series being poorly reviewed by professional journals and by Amazon readers.  I'm mystified as to what the McGraw-Hill editors are thinking.  Here is yet another hastily-assembled title.  Many readers have already identified its flaws.  The professional library review journal LIBRARY JOURNAL does not recommend this title.  I would caution libarians and Amazon shoppers to carefully evaluate any title from this series before purchasing it.  There are several alternative titles that do a much better job than this book.
3932873
My rhetorical question: Why do we need another review of this book? is based upon having read several dozen such reviews. Of these many fall into the general category of criticism like this one: "Peak Oil Is Real, But This Book is a Bigoted Rant". This review title is from one deemed by Amazon to the "the most helpful critical review".

Well, I beg to differ and that's why I am adding to the 250 reviews already made of this book by Jim Kunstler. I do not believe that Jim is a bigot at all and that is important to state right off the bat. I also found very little if any "rant" in this book. I suppose because of the nature of the subject matter (it's really negative in its overall implications) it tends to be seen by some as "rant" when it is not. These judgements are made on the basis of not really "getting it" in terms of the fundamental reality facing us and which Jim has so exposed us. People in general hate prophets. And if they are also right, then it's even worse.

I thought that the very end of this book was revealing and it definitely refutes those critical reviews who see Kunstler as a hypocrite. It's in the last chapter, "Living in the Long Emergency" and is the last section, and is entitled "My Long Emergency". It is a personal statement from the author. In its way it is refreshingly candid and honest. It is in fact the perfect way to end his book.

Here is a quote from this section: "It's not as though I consider myself a detached spectator of all the things I have described, some of them rather terrible to contemplate. I have reasonable expectations to live through the early decades of these epochal changes, and perhaps to suffer because of them. Unfortunately for me, I will not be young." Jim and I were born in the same year (1948). I'm his "senior" by about 3 months. So for me Jim is talking about US not just himself.

I believe that this book, now 7 years old, is important. It was, perhaps, more important when it was published than now. But if you are coming to these whole "epochal changes" for the first time, you could do worse than pick this up at your local library. It's readily available, having been in print for this long and having been as successful as it was. There are other authors who say the same things as Kunstler, but those books are usually uncommonly dry. With Jim you get really good, interesting, even humorous writing. He's a "popular writer" who can explain these complex issues to Everyman.

I don't agree with everything Kunstler says, esp. with regard to his analysis of the regions of America (he gives short shrift to the Northwest for example). And I do not believe he puts enough emphasis upon the concomitant Big Problem of the United States dollar. Between the Scylla of Peak Oil and the Charybdis of dollar collapse, we are facing a "perfect storm". Maybe he thought one catastrophe at a time is enough, though he does allude to the dollar problem in passing.

Anyway, those are my thoughts for what they are worth. It's a good book. It's an important book.
263671
I have never written a review on Amazon and I don't know this author so now that that is out of the way...I do not understand the previous reviewer. Why would you buy a book called " The Decadent Housewife" which says its funny in the description and then complain about decadent housewives?  This book was so obviously tongue-in-cheek that I believe the reviewer must have read a completely different book and is confused.  This book tells you how to spend a whole day doing as little as possible while trying to figure out what exactly it is that your man does for a living (seriously, there is a chapter on how to figure out what your man does for a living) It has hangover cures, where should you go in the afternoon (and whether you should go out at all), whether you should take a flower arranging class, what a dishwasher is, etc..The illustrations are old school pinup type and it was just a cute funny book...again, what book was the previous reviewer reading?
3541665
I'm just launching a new magazine, so I have alot to learn.  I have read some terrific books; this is not one of them.  Basically the pictures are nice, but I honestly cannot think of one thing I learned from this book.
2485165
As there are plenty of reviews describing the content (which is amazing) the purpose of this review is (obviously) not to duplicate those efforts, but to warn and advise about the quality (or lack thereof) of many of the editions recently put out, including the one that I got.

Several recommendations: If you are not already familiar with T.E. Lawrence, first read the recent biography "Hero: The Life and Legend.." by Michael Korda.  That will initiate the reader into Lawrence's world, and that book is well published and edited, and contains several maps and a good number of photographs.  From "Hero" you will learn just how much effort Lawrence put into the writing of his story of the Arab Revolt of 1916-1918, including plans for very limited publishing and exacting standards of paper type, maps included, etc.

The above recommedation is critical if you are reading reviews to decide about purchasing one of the very sub-par recent editions of Lawrence's own publication "Seven Pillars of Wisdom."  As stated in many of these reviews (check out the 1-star reviews), there are many horrible, terrible, very bad editions of "Seven Pillars," by which Lawrence would be understandably outraged.  The edition I got is one example:  paperback ISBN 978-1-61720-183-7, 2011 Wilder Publications, 548 pages.  I think the publisher says that it is "green" and only prints the book as it is ordered, and as the date on the back page of mine says 03 November 2011, that seems likely. What a crying shame that the 'green' publisher could not also take the time to correct all of the obvious typos - the vast majority of which seem to be errors from scanned material that was not correctly OCR-d and proofed.

That being said, if you have read "Hero" you need to decide how bothered you will be by mistakes in the book as you read. If you can be tolerent then you don't have to be choosy about the publisher/edition you get, because even with the horrible one, you will have the background to be able to overlook the errors (I tried pretending that the mistakes made it more like reading the original notes, rather than the written, revised, lost, rewritten, agonized over and carefully published manuscript that it was.)

If you know that you will be interested and you like to keep books that you care about, you will want to track down better editions - maybe online will not be the best way to shop for it since there are so many.