Professional & Technical Books - Page 4

Anticancer: A New Way of Life

David Servan-Schreiber

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Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Nutrition -> Cancer Prevention

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 32 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

At age thirty-one David Servan-Schreiber was a rising neuroscientist with his own laboratory for brain imaging funded by the National Institutes of Health. While testing brain-scanning equipment, he discovered a tumor the size of a walnut in his own brain. This is the moving story of how a researcher and scientist who believed only in conventional treatments was transformed into an integrative physician who realized the importance and power of the body's natural defenses against chronic disease.

Dr. Servan-Schreiber's advice details how to find the right blend of traditional and alternative health care; how to develop a science-based anticancer diet (and the small changes that can make a big difference); the top ten household products to replace; understanding the effects of helplessness and "unhealed wounds" both physical and emotional, and how to regain balance; and how to reap the benefits of exercise, yoga, and meditation.

Anticancer takes us on an inspiring personal journey and ultimately guides us to a new way of life.

Unabridged on 7 CDs.

The Great Crash of 1929

John Kenneth Galbraith

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 48 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Spooky 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 6 people found this review helpful.

I started reading this book the day before the most recent crash started. Every night I picked it up, and it mirrored the current events so closely, that it was more than a little scary. Why won't we learn from the mistakes of the past?

Relevant Again - and Readable as Always 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Galbraith wrote The Great Crash in 1954 and he notes in his introduction that every time it was about to go out-of-print a new speculative mania would come along and a new printing would issue. One expects that the 2008 version must be in the works.

Galbraith writes for the general audience, which means he not only leaves out most of the arcane details, but he also writes in an engaging style. Galbraith's view is that the great speculative boom that preceded the Great Crash was fueled by not by easy credit, but rather by a mindset that ignored risk and assumed that the market would go ever upwards - in short, a mania. The leverage that helped raise the market to unknown heights, particularly buying on the margin, also built in the means for the sudden collapse. Once the market nosed over, margin calls went out, some were met, many were not, and the market tumbled faster and farther. Galbraith demonstrates that many leaders held onto a `boundless optimism' long after any rational support for such a view had disappeared.

Galbraith's main focus is on the market speculation and its collapse, but he also takes the view that the stock market collapse did in fact contribute greatly to the cause of the Great Depression. Galbraith asserts that the economy was not in strong shape before the stock market collapse. He likens the Great Crash to `typhoon which blew out of lower Manhattan'. The crash in the market struck the rich especially hard and because wealth was so concentrated the subsequent shrinkage in spending and investment by the rich caused serious damage to the economy. While we have significant safeguards in place today that did not exist in the 1930's, we also once again have a concentration of income and wealth eerily comparable to the pre-depression era.

Highest recommendation. Well-written, well-argued, and timely (once again). Readers may also appreciate Galbraith's equally readable A Short History of Financial Euphoria (Whittle)

Editorial Review:

Of Galbraith's classic examination of the 1929 financial collapse, the Atlantic Monthly said:"Economic writings are seldom notable for their entertainment value, but this book is. Galbraith's prose has grace and wit, and he distills a good deal of sardonic fun from the whopping errors of the nation's oracles and the wondrous antics of the financial community." Now, with the stock market riding historic highs, the celebrated economist returns with new insights on the legacy of our past and the consequences of blind optimism and power plays within the financial community.

Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association

American Psychological Association

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 259 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Necessary Evil 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

The program that I am in requires that I write all of my papers in this style, so I was forced to purchase the book. I do highly recommend the spiral format, as it is awfully easy to use.

Editorial Review:

In addition to providing guidance on grammar, the mechanics of writing, and APA style, this manual offers an authoritative reference and citation system. It also covers the treatment of numbers, metrication, statistical and mathematical data, tables and figures for use in writing, reports or presentations. This new edition has been updated to include: guidelines and examples for referencing electronic and online sources; avoiding plagiarism; presenting case studies and the construction of tables; copyright and permissions issues for writers; and reference examples for audiovisual media and patents. Writers, scholars and professionals will also find guidelines on how to choose text, tables or figures to present data, writing cover letters, the retention of raw data and on establishing written agreements for the use of shared data.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

Patrick M. Lencioni

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 222 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Patrick Lencioni once again offers a leadership fable that is as enthralling and instructive as his first two best-selling books, The Five Temptations of a CEO and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive. This time, he turns his keen intellect and storytelling power to the fascinating, complex world of teams.

