Economic-Life Books

Loosely based upon the classic story of Alice in Wonderland, sometimes very loosely (the seven dwarves do make a very amusing appearance), Alive in Corporate Wonderland is both entertaining and so close to the truth that it is scary.

The story starts with young Alice studying, or rather being distracted while attempting to study, for her accounting exam. Alice is a somewhat spoiled girl whose Daddy is paying her way through college and whose only real goal is to marry well. Therefore, when Alice falls asleep and finds herself in Wonderland, Inc (a somewhat exaggerated version of the worst aspects of the real world), the reader will feel very little pity for the underachiever. Moreover, as the story continues, the reader will note hierarchical cliques, positions that have no real purpose, and bureaucracy at its worst that he or she has likely experienced first hand in his or her own corporate experiences. This only makes the storyline that much more entertaining and hilarious. Beware the real world, it will make Alice in Wonderland look like kid stuff!

Lewis Caroll's classic tale of Alice Adventures in Wonderland was first published in 1865 and is still a favorite among young readers. Most of us will remember this children's story as a tale filled with satire references to the author's friends and to the lessons that British schoolchildren were expected to memorize.

R.T. Talasek has now reincarnated this famous tale with his loose adaptation, Alice In Corporate Wonderland: Down The Long Hallway. Talasek informs us in the Prologue that hopefully the reader will realize that the similarities between the two stories are frightening, with some allowances for the passage of time and change of venue. It should be pointed out that Talasek worked in the corporate world for over twenty-five years and the story draws from this experience.

Talasek's Alice is studying towards her MBA degree at Ivy League University and one day while preparing herself for her final exams, she falls asleep. In dreamland Alice meets up with a woman dressed in a white linen suit and matching white shoes, who towers over her. Alice is quite perturbed! Who is this woman, whom she compares to a rabbit with her "floppy hair ears." Moreover, Alice does not know if she herself works in this building or why is she here. Finally, Alice is informed by the woman that she is the senior assistant to the president and people call her WR.

Alice is instructed to follow WR to her first meeting and that Wonderland Industries values punctuality. WR tells Alice what Wonderland Industries is all about however Alice admits she has no idea what WR is talking about, as the descriptions and jargon she hears make little sense. Unfortunately, Alice can't keep up with WR and looses her in the corridors. Feeling abandoned and confused Alice is now left to find her way to her first meeting.

No one is around to aid her and the windowless hallway seems to go on endlessly. Eventually, Alice runs into a group of seven men singing "Hi, Ho, Hi, Ho, it's off to work we go!" Sound familiar? Are these our seven dwarfs? Only this time they are dressed in Brooks Brothers business suits of varied shades of blue and gray. All of these employees seemed to be programmed and are not exactly sure as to what their respective responsibilities are in Wonderland Industries. Although, they do understand that in order to survive and keep their jobs they must tow the company line, otherwise they will be history.

Alice is finally approached by a short man with thinning hair, large ears and a round head, who beckons Alice to a room filled with row after row of steel desks, badly in need of paint. He tells Alice that he has been looking all over for her and that her help is needed, as she definitely is management by the way she is dressed and they need a management representative as a sponsor. Again, Alice is perplexed, as she has no idea what Mr. Mouse (Alice's nickname for the gentleman) is talking about.

As we follow Alice during her first chaotic day of work, we have to ask ourselves how do you rationally expect employees to grasp and understand America's ambiguous corporate "la la" land where there are sometimes vague norms, values and expectations that supposedly are to serve as unifying the workforce and strengthen a company's success. The characters that make up this corporate world are very often bizarre and "off the wall" with little or no direction.
New and even old employees constantly face the taunting challenge of comprehending both the norms of the company as well as communicating in a somewhat new language while adapting to a sometimes ambiguous culture.

Conveying thoughts, ideas, beliefs and feelings to another individual is never an easy task. Some authors choose the straight forward method and others rely on various techniques as allegory, parables, symbolism, metaphor, and irony in an effort to reach their readers.
Talasek has succeeded admirably in conveying his thoughts and feelings pertaining to corporate America's madness with the clever use of Carroll's characters and the loose similarity with the original story line.

