Agencies Books

There seemed to be a few books of this genre around the late 1970's early 1980's, most notably the Terran Trade Authority Books (Spacecraft 2000-2100 AD, Great Space Battles, Starliners, Spacewreck). They were great quality hardcover space art books that tried to give a small sci fi background story along with it. Sometimes some of the writing can be interesting and other times just so so. I really think what is of value here is the great sci fi art in these books which i haven't seen reproduced anywhere else. Galactic Aliens is of course taking the angle of displaying the most dangerous aliens out there. It's like a hitch hikers guide of what aliens to avoid and which ones we have no defense against. We humans even have our own page! I've tried uploading a few pages from the book to give you an idea of the format of the book. Each alien (I count 43) has 2 pages devoted to it, great artwork displaying it in a pretty cool format.

The overarching practical suggestion of this book is that substantial public value is being lost due to insufficient collaboration in the public sector and that new ways of thinking and acting are necessary if systemic tendencies toward organizational fragmentation in increasingly obsolescent forms are to be reversed and public value interactively created. In this volume, Bardach is in search of a mode of discourse capable of standing up to social science scrutiny and modes of concrete action able to support the creation of public value in the face of public problems that do not conform well with our taxonomically formed organizational jurisdictions of the 20th century.

This is not your usual text on collaboration. It does not remotely consider collaboration a panacea to problems of policy and/or administrative fragmentation nor does it settle for the usual focus on collaborative behavior merely. It is concerned with understanding and building inter-organizational capacity. Understanding matters of potential or capacity, is not a historical strength of the social sciences. As such, the inquiry requires methodological advance rather than mere application of established methodologies. The methodological aspect of the text cuts in two ways. On the one hand, focus on methodological development is a seminal contribution of the text. On the other, it is an aspect of the text that makes access more difficult, in part for readers with academic backgrounds who were not exposed to such practical challenges in their methods courses, and most especially for practitioner readers whom the author also expresses hope to reach in its writing. It is a nuanced text that moves on and in-between theoretical, methodological, and empirical levels of abstraction simultaneously. Its risk is that it may appear too professionally-oriented for academics and too academic for practicing professionals. In its first edition, at any rate, I believe this text will prove to have been most accessible to a minority of reflective academics whose methodological questions probe beyond the ordinary and to a few reflective practitioners who happen to be more conceptually adept at differential levels of analysis than most practitioners or than most academics for that matter. Although it is not an easy read, the issues it raises are substantial and the text deserves a wider audience, most especially among that subset sometimes known as "pracademics," who straddle, however uncomfortably, the worlds of learning through and for practice and academic-based learning.

It may help to appreciate Bardach's contribution by placing it in a larger historical context of enduring contributions. For example, Bardach's concern for strengthening possibility inquiry and practice and for how we may learn purposefully to promote creativity in public management in ways that create public value is remarkably reminiscent of ways of thinking and acting articulated long ago by Mary Parker Follett in her 1924 volume, Creative Experience. As Peter F. Drucker, Warren Bennis, Paul Lawrence, and others underscored in their contributions to Mary Parker Follett--Prophet of Management, Follett's thinking was far ahead of her time perhaps just because she was able to perceive the world through a different "zeitgeist" or world view than did her contemporaries or most of her organizational successors in the last century. After her death, her work was largely forgotten (or conveniently pigeonholed in uncomprehending categories) so that even when sometimes ritually cited, her contribution was effectually lost to main currents of the twentieth century. Yet the challenge of possibility thinking that she posed in the organizational field endures and Bardach is one of a minority of scholars to pick up this challenge again on the cusp of a new century. Just as Follett was neither an empirical thinker merely, nor a normative thinker merely, but one concerned with the more creative process of actualizing potentials for the creation of public value, so likewise, is the challenge of better interactively understanding this creative process at the heart of Bardach's inquiry in this volume.

At a theoretical level, the text argues against "the more or less deterministic worldview of workaday social science" (p. vi). It is an attempt to articulate a conceptual frame of reference that gives central place to contingent notions of potentiality and capacity in human affairs. Bardach communicates this frame of reference by elaborating on the generative metaphor of "craftsmanship." He articulates a frame of reference in which the purposive activity of actors may be explicitly understood as playing a causative (and hence explanatory) role in human affairs. Although he doesn't cite the notion of causality as articulated in the literature of some realist (see e.g., Ray Pawson, 1997; 2006, chs.1-2) or critical realist methodology (see e.g., Andrew Sayer, 1993 and 2000), in this reviewer's judgment, his practical and theoretical concerns as reflected in this text are substantially inline with the theoretical re-conceptualization of causality for the social sciences as articulated in that literature.