Kathryn Petersen, Decision Tech's CEO, faces the ultimate leadership crisis: Uniting a team in such disarray that it threatens to bring down the entire company. Will she succeed? Will she be fired? Will the company fail? Lencioni's utterly gripping tale serves as a timeless reminder that leadership requires as much courage as it does insight.

Throughout the story, Lencioni reveals the five dysfunctions which go to the very heart of why teams even the best ones-often struggle. He outlines a powerful model and actionable steps that can be used to overcome these common hurdles and build a cohesive, effective team. Just as with his other books, Lencioni has written a compelling fable with a powerful yet deceptively simple message for all those who strive to be exceptional team leaders.

The First Billion Is the Hardest: Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America's Energy Future

T. Boone Pickens

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

With a Plan for Reducing U.S. Oil Dependency

It’s never too late to top your personal best.

Now eighty years old, T. Boone Pickens is a legendary figure in the business world. Known as the “Oracle of Oil” because of his uncanny ability to predict the direction of fuel prices, he built Mesa Petroleum, one of the largest independent oil companies in the United States, from a $2,500 investment. In the 1980s, Pickens became a household name when he executed a series of unsolicited buyout bids for undervalued oil companies, in the process reinventing the notion of shareholders’ rights. Even his failures were successful in that they forced risk-averse managers to reconsider the way they did business.

When Pickens left Mesa at age sixty-eight after a spectacular downward spiral in the company’s profits, many counted him out. Indeed, what followed for him was a painful divorce, clinical depression, a temporary inability to predict the movement of energy prices, and the loss of 90 percent of his investing capital. But Pickens was far from out.

From that personal and professional nadir, Pickens staged one of the most impressive comebacks in the industry, turning his investment fund’s remaining $3 million into $8 billion in profit in just a few years. That made him, at age seventy-seven, the world’s second-highest-paid hedge fund manager. But he wasn’t done yet. Today, Pickens is making some of the world’s most colossal energy bets. If he has his way, most of America’s cars will eventually run on natural gas, and vast swaths of the nation’s prairie land will become places where wind can be harnessed for power generation. Currently no less bold than he was decades ago when he single-handedly transformed America’s oil industry, Pickens is staking billions on the conviction that he knows what’s coming. In this book, he spells out that future in detail, not only presenting a comprehensive plan for American energy independence but also providing a fascinating glimpse into key resources such as water—yet another area where he is putting billions on the line.

From a businessman who is extraordinarily humble yet is considered one of the world’s most visionary, The First Billion Is the Hardest is both a riveting account of a life spent pulling off improbable triumphs and a report back from the front of the global energy and natural-resource wars—of vital interest to anyone who has a stake in America’s future.


From the Hardcover edition.

Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy

Martin Lindstrom

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 45 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Based on the single largest neuromarketing study ever conducted, Buyology reveals surprising truths about what attracts our attention and captures our dollars. Among the long-held assumptions and myths Buyology confronts:

• Sex doesn’t sell - people in skimpy clothing and provocative poses don’t persuade us to buy products.

• Despite government bans, subliminal advertising is ubiquitous — from bars to supermarkets to highway billboards.

• Color can be so iconic that the sight of the robin’s egg blue of a certain famous jewelry brand significantly raises women’s heart rates.

• Companies shamelessly borrow from religion and ritual — like the ritual, made up by a bored American bartender, of drinking a Corona with a lime — to seduce our interest.

• “Cool” brands, like iPods, trigger our mating instincts.

The fact is, so much of what we thought we knew about why we buy is wrong. Drawing on a three-year, 7 million dollar, cutting-edge brain scan study of over 2000 people from around the world, marketing guru Martin Lindstrom’s revelations will captivate anyone who’s been seduced —or turned off— by marketers relentless efforts to win our loyalty, our money and our minds.

Packed with entertaining stories about how we respond to such well-known products and companies as Marlboro, Calvin Klein, Ford, and American Idol, Buyology is a fascinating tour into the mind of today’s consumer.

The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crash of 2008 and What It Means

George Soros

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 56 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Brilliant and pedestrian at the same time 3 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

This book provides a cogent and prescient analysis of our current international financial mess in the credit markets. Even though the book was published in May 2008, parts of it read like current analyses in the WSJ and NYT. I only wish I had read this in May when it came out! Take the following as an example: "Whether we are in a recession now is questionable; that we shall slip into recession in the course of 2008 I consider a certainty." Or this: "The Bush administration and most economic forecasters do not understand that markets can be self-reinforcing on the downside as well as the upside."