Norm Goldman, Editor Bookpleasures

Reviewed by Cathy Yanda for Reader Views (5/06)
Having met Lewis Carroll's Alice when I was a child, it was fun to be re-introduced to her now that she has an Ivy League MBA and is beginning her first job in corporate America. R.T. Talasek brings together characters from the original "Alice's Adventure in Wonderland", other children's stories, movies and rock-n-roll. "Alice in Corporate Wonderland" begins with Alice studying for her finals and nodding off to find herself at Wonderland, Inc. for her first day on the job. Alice, in typical fashion, gets separated from everyone and is lost in a long hallway.

She decides to quiz a group of vertically challenged men, bearing a strong resemblance to the Seven Dwarfs, she runs across in the hallway. She discovers they are blindly loyal to the company and simply do what they are told. As she quizzes further..."But don't you know how your assignments tie to the goals of the company? How do you activities tie to the long-range strategic plan of the organization? How do you know when you are successful in completing your task when you don't know what your goals are?"...the men are perplexed and reply, simply..."Now, we must return to the assignments that our supervisors have given us, because we know that it is imperative to the success of the company, and that we will be rewarded for our efforts"...

R.T. Talasek weaves many more valuable lessons into this brief volume of corporate adventures. At one point, Alice is told by Castillo Erpillar (Cat), her mentor at Wonderland, Inc., that she would read "Sun Tzu: The Art of War" is she wants to learn how to be successful at Wonderland Industries. Alice recalls that this is not the first time she has been advised to read this book. Perhaps in the next adventure of Alice she will have picked up a copy and applied some of the wisdom. She reflects on some wisdom later, "Better to retreat and live to fight another day..." not sure whether it was from Sun Tzu or Top Gun. She decides at that point that maybe Cat had been right about the book.

"Alice in Corporate Wonderland" is a well-written, concise volume which would be a valuable asset to anyone newly entering the corporate world. It also offers a fresh perspective to those who have been there for years.

Anderson provides an enlightening and accessible look at the multitude of changes taking place today that are usually characterized by the word 'globalization'. As he so clearly points out, these changes are not merely economic, although such changes are important, but also political, cultural and biological. This broader framework is likely to be important to those who would better understand (and perhaps alter) the course of globalization.

Anderson notes that nations are increasingly losing their closed character (and becoming more open), a development exemplified by the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In consequence of this, individual nations have less control over their economic, political, cultural and biological dimensions, and there is an increased need for associations of nations. It should be noted, however, that Anderson is skeptical about the likelihood of the emergence of global government.

A particularly useful part of Anderson's book is the classification of attitudes toward globalization that he presents in Chapter 12 ("Global Visions and Divisions"). They are: the globalist right; the globalist left; the antiglobalist right; and the antiglobalist left. With this classification in hand, one can better grasp the discomfort many people feel with the process of globalization, as well as why some people are working so hard to advance it.

What Anderson does, therefore, is develop a more nuanced view of what globalization is and a more nuanced view of individual responses to globalization. He makes globalization more complex, but it is surely not something to be addressed in a simple-minded fashion.

Walter Anderson's gift is to synthesize and explicate complex social issues in an intelligible, readable, and coherent manner. There is not a lot of news in this book. It is a fine overview of the complexities of globalization and all the different ways it manifests itself in our lives. It pulls together a lot of information on the ways in which our world is changing, how this change effects us, and how we effect the process of change.

Anderson also provides an overview of how people are thinking about and conceptualizing our changing, globalizing world. In short, it is an excellent primer or introduction to the processes of globalization and how people are responding to it. It is not a ponderous academic tome, but it does have a bibliography that you can use as a springboard for further explorations.

It helped me to get a handle on a lot of materials and information I was familiar with, but never had the time to read, study, and think about systematically.

One thing which I found helpful was the symbolic references to the Treaty of Wesphalia which ended the 30 years war in the 17th Century. It marks the transition from the world of the Holy Roman Empire to the world of the sovereign nation state. The current era is post-Wesphalian in that the boundaries that defined nation states are becoming more permeable and oftentimes irrelevant. Environmental, medical, economic, political and social problems do not begin and end at national borders, hence new ways of thinking and new forms of global governance are emerging to deal with these problems. Our post 9-11 world has seen efforts to strengthen national boundaries in response to a globalized threat, but it only affects a small part of the globalization process.

Another thing is the intersecting dimensions of Globalist-antiglobalist and political left-political right continuums. This could be conceived as a four fold table: globalist-left, globalist-right, antiglobalist-left, antiglobalist-right. I prefer to think of it as an x-y axis that defines a two dimensional grid.

