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This book is supposed to provide its reader of an introduction to International economics. As this book is mostly meant for students who are just getting to know the subject, the authors should have been more clear and they should have made it more attractive. The lay-out is pretty boring, and the graphs are often confusing and not well explained.New developments, such as voluntary export restraints, etc.., are only covered briefly. The contents also focus too much on small,open economies and not on larger economies. This makes it especially unattractive for US students.

I have very mixed feelings about this book. It deserves three-and-a-half stars. On the one hand we have a fascinating polemic touching on all the essential realms of modern thought. On the other hand, we have a political indictment that suffers from an excess in name dropping and citation packing along with an untamed fascination with Edward Said.

At whatever measure, the book is provocative in a number of ways. It really only has to do with Japan on its periphery. In reality, it (fleetingly) touches on Japan's political uniqueness and its (slight) place in the history of thought in the grand scheme of an indictment of logical positivism/economic rationalism in the social sciences. At times an impassioned defense of the empirical method, and the 'changeableness' of truth; at other times the book takes on an almost 'ad hominem' tone towards rationalism to the detriment of the work as a whole. The book contributes, in my opinion, a valuable critique of the social sciences, and attempts to defend political science methodology from the positivism of political economy.

Williams ranges from Kant, to Marx, to Said, to Saussere, to Chomsky, to Nietzsche, to Mill, to Foucault, to Francis Ford Coppola, to Alan Bloom, to Dewey, etcetera, etcetera. He pulls off this journey at times, with interesting insight into the place of thought in social science disciplines. Other times, however, he becomes enmired in demonstrating how many different thinkers he can namedrop in a paragraph.

It could be a good book (maybe only as a reference) for an intermediate course in scientific method and/or the history of philosophy. It is almost a compendium of philosophical positions. Although he slants his descriptions of some schools of thought, he is good at presenting arguments undermining many dogmatic perspectives. His critique of structuralism, post-structuralism, and political correctness is excellent. His chapter on linguistics is a little garbled, but interesting nonetheless.

At the beginning is a glossary that is useful for understanding Williams' position, although the definitions are almost comically self-serving. He is relentless in his citations, with a large section of endnotes. Helpfully, he includes a bibliography of all the works cited.

I read this book because I am hoping to visit Tibet. I had earlier read Love is a Many Splendoured Thing by Han Suyin. I found "Lhasa: An Open City" to be a very pro-China account of Tibet. So in that sense it was disappointing. The language was uninspiring. However, if you retain your objectivity, there is a lot of useful information about Tibet and it is definitely worth a read on that account.

This book has places to add pictures and details to tell your child's own story. My daugther, nearly two, enjoys looking at pictures of herself, her Mommy and Daddy, and her birthparents as I read to her about her adoption. The only negative thing, in my opinion, is that the colors and animated characters are dull. It needed a lot of stickers, pictures and drawings to make it more interesting for our daughter.

I am a Ph.D Candidate, majored in Multimedia Communication. This book provides the reader with some very important principles and fundamental knowledge about the design of distribuited multimedia systems. It is a good book for the researchers and graduate students majored in multimedia communication architecture. You must have enough knowledge about CORBA, DCE, ODP and multimedia communication. If you just want to get some general knowledge about ODP, do not read it.

This is an average Hardy Boys book. Plenty of action, a wounded woman, and someone that tried to kill her.

For the price, I wasn't too disappointed with what I received, however the cards look nothing like the picture. They are have the texture of paper in sketch-pads, about as thick, however are a little more of a dingy vanilla then the picture would suggest. Still make for a nice way for correspondence, definitely preferred to notebook paper. They have a certain antiquated air to them I like.

My girls love tools but some of the illustrations were not very easy to distinguish. For instance one of the pages has a close up of a drill bit. But it's kind of cute and if you have young kids that like tools it will probably be enjoyed. Otherwise, probably not worth the price.

This book was a great help for me as a programmer trying to become a system manager for Vms (a new operating system for me). It gave me the bare basics I would need to know inorder to get to a good start learning vms. This book is not for an advanced systems administrator, but it is just right for a beginner. The chapter on system integrity monitoring was really good. It talks about the uses for the monitor command. It also talks about monitoring the system for hardware errors. The book contains very little on tcp/ip and its uses in the vms realm.

Illich makes what would otherwise be dry reading into an emotional and thought-provoking journey. He has great perception to see interactions in society. Every moment I spent reading it was worthwhile. Just as much fun was deconstructing his arguments to see how he reached the conclusions and deciding whether I agree. I am eager to read "Tools for Conviviality."