So, why do I only give the book 3 stars? Because it's really two books. One is the analysis mentioned above. The other is a bizarre bit of axe-grinding as he promotes a theory he developed decades ago that he keeps presenting to the world and that the world keeps ignoring. Well, the world ignores his theory with good reason.

He makes a valid point, from a philosophical point of view: modern science is built on traditional logic, which has an assumption of independence, ie, objects of thought must be independent of each other. This translates to the economic world, in which the classic model of supply and demand requires that supply be independent of demand. But (he doesn't come right out and say this clearly) in the financial markets, this simply isn't so. Supply and demand are not independent, simply because market participants can be either buyers or sellers. Which they are can change rapidly, causing the traditional theory of supply and demand to be a poor predictor of financial markets.

But, the model Soros proposes is, to be kind, quaint. Essentially, he argues that in the social sciences the scientific approaches used in the physical sciences simply can't work. This is because humans not only study how the world works (cognitive function), but also participate in it (manipulative function), thus changing how it works. While it's clear that humans influence how the world works, it's not clear that his proposed model, his theory of reflexivity, is the best approach to understand it. For starters, he simply keeps repeating his theory, mantra-like, throughout the book. He provides no serious development of the model nor any data to back it up. In addition, his assertion time and again that the non-human, physical world is easy to model and to make predictions about, is naive, at best. The real world, physical and biological, is highly complex and dynamic, whether humans are involved or not. An example is climate change. Despite progress, we are nowhere near close to being able to predict changes to global climate.

More critically, there are other approaches that have been developed that offer insights that are more profound than his. First, from a philosophical/logical perspective, is fuzzy logic, developed by Lotfi Zadeh in the 70s. Fuzzy logic explicitly violates the independence assumption required in traditional logic, making clear that traditional logic (and science, by extension) are limited by the extent to which they rely on this assumption. More useful in the context of financial markets are dynamic simulation models, which can at least demonstrate systematically, and under specified conditions, how the markets are unstable. In particular, the concept of positive feedback in a system (good things get better, bad things get worse), which Soros understands (see quote about Bush administration above) is a much better way to understand what goes on in bubbles than Soros' sketchy theory.

So, the book leaves me with mixed feelings--brilliant in some ways, pedestrian in others.

Editorial Review:

In the midst of the most serious financial upheaval since the Great Depression, legendary financier George Soros explores the origins of the crisis and its implications for the future.George Soros, whose breadth of experience in financial markets is unrivalled, places the current crisis in the context of decades of study of how individuals and institutions handle the boom and bust cycles that now dominate global economic activity. 'This is a once in a lifetime moment', writes Soros in characterizing the scale of financial distress spreading across Wall Street and other financial centres around the world. In a concise essay that combines practical insight with philosophical depth, Soros makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the great credit crisis and its implications for the world.

Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life

John C. Bogle

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

For a critical element of American society, including many of its wealthiest and most powerful, there seems to be no limit today on what "enough" entails.

The excesses are most starkly visible in the continuing crisis in banking and investment, and even in the two enormous government-sponsored (but publicly owned) mortgage lenders, to say nothing of the billion-dollar-plus annual paychecks that top hedge-fund managers draw down and the excessive compensation paid to CEOs, regardless of  performance.

Throughout his legendary career, John Bogle—founder of the Vanguard mutual fund group, and creator of the first index mutual fund—has helped investors build wealth the right way and led a tireless campaign to restore common sense to the investment world. Along the way, he’s seen how destructive an obsession with financial success can be. Now, with Enough, he puts this dilemma in perspective.

Bogle offers his unparalleled insights on money, on the values we should emulate in our business and professional callings, and on what we should consider as the true treasures in our lives. By explaining what "enough" truly is, he demonstrates how close everyone can be to having it.

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition

Oliver Sacks

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 85 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Disturbances 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 6 people found this review helpful.