This categorization scheme captures some of the ambiguities and paradoxes of responses to globalism. Anderson uses it to explain different perspectives offered by various writers and actions by various activists. It also helps me understand my own conflicted feelings about globalization (free markets, immigration, multi-culturalism, global warming, the aids epidemic, etc.)

Ultimately All Connected Now is a good place to start thinking about globalization. If you have already been thinking about globalization, this is a good place to pause and review your thinking, and the thoughts other's have had, about globalization.

The day I read the title of this book, my fears of the last 30 years were gone. It was stating the obvious, so obvious that not many managed to grasp it. Since humankind started to record history 5500 years ago and maybe long before, we are living in the First Global Civilisation. A civilisation that spans the planet and already goes beyond with human space missions, satellites, probes and robots.

It started with Columbus and global travel. Then this new civilisation which was born thanks to long distance communication (telegraph in the 19th century, later phone, telex, fax, internet) is reshaping our lives in different ways: at home, in cities, in our workplace, in our environment, in our information, in our bio-information, in the perception we have from ourselves.

In this perspective one understands the meaning of the 20th century, a transition between a set of civilisations gradually conquered by the West that took their independance but that remained connected into a global civilisation with multiple centers influencing each other.

We are a sentient specie (author calls us a global animal) rather than an American, an European, a Japanese and our problems are not national problems but global or human problems.

Global civilisation because it allows us to have a global vision of our planet (remember this picture taken from the Moon in 1969 showing Earth as a blue oasis in the middle of nowhere), to realize we have an ecosystem to which our survival is attached, to see the multiplicity of our beliefs and religions, the interraction of cultures, those who accept an open society and take ideas from abroad and those who refuse and fight against it. Sometimes the same people but on different subjects.

Global civilisation does not only have states (more than 200 ranging from tiny Monaco or Vatican to US, Canada, Russia, India and China), NGOs (US Aid, Red Cross, ... ) but 400 international organisations including the UN, NATO, ASEAN, the Arab League and the European Union, 38,000 transnational or global corporations (global because because they adapted to the environment faster than others), non-state actors (billionaires, drugs lords, terrorists), religions (many with the biggest being Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Taoism all calling for more than 1 billion members), citizens as individuals or organised in communities and organisations. All those interract to form our present world.

It does have an informal governance, a reunion of different spheres of the global civilisation but no global government (note: civilisations with multiple polities and no centralized government are numerous in the past: Mesopotamia, Greece, Mayan civilisation, Western Europe, India and China for some periods of their history).

This global civilisation triggers reactions, vision and divisions: anti-globalization, environment movements, labour movements, etc...

Although some author opinions will not be shared by everybody, it is concise, clear, well-written, easy to understand and easy to make its own opinion about the event we are all living today. Vision about life, job, travel, environment, foreign relations will be changed for ever. A true paradigm shift that makes sense of the last decades and removes the anguish felt by many in front of this changing and sometimes crual society. Once read, you feel just like a kid which became familiar to his new house. And more, you are astonished you did not realize it earlier while it was so obvious.

This is a fantastic book. Simple to read, well organized with great insights into what makes some people so effective and succussful at what they do. John Wareham was inspired when he conceived and wrote this book. As founder and president of a hightech start up company, I lived by it. Then I hired a new president to replace me and I loaned him my copy hoping that he would benefit from it as much as I had. He never read the book and after many queries, he finally confessed that he had lost it. Can you believe it, the idiot lost my book! Needless to say he didn't last long as president.

I read this book for the first time eight years ago and since then i had read it several times. It was one of the most important books for my personal and professional growth. It is like a bible to me. I hope you readers also find the golden knowledge i have found in it.

Every person with a career should read this book. With simple graphs and clinical psychology in layman terms, Wareham gives you the tools to understand why you are where you are. More than that, you will understand your hidden limits. As a headhunter, this book must be read by every person who regularly interviews others.

With so little time spent on caring in the workplace, Giovagnoli shows us all that there are practical, powerful things we can all do daily to make a difference in our workplaces. The book was so well laid out and the stories brought me to tears as well as laughter. Great Angel Advice Corners at the end of each section really help bring the strategies she offers to life. I put the Action Strategies page up in my lunch room as Giovagnoli suggests and last week alone three people brought food treats for my department. For the first time in a long time, this Christmas at the office feels like there are people who care about each other. It's even getting to the point that I look forward to going to work to see what new idea someone has come up with--all from the strategies Giovagnoli recommends.

