Locked-in

If you're looking for some light reading about traveling, this book fits the bill. Only most people are more interested in what happens at each stop on the trip, and don't need to know the details of catching the train, checking into the hotel, or attempting to deal with getting a visa registered or hotels to stamp the visa. Some of the detail is useful, as the process *is* different and could be mind-bending for someone not prepared for it.

I was also shaking my head as we see the author (who is making the trip after a multi-year business trip to help reform Russia) attempting to use legaleze to force people to give her the same price as a Russian citizen. (It's expected that forigners will pay more for things like hotels, bus tickets, train rides, etc. Forget the clause in the Russian Constitution -- no one abides by it. Which is what the author finally realizes after weeks of arguing.)

If I could have I would have rated this a 3.5 star book. Because I like Bukowski's work, I will round up. I am huge fan of biographies and this just isn't one of the better ones.

Years ago I was a struggling, naive graduate student in English at a major southern university. Like a fool, I decided to write a master's thesis on Charles Bukowski. The department chair stuck me with a professor who was supposedly the resident expert on contemporary American literature. From our first conversation it was clear that the man not only had no respect for Buk, but hated his work and hated the very notion that anyone would want to do graduate level work on him. He dismissed the idea with a sniff, saying, "He's marginal and unworthy. No one has written a book on him." I am sad to report that I let the bastard get the better of me. The thesis went unwritten.

Well, that was a decade ago and since then there have been several very fine books written about Bukowski. Three excellent volumes come readily to mind: Neeli Cherkovski's seminal biography, "Bukowski: A Life"; Gay Brewer's Twayne volume, "Charles Bukowski"; and Russell Harrison's "Against the American Grain." All are top notch in their own way.

Now we have Howard Sounes' worthy addition to this list, "Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life." This new biography works well as a compliment to Cherkovski's more intimate work (Neeli and Hank were good friends and the closeness of their relationship informs every page of the text). Sounes' book is more flamboyant, to be sure, and paints Bukowski in darker colors than does Cherkovski's. Both portraits are quite valuable and, even more important, both are very good reads.

I'm still waiting, though, for the definitive Bukowski biography to emerge, a book that combines a true scholar's rigor with a novelist's eye for detail. Maybe some new English professor or graduate student coming up will grab for the brass ring. I can't help but think that our universities will finally forget their snobbery and small brained prejudices and hop on the Bukowski bandwagon.

What I would love to see published is a book that encompasses the pictures painted by Sounes, Cherkovski, Brewer and Harrison, with added chunks of personal grace and style thrown in by this to-be-named biographer. It's bound to happen some day because Bukowski's legacy is simply too daunting, too great to be ignored.

In the meantime, I recommend this book and all of the others I named above. There are other fine volumes on Buk out there, too. Go find them all and read them right away. You'll learn lots of cool stuff and be the life of your next cocktail party!

This book mainly focus on two types of frequency synthesis : DDS and PLL Fractional-N synthesizer, (unfortunatly only one chapter, ch.5). The idea is good, but more improvement should be done about it to make it a good teach book.

The style used is brief but unfortunatly some typographic mistakes remain which make it difficult to follow some explications:
Mathematic formula are uncomplete, some graphics have only a short caption which is not explicite enough, and for some chapter the bilbiographic references are not complete (only the name of the author for example).
No ISBN are mentioned
Due to this lack, a second edition would be strongly appreciated.

For chapter 10, unlike Best -pll reference, no program is directly attached to the book, and you should contact the author to obtain Qbasic files, which is far from comonly used as (window application/dos, or a matlab-toolbox format.
No ftp site is mentioned.

This book is an addition material to classic PLL-books (Best, Rohde), but one can not expect it to be used as primary material for a course for example for the moment.
Finally, the price of the material is high considering the content. 60 $ is a lot for 300 pages + a reprint of one article !!

One might think that the reason South Korea was so much more successful than its rivals was because it had a streamlined and efficient bureaucracy. But this is not necessarily the case: in the mid-eighties it required as many as 310 approvals and 312 documents before permission was granted to form a new industrial plant. One might think that the difference was the result of the strategy of industrialization. India, like many other countries, followed an import substitution industrialization (ISI), while South Korea followed an export-led industrialization (ELI). The difference here is not simply one between protectionism and free-trade: for a long time South Korea had its own system of tariffs to protect domestic industries. But an ELI path insured that Korean companies faced the pressures of foreign competitors, while an ISI path often resulted in domestic companies smugly idling in the fleshpots of assured markets. But Chibber shows that this is not the result of the cleverness of South Korean bureaucrats and the ideological blindness of Indian ones.

There were reasons why countries preferred ISI to ELI. For a start, industrial countries placed tariffs on industrial goods from developing countries in the fifties. American foreign aid put restrictions on exports during the fifties. So did many foreign companies. One Indian committee found in 1969 that 65% of the collaboration agreements it surveyed had export restrictions imposed by the foreign partner. Moreover, since export markets were competitive and risky and domestic markets safe and assured it was only rational for businesses to resist their governments' push for export drives, which in India and elsewhere they successfully did. Korea was different. It had the luck to be the place where Japan needed to outsource its light manufacturing, and this gave it the contacts and places for its own export drive in the sixties to be successful. Moreover this led to a crucial difference with India. Because the export markets were both competitive and profitable, companies would support the disciplinary measures the South Korean state imposed to assure that its aid worked. After all, if one company failed to do what it was supposed to, there would be another to do a better job of it. By contrast, in India under ISI, there was no such incentive. There was considerable support for getting state incentives, but there was stringent opposition to enforcing any disciplinary measures. And so Chibber details how Indian business' call for state planning in the forties was in fact a way to pre-empt more radical measures, that it was call for not socialism, but for capitalist planning. He discusses how they worked vigorously to take out any teeth in Indian planning legislation, and he also shows how the Congress party demobilized the labour movement, which could have served as a counterweight to Indian business. And he goes on to discuss how Indian business was able to thwart possible reforms in the fifties and sixties, and how Indira Gandhi's erratic patronage system undermined it once and for all. He also notes how Korean business eventually became powerful enough that they did not need the developmental state's restrictions, and so started to dismantle it. The result is a complex, well documented account, which should be read by all shallow advocates of globalization.