Illich proposes that sometime in the last 50 years society passed through a threshold where "modernized subsistence" was achieved and all our modern real needs were met. At this point we reached the maximum, and coincidently the ideal level, of individual satisfaction through a balance of autonomous action and consumption of mass-produced commodities (goods and services primarily in medical, transportation and educational areas). But then society passed through this threshold and, as a result individuals have been experiencing lower and lower overall satisfaction with life with our ever increasing use of mass-produced commodities.

Illich argues that society would have stopped at the threshold value had there not been created at that moment the distorting force of the Dominant Professions. Dominant Professions that impel society to produce a surfeit of mass-produced commodities.

Dominant Professions are a professional class with the power to impute the need for unneeded commodities upon the citizenry. By using the language of the Professional, they trick us laymen to go beyond our real needs by creating in us needs that we would not otherwise have - imputed needs. They do this for the sake of sustaining and furthering their authority and profession and in the service of the people who control the tools of mass production. The Dominant Professionals not only control the distribution and supply of the approved commodity that satisfies our imputed need, they also make it illegal or impossible to satisfy our need using a non-approved commodity. The Professional's commodities are of course mass-produced. Thus, society has passed the threshold because of the Dominant Professions. To get back to that threshold value we need to dismantle the authority of the professional class.

Those are the arguments. The fun part is decomposing the arguments. Stop reading now if you want to figure it out for yourself without being biased by my analysis.

First, Illich imagines us a citizenry of such simpletons we can't determine how much we need to sustain ourselves in this late industrial society. By calling every need an "imputed need" if it is beyond "modernized subsistence", Illich can blame the Dominate Professionals for causing society to progress past where it would otherwise have stopped, fully satisfied. I disagree. It is the ever expanding desires of individuals that keep us wanting more long after we knowingly achieved subsistence. We are never satisfied enough to stop wanting more. These are not imputed needs from an external Professional class that we need to defend ourselves against, this is our own natural behavior which we chose not to rein in.

Illich also tells us that we know the maximum benefit to life that industry can ever provide. Fortunately, this is not true. For example, if average longevity hasn't changed during the past 50 years it doesn't follow that industry has been ineffective. This assumes a constant population base whereas the size of society is increasing and more people are living to about the same age. And there is ample evidence that the mass-produced commodities are the cause for improvement in life. Examples Illich sites in the book as examples of autonomous actions replaced by commodites that induce "modernized poverty" include; peasants living in homes they built from and upon the refuse of others moved to pre-fabricated houses, indoor light from fires and candles replaced with electricity, infant mortality reduced by the presence of trained physicians. Furthermore, individual human longevity is not limited by a theoretical physical law we know of in the same way the speed of light is. Thus, because the record has not been broken in the past 50 years it does not follow that it cannot be broken during the next 50 years. If we followed this logic long-jump competitions were no longer necessary after the 1968 Olympics.

Illich proposes that we are faced with a new choice - "modernized subsistence" - resulting from the invention of modern industrial capabilities. However, each age - in it's own time "modern" - stone, bronze, iron or last week in the post industrial age, the commodities that determined the maximum attainable life and the minimum amount of resources needed to stay alive, e.g. the subsistence level, were dependent on what was available. Because installation of a society-wide commodity will always impede the liberty of an individual to use another technology or no technology at all - whether it is the rules of the road, language, or inoculations, there is no non-zero level of commodity use required that will simultaneously preserve for every individual the liberty to act and the same objective measure of "modernized subsistence". Simply said - your actions count towards yourself and the whole.

Illich's asserts we know what "modernized subsistence" looks like from empirical observation. In fact, Illich gives his opinion of a current and real country that has at its disposal the appropriate intensity of production to approximate "modernized subsistence." Subsistence is a minimum level to support life. "Modernized Subsistence" supports "Convivial Austerity." What Illich proposes is his ideal society: his idea of the ideal life for the individual that alienates the liberties he cherishes least and mandates the commodities he values more.

Illich shows our beautiful tendency to romanticize the past; when it seemed that the world reached its apex coincidently with our arrival on the planet. Language was real, technology was benign, and people were pure until that moment when a kernel -born only in our consciousness - metastasized and corrupted the balance of powers that would have otherwise been. Reality is that language is always evolving, applied technology is never benign and people run the gamut from altruistic to evil. And this has always been the case. Illich's arguments and desires for a better world are wonderful food-for-thought. They also are unfortunately an impractical model for society.