Angels in the Workplace is by far the best book to come along in years! Workers and employers all over America will improve their attitude and working environment by reading this book. In a time where the knowledged-based workplace is imminent, employers and employees alike are looking for ways to enhance their work life. This is the way! Using Giovagnoli's action steps, your workplace will become a more spiritual and fulfilled place to spend your 40 hours a week.

This is the perfect gift for family, friends, colleagues. I even gave a copy to my boss. I like the way each belief--faith,hope, charity, courage, truth, trust and love have not only stories, but strategies to make them work in your work place. I turn to the book once a day to get ideas and inspiration.

"Anticipating Tomorrow" invites the reader to examine a blue-print of life for Americans in the 21st century. The book engaged my interest, but the chapter: Education, the Democratic
Autocracy was especially insightful to me, an educator with over 40 years experience, both on the college and secondary levels. I found M. Blickstein's analysis of America's educational system accurate, sound and meaningful. His prescription for change is "on target." I feel this book is important for educators to read. Frances S. Dubner, Ph.D.

Five years ago did you think you would be using your cell phone for text messaging? Were you using your computer as a source of recorded music? Were you concerned that information encoded in your credit cards could give away the whole store if the data found their way to the wrong hands? Blickstein's book is about the effect of technology on our lives. The changes we know of are the foundation of the book, but its thrust is on the changes we have yet to see. Blickstein has an enormous wealth of knowledge that he brings to bear on the subject. Equally important, he has the vision to describe the way things will be, not in the distant future claimed by sci-fi, but in the immediate future and a few years beyond.

The chapter headings show the book divided into distinct aspects of our lives: Medical, Religion, Community, Politics, Education, Jobs, Retirement, Entertainment, and Networks. In each of these, we are told what to expect and why. A small sampling: Machines in our homes to monitor our health and less need for invasive surgery, decentralized control of mainline religions, an increase in the transient population with concomitant effect on geographic political lines, many if not most blue-collar jobs entailing abstract problem solving, and on and on for hundreds of specific effects of technology.

This book can be recommended for anyone interested in "living and making a living in the 21st Century," the book's subtitle.

This is a very well-written book that is both thoughtful and thought-provoking. Blickstein displays an excellent knowledge of modern technology, and how it affects both how we live today and what we can expect in the near future. His research is exemplary, and his careful use of statistics is easily understood. As a retired academic, I particularly appreciated the chapters on education and retirement. This book is hard to put down.

I've read a lot of guru-type books about financial success, but this is one of the best examples of blending the left-brain and the right-brain. Thinking about money takes both parts of the brain and Klein and Emerson have nailed it.

Written in plain English, they explain risk, choosing a financial advisor and they include stories that bring home their points.

I would highly recommend ARE WE THERE YET to anyone looking for a well thought-out guide to next few decades of your life.

Just finished reading "Are We There Yet???" and before I give my review I have just one word for the authors---BRAVO. Just the fact that I finished reading this informative, easy to follow, funny, "gem" is an accomplishment in itself. I have tried to read many books on "planning your retirement" and after the first couple of pages I toss them aside because they are either too boring or don't have a clue as to what I'm reading. Not so with this book. It explains things in terms you can understand and at some point you start to grasp what you have to do to get ready for retirement. Simple, concise, & understandable. This "gem" should be read by anyone contemplating retiring in the near future or the
"future, future". Again kudos to Mr. Emerson & Mr. Klein. You've got yourselves a winner, gentlemen.

I am thinking about retiring in the next 5 years and just finished reading "Are We There Yet???". Although I expected a dry, boring explanation of financial prospects & projections, I was pleased to read about planning both financially & mentally for retirement. It leads you through each phase in a comprehensive, informative and easy to understand manner and along the way is interspursed with a sense of humor that makes it an easy read. This book should be a planning guide for everyone leaning toward or even remotely thinking about retirement. Edie from New York.

I found this book to be supremely helpful. It's difficult to pin down precisely what the book says - - I think it requires several careful reads for it to "sink in." But this is definitely one of the TOP books I'd ever suggest to a friend interested in trading.