In a language that would be appreciated by realist or critical realist methodologists such as those above, Bardach states "the analytic problem is in understanding purposiveness not as a product of individual will alone but as a product of the interaction between individual will and certain conditions in the environment." Bardach's discussion does usefully build upon Lawrence Mohr's important and still under-appreciated distinction (1982) between variance theories (typically employing quantitative methods), process theories (typically employing qualitative methods), and notions of causality corresponding to each (for readers interested in a concise summary of distinctive notions of causality corresponding with these distinctive types of social science theories, see e.g., Joseph Maxwell, 2005). Bardach instructively draws attention to how a sensible variance analysis is functionally dependent upon a prior qualities analysis. Perhaps most fundamentally from a methodological perspective, Bardach makes a constructive and empirically grounded foray into conceptually unconfining notions of causality in the social sciences and broadening understanding of this fundamental notion in ways appropriate for action, which is also to say, for acting upon the potential of a situation when it matters most, in real time.

Unfortunately, in his focus on methods and causality interwoven throughout the text, the author seems to leave many practitioners shaking their heads wondering what he's talking about. His thoughtful exploration of uses and limits to conventional boundaries of social science methods for addressing real world challenges deserves further serious attention by policy and organizational scholars. This book is courageous in attempting to articulate a theoretical connection that holds much promise for distinguishing modes of inquiry relevant to worlds of practice, yet whose theoretical groundings I do not believe anyone has articulated fully or even adequately for a practitioner's audience to date.

Bardach's focal concern for potential and capacity lead him to be centrally concerned with the interaction between "an evolving medium of linked possibilities and purposive intervention." The interactive process with which he is concerned is resonant not only with the work of Mark Moore on creating public value (a referent he explicitly draws upon), but is also resonant with what is conceptualized in the notable yet currently less attended to policy work of Giandomenico Majone (1989) and Donald Schon and Martin Rein (1995) as a dialectical policy process. Surprisingly, Bardach makes no mention of these referents despite the obvious relevance of a policy dialectic to this focal issue he examines.

In speaking of the process of potentiality in-between linked possibilities and purposive intervention, Bardach refers more generically to "an ongoing developmental process." Bardach's focus here is also notably similar to what Alberto Guerreiro Ramos articulated as "objective possibilities" with respect to developmental issues at large (1971). Indeed, it seems to this reviewer that Bardach would substantially strengthen his case by placing his work explicitly in the frame of reference of possibility-thinkers just as Michael Barzelay carefully did in his insightfully developed (1992) work. Neither scholar, however, developed a historical frame of reference for articulating possibility thinking. To the best of my knowledge, that is a task still left unaddressed in the policy-administrative field. Bardach's specific concern in this text is with articulating, building, and acting upon situational potential for interagency collaboration. In so doing, he surfaces issues that have been at the periphery of social science concerns in the last century. Yet in so doing, he appears remarkably perceptive to this reviewer and to offer important methodological cues for the further development of professional scholarship in the century to come.

Whatever direction social science programs take in the coming century, I believe professional schools such as programs of public policy and public administration are going to need to recover actionable forms of inquiry and knowledge if they are going to remain closely relevant to the practitioner base that they ostensibly serve. I believe that however it is assessed in the short term, in the long term, Bardach's text will be understood as one of those critical stepping stones that help the professional policy and organizational fields begin to rethink their methodological foundations and seek to help practitioners creatively engage experience in a 21st century world whose problems are not likely to be well handled either within jurisdictions of the formal taxonomic organizations created in the 20th century or via ways of thinking and acting currently commonly fostered in the social sciences.

In conclusion, this is one of those books where a mature scholar was truly thinking as he wrote. It's clear he's not simply regurgitating anything he had already figured out before he started writing. As such, it is a book that requires serious study rather than a text that can be lightly breezed through. It's got enough accessibility challenges in this regard to withhold one star. But in terms of the worthiness of the read, it's a five star book. One could hope that the author may make room for a second edition. It's a unique contribution and addresses a set of topics that are only likely to increase in relevance and import as the new century wears on.

As the editor, I can tell you that my goal in writing this book is to get students of international affairs to start looking systematically at what happens when international organizations like the UN or the EU decide to directly engage local non-governmental organizations in the Third World. This phenomenon, while widespread, has only just begun to penetrate the awareness of most experts in the field, and they often don't even know which words to use, let alone ideas, to describe and explain what is happening. I brought together a number of people with quite different perspectives on the issue and had them each write their own piece, after which we met together at a conference and compared notes. What you will find is that, although we use very different terminology, we all ended up saying many of the same things, that UN efforts to build up local organizations from the outside are analogous to other things in international relations, from neo-colonialism to balance of power politics to development aid projects. In other words, we already have the analytical tools to understand most of what is going on. We are also ina position to predict that these efforts to strengthen "civil society" within Third World countries is probably going to largely backfire unless it is done very carefully with great sensitivity to local political and social conditions. Enjoy the book!

This may have been published for political purposes (in part), but the wisdom contained between its covers sure makes sense to me.

Gore goes out of his way to target waste within the government, spotlighting a host of needlessly duplicated work and costly contracts that do no one but the contractors any good. This series of problems and suggested solutions really comes across as a breath of fresh air, and it sadly demonstrates that many of the common-sense solutions are easy to identify and impossible to implement, even for top government officials.