Ulysses Grant knew two songs: one was the Yankee Doodle, the other was not. That's my kind of pun. I keep telling my Chinese friends that I do not believe in their tones. Tones are just a trick to fool dumb foreigners like me into thinking that the language is unlearnable.
Nabokov, one of my main heroes, tells us in his memoirs that music, for him, was just an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds.
In other words, I am not left alone with my amusia.
I am happy that my affliction is not quite as bad as Nabokov's (whose son became an opera singer, by the way). I do enjoy listening to music and I love concerts. I just don't hear tones and I was the worse singer in living memory in my high school. Only the Bundeswehr appreciated my talent for marching songs. Reading Sacks shows me that it could have been much worse.
The multitude of possible problems is huge. Sacks gives us dozens of case studies, some studied intensively, some just based on correspondence. Music can be the cause or at least trigger of problems, like in some epileptic attacks, or the consequence of problems, like in some hallucinations. Music can be a problem when it disappears or when it intrudes. Music is used as a therapy for many problems.
The book is a veritable phenomenology of musical problems of the brain.
Which leads me to my mild criticism: after some of the stories, the telling of case after case wears you out. There seems to be no handle for explanations yet. Science seems to have a lot of pieces for the puzzle, but is still quite far away from a comprehensive understanding of our brain and mind.
One chapter with special fascination is the one on synesthesia. Nabokov had it as a child, though not in a version involving music. Sacks tells us, that Nab's mother had it too, which is mentioned in Speak, Memory, and that his wife and son had it as well. Transcending the brain, but still short of explanations.
A case that Sacks is not mentioning, that I 'encountered' in my literary excursions, is Kenzaburo Oe's son, who was born with a brain damage, who grew up as a handicapped child in a loving family, and who developed artistic talents as a composer. (Oe's Rise Up O Young Men recommended as an extended case study.)
Disturbances: Wilhelm Busch, a popular German writer/comedian/cartoonist (Max & Moritz) of the late 19th century had this to say about music: it is often considered disturbing because it is always coming along with noise.

Editorial Review:

Revised and Expanded

With the same trademark compassion and erudition he brought to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks explores the place music occupies in the brain and how it affects the human condition. In Musicophilia, he shows us a variety of what he calls “musical misalignments.” Among them: a man struck by lightning who suddenly desires to become a pianist at the age of forty-two; an entire group of children with Williams syndrome, who are hypermusical from birth; people with “amusia,” to whom a symphony sounds like the clattering of pots and pans; and a man whose memory spans only seven seconds-for everything but music.

Illuminating, inspiring, and utterly unforgettable, Musicophilia is Oliver Sacks' latest masterpiece.

Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl

Stacey O'Brien

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Total reviews: 57 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

On Valentine's Day 1985, biologist Stacey O'Brien first met a four-day-old baby barn owl -- a fateful encounter that would turn into an astonishing 19-year saga. With nerve damage in one wing, the owlet's ability to fly was forever compromised, and he had no hope of surviving on his own in the wild. O'Brien, a young assistant in the owl laboratory at Caltech, was immediately smitten, promising to care for the helpless owlet and give him a permanent home. Wesley the Owl is the funny, poignant story of their dramatic two decades together.

With both a tender heart and a scientist's eye, O'Brien studied Wesley's strange habits intensively and first-hand -- and provided a mice-only diet that required her to buy the rodents in bulk (28,000 over the owl's lifetime). As Wesley grew, she snapped photos of him at every stage like any proud parent, recording his life from a helpless ball of fuzz to a playful, clumsy adolescent to a gorgeous, gold-and-white, macho adult owl with a heart-shaped face and an outsize personality that belied his 18-inch stature. Stacey and Wesley's bond deepened as she discovered Wesley's individual personality, subtle emotions, and playful nature that could also turn fiercely loyal and protective -- though she could have done without Wesley's driving away her would-be human suitors!

O'Brien also brings us inside the prestigious research community, a kind of scientific Hogwarts where resident owls sometimes flew freely from office to office and eccentric, brilliant scientists were extraordinarily committed to studying and helping animals; all of them were changed by the animal they loved. As O'Brien gets close to Wesley, she makes important discoveries about owl behavior, intelligence, and communication, coining the term "The Way of the Owl" to describe his inclinations: he did not tolerate lies, held her to her promises, and provided unconditional love, though he was not beyond an occasional sulk. When O'Brien develops her own life-threatening illness, the biologist who saved the life of a helpless baby bird is herself rescued from death by the insistent love and courage of this wild animal.

Enhanced by wonderful photos, Wesley the Owl is a thoroughly engaging, heartwarming, often funny story of a complex, emotional, non-human being capable of reason, play, and, most important, love and loyalty. It is sure to be cherished by animal lovers everywhere.