I have to give this 5 stars because the book is just as the title says it is. It is about what Jason learned and lost trading the Chicago Futures Markets, so no one should be surprised or disappointed.

"The Art of the Trade" part of the title should really be "The Art of Jason's Trade", but that is ok. One thing about Jason is he has no lack of ego. If ego were energy, this guy's ego could power the entire city of Chicago, but that actually makes this book a little more interesting. To see and feel his ego boldly and unashamedly served up and spatula-spanked point blank right into your face is kind of entertaining.

He has had an interesting career with brokers and he shares not only the experiences he has had, but his thoughts and feeling towards those experiences and how it affected him personally and emotionally. Anyone that has traded for any length of time can relate to many of the emotional turmoils that this business can manifest.

Don't buy this book expecting a "how to" book on trading. He does have some verbiage alluding to some trading theory, but again, like his other book, he doesn't really give you anything you can use. For example, he tells the reader to figure out where the loser is in any given trade situation, but doesn't really tell us how to do that - which is actually the most important part. It's like telling us the secret to trading is to buy low and sell high, but if he doesn't tell us how to do that, then it is really a worthless statement.

So if you are interested in reading about the career and personal thoughts of a trader, and would like a little insight into how bizarre the world of brokers can be, and how it has affected this trader through good times and bad times, then this book is for you.

This book is monumental and it will lead to a paradigm shift in the way you look at trading and conduct technical analysis. As the author stated in this book "trading becomes effortless and a way of life (borrowing his words "meaning of life")."

It's just an incredible transformation process you will go through as you study this book and finally get his points. During this transformation you will look at market and price movements more objectively, subsequently, to exploit market volatility.

The author is brutally honest and straight forward in telling his story, which I appreciate immensely. There're sections of the book you may find irrelavant to what you are seeking, please (PLEASE) don't let it or the author's sarcasm distract your search for gems in this book. He knows what he is talking about, he has the "secret", and he is the master of this trade. Respect it, appreciate it, and read, re-read, and study this book until you understand and grasp his point of view - they are priceless!

I am eternally grateful to the author for sharing his journey of life in this book. Trading is not about techniques or price, it's a MIND thing! Trading is not hard, it's US - who we are - that makes it hard!

Thank you, Jason!!!

PS. You can also google and read his interviews, columns, and broadcasts on the web. I find them helpful.

Books that I consider "beautiful" invariably have beautiful ideas. Artful Work is one such book. If we took Richards' thoughts to heart, we would redefine work. Work worth doing was something a master craftsman did long ago. The movement to mass production of goods put artisans at a disadvantage, so much so as to force them to find "jobs." Work became something necessary for survival and the rewards for working proved to be unrelated to the work.

One of the more powerful concepts presented in Artful Work is sculptor Henry Moore's answer to, "What's the secret of life?" "The secret of life is to have a task, something you do your entire life, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is--it must be something you cannot possibly do!"

Part of what holds us back from creating great workplaces is that we may change a great deal, but rarely the bedrock of the workplace--our beliefs about what work is. Without awareness and an examination of our constricting beliefs, we will continue to experience frustration in creating better workplaces. One fundamental failure of ours is the unwillingness to match employees with the work that gives them joy.

Many leaders are so concerned with controlling workers, that they elaborately encourage the need for approval. The thinly veiled belief that management hides or denies (and workers fail to notice) is the gross lack of trust in the human spirit--without strong direction, people will be destructive.

"The artist's perspective on work is:
· All work can be artful
· The reward for artful work is in the doing
· The ambition of artful work is joy
· All work is spiritual work
· Artful work demands that the artist owns the work process
· Artful work requires consistent and conscious use of the self
· As the artist creates the work, the work creates the artist."

"Management involves allocating organizational energy: managers historically have decided who works on what tasks. Leadership, on the other hand, involves raising the level of available energy."

The above only exposes the tip of the iceberg. Any reader of Artful Work will be rewarded.
--Jack Bender, author of Disregarded: Transforming the School and Workplace through Deep Respect and Courage

This book does an excellent job of capturing the differences between work done mundanely, and work done artfully (the latter being craftsmanship). Any work can be performed in an artful way.

The premise is that anything worth doing is worth doing well. Being completely present benefits us in many ways, and adds more to our lives than the tedium of just performing tasks would.