This interesting reader describes various examples of public services and how they are financed by taxes. The book's clear text and vivid illustrations clearly communicate that the government provides a number of services that impact children's lives when they go to school, visit the library, play in a park, need help in an emergency, and receive a letter in the mail. A color-coded flow diagram in the back shows how the government channels tax payments into public services. The lessons are reinforced with a glossary and some examples of government agencies, such as NASA, that children may recognize. This book is ideal for teachers, parents, and volunteers who are seeking books for younger readers with important lessons about the economic role of government.

Rosenfield's book stands out among mountains of books published on the trendy topic of mind and memory. Here he offers a most cogent argument, in the tradition of Hughlings-Jackson and Freud, against localizationist views, popular in the last century, now revived under the disguise of connectionist/computational models. As a historian of ideas, Rosenfield reports with vigor and clarity and classical precision; as a philosopher of mind (for that is what he is) he reasons with astonishing penetration and subtlety. Though this book might not get the attention it deserves today, as it is in many ways against the mainstream, mechanical conceptions of the mind, I have no doubt that it will eventually contribute to a emerging psychology of consciousness that does not flee from reality in search of simplistic ways of explanation.

The Colby Agency assigns Doug Cooper with an impossible job. He must protect tomboy Edwinna Harper of Meadowbrook, Maryland, who has recently been identified as a D'Martine heiress. That assignment seems relatively simple for the professional bodyguard until he meets the bodacious Eddi. However, his boss Victoria Colby also expects Doug to turn this small town sow into a first class lady, but she remains in shock to learn that the man who raised her is not her biological father, who died before she was born.

Doug rejects Eddi's assault on his heart keeping a professional demeanor though at night he wonders why he keeps dreaming of her. However, when someone decides to remove the heiress, Doug risks his life to insure history fails to repeat itself as he keeps his beloved safe. By doing so he enables her to crumble the barriers that kept his heart out of reach.

GUARDING THE HEIRESS is a solid romantic suspense that hooks the audience due to the antics of the lead couple, especially the hero. Doug tries everything to not fall in love, because it is unprofessional for his assignment, but Eddi overwhelms him even while she struggles with her own demons. Though lost little heiress found tales are frequent themes, Debra Webb insures her novel's freshness with a strong cast who makes for a fine tale.

Harriet Klausner

The back of the book says:
Could Jolie Randolph be losing her mind? That would explain why the typically focused bank executive had discovered inconsistencies in her usually meticulous work, totally forgotten a business trip and woken up naked in a stranger's bed! Jolie was coming undone and under investigation by the disarmingly handsome Simon Ruhl. But would he bed her or bok her?
Undercover Colby agent Simon Ruhl had his sights set on Jolie for more than one reason. She was suspected in a money laundering scheme and she was clearly being set up. Simon was duty bound to protect Jolie from an unknown threat while surreptitiously proving her innocence- all before he went totally insane with desire for her.

I finished this book in one night. It is not complicated or long. The whodunnit was fairly simple but I loved the struggle for the 2 main characters. They were obviously meant for each other but the case was getting in the way and I was curious to see how they would overcome that. A definite 4 stars.

It provides the usual memorable cartoons, useful summaries, and thoughtful commentary. Unlike some of the others, like Constitutional Law, I would not rely on the Summaries alone though - there is far too much stuff in the afternotes that obviously cannot be analyzed by the book alone.

But if you like HCCS, I recommend it highly. Its an excellent introduction, and helps you cut through much of the legal verbiage to hone in on what you need to know.

Former prosecutor Renee Vaughn wants to right the wrongs of her past. When Jim Colby and The Equalizers give her a chance to go undercover, she jumps at the opportunity. Unfortunately, Paul Reyes isn't who or what she expected. As the reclusive brother of international drug kingpin Victor Reyes, Paul finds himself the target for his brother's hit men. Will Renee and Paul survive long enough to sort out the mess? And will the attraction between them remain once all truths are revealed?

HOSTAGE SITUATION is the second book in The Equalizers, which is an offshoot of the long-running Colby Agency series. Debra Webb always does a phenomenal job with romantic suspense and HOSTAGE SITUATION continues this trend. One cannot help but love each new installment, as the Colby family (and all of the connected families) have taken on a life all their own.

Renee is a conflicted character. While one would expect a former prosecutor to be ultra savvy, Renee makes her fair share of mistakes. However, her distress over her brother certainly explains any misgivings about some of her actions. Paul remains somewhat of an enigma throughout the book and it appears this is Ms. Webb's intention. I only wish their romance had developed a bit more and I did have one of those moments where I wanted to scream at them and ask them exactly why they were having sex when their lives were in danger. Overall, however, HOSTAGE SITUATION is an enjoyable read and a welcome addition to The Equalizers series.

COURTESY OF CK2S KWIPS AND KRITIQUES