Artful work, seen as a contribution to the individual, is an exceptional thing to integrate into your life. Working without meaning definitely detracts from the individual. Dick Richards clearly argues the distinction between the two poles.

A great quote from the book is "It takes courage to grow up and be who we are." Being artful, and expressing ourselves in the world, is being respectful to us - to who we are, and what we can contribute. No matter what you do, doing it with your whole self could be greater therapy than anything else you might be able to buy.

Although the topic is serious (heavy to many), it is well written and easy to consume. The author does a great job of interpreting deep serious topics to manageable ideas that won't scare readers away.

He also discusses not just an artful individual, but what an artful organization might look like. How can you be artful, how can your organization encourage artfulness, how can leadership foster it. Very much worth the read.

This book recently won the Ben Franklin Award from the National Booksellers Association for content, design and production in the business book category. It is as beautiful on the inside as it is on the outside. The stories are touching and the message gives hope that each of us can find meaningful work and the the search is worth it

"This book offers something different from the typical job search book--hope. Reading it is like having an ally in your corner-a source of support, comfort, fresh perspectives, and practical wisdom. I recommend it to anyone who is struggling with the frustrations of a career transition."

In life we are often presented with challenges. We can take control of those challenges or we can let those challenges control our minds and emotions. In this era of rapidly changing job and work environments, many people find themselves faced with job losses or underemployment. In an excellent treatment of the issue of emotional responses to career change, Diane Wilson guides individuals through the process of taking control of their careers and of career transitions. Diane's book, Back in Control, deals with the emotional side of job hunting, and, therefore, fills a real hole in the existing literature. Diane's book will aid self-awareness by showing people that they are not alone in experience a wide range of confusing emotions when faced with career moves. But she goes beyond just illustrating the problems; she also offers a variety of potential solutions to the problems encountered in career transitions.

"This book is a rare treasure in that it goes beneath the surface to grapple with the real psychological and social effects of unemployment. Diane Wilson provides a "roadmap"of the emotional terrain one is likely to encounter in successfully navigating a career transition. Awareness, acceptance and action ... her three pronged approach helps us to transcend counter-productive knee-jerk reactions and find our way safely to the other shore."

Five stars... without a doubt! Blake, Blake, and Kitteridge craft a compelling case for stewardship of the ecosystems we inhabit. The story is grounded in the Klamath Basin of Southern Oregon where a complex dance of men and nature is being played out. Historically, the federal government in the form of the Bureau of Reclamation identified the water rich basin as a region to promote for farming. No surprise that today the area is largely given over to farming and ranching. Prior communities consisted of local Native Americans who for the last hundred years or so have been driven out of the basin either by our military or our legal system. And last, but not the least in importance, the bio-diversity that suffers at the hands of lost habit, chemicals used for pesticides, and misguided management by public institutions.

Farmers, the indigenous Klamath people, migrating birds and native fish, all have their claims to the basin. From recalling the basin from his early childhood to driving the dirt roads to meet the 3rd generation farmers and ranchers, William Kitteridge's writing is exceptional at putting real faces and names to this place.

The story is made sublime with some of the most outstanding western wildlife photography you are likely to find. The photographs represent the sacredness of a place that serves as a stop for millions of migrating birds that no words can begin to portray.

A tragic postscript to the publishing of this book was a fish kill of some 30 thousand salmon on their way up the Klamath River to their spawning beds. Its been concluded that in stream flows got drawn down to the point where the migrating salmon stacked up in swallow and warm pools which ultimately depleted the water of oxygen. Only recently have federal wildlife managers admitted that diversion of water to farmers in the basin caused the massive fish kill in the Klamath.

This book is an epiphany. Kittredge is the best essayist writing about the American west living today, and the photographs are almost perfect. This book will introduce readers to an area that has remained mostly obscure, an area where huge environmental dramas have long since began, and are still being played out. Many sympathies are presented in this book; lots of heros, too. An amazing read.

Excellent narrative that provides the historic context for what is emerging as one of the most difficult and contentious fights between economic and enviromental interests anywhere in the US. The photography is outstanding and Kittredge's discussion of the people and the issues in this beautiful area provide concise insight for anyone interested in understanding the tragedy of US government policies on the management of the land, the people, the fish, and the birds of the Klamath Lake basin. Strongly recommend!!!