PO

The volume is a detailed study of Rin-chen-bzan-po, the key figure in the Later Spread of Dharma after its persecution by Glan-dar-ma in A.D. 901. Due to him it first appeared in Mnah-ris and later on spread to Dbus and Gtsan. He is famous for his translations of both the sutras and tantras, and extensive explanations of the Prajnaparamita.

"While Buddhism spread anew with greater purity and its understanding deepened by the new sutras and tantras, Rin-chen-bzan-po realised that the translations of sacred texts alone would not do, and to irradiate the faith temples would have to be built and would also have to be attractive to draw people. He brought with him artists and craftsmen from Kashmir to embellish temples newly built all over the country. The temples at Tabo, Tsaparang, Tholing, and elsewhere in Western Tibet bear clear evidence of the craftsmanship of Kashmiri masters. The murals of Man-nan temple are the only surviving frescos of the Kashmiri idiom known today. There is a sharp distinction between the school of Guge and the school of Central Tibet, inspite of the same spiritual world. While Guge leaned on Kashmir because of geographic proximity, Central Tibetan schools were influenced by the Pala and Nepalese idiom.
A Tibetan manuscript of his biography has been reproduced at the end of the volume.

Sheri-D Wilson's latest book of poetry came out in 1998. This is a book of "preformance poetry" with many, many different layers. Like an onion. Teeming with urbanity of the every day mysticism of life--one moment you'll be howling at her clever play of words, the next, you'll be gasping at her sudden fatalism. It's this fatalism which has slowly been creeping into Wilson's works which show her transgression and maturation as an artist. This book is not afraid to illuminate pain in the action of the now. It is one of her more down to earth books......(compare with Swerve), and it is not one or two continual preformance pieces like I personally perfer, but it is filled with genius pieces of funky poetry--the care, thought and reserch is evident in each one. She makes action poetry look effortless. On the stage, as well as in this book. Recommended to those with a desire to connect poetry with the real world, and in turn,their own real world, with the inner world of the true poet's heart.

The 475 trials of Trent mark a very important chapter in Jewish history. The history of genocide and murder dates back to the early days of Europe. Here, in Trent, three Jewish families were accused of murdering a young Christian boy through ritual practices. The now-infamous trial lasted more than three years, during which many Jewish men and women were tortured during brutal interrogations and forced to confess to a crime they had not committed.

The book is a good read that never boggles down in too much details. Hsia gives all the necessary information for the reader to understand the time and place as well as the events surrounding the death of little Simon. His study of 15th century Italy is visually appealing to the reader, as the facts are written down to be easily understood by anyone.

Thought-provoking, precise and well written, Trent 1475 brings you back to a time and place where torture was the popular recourse during judicial interrogations, where the Jewish population was misunderstood and badly treated, where torture was so brutal that people would lie and condem themselves just to avoid being brutalized.

This book will appeal to historians, but also to the curious and inquisitive minds. Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial is an important book that teaches us about our past and about our violent history.

This exhibition catalogue is a must have item for anyone who has a serious interest in China's rich textual tradition. I have already put Visible Traces on my Christmas wish list in hopes that my relatives, who have no idea why I have been studying Chinese literature and history all these years, will break down and give me something related to my life's work. And I haven't written a wish list in ages, that's how much I want a copy of this on my bookshelf. And if they don't give me a copy, I'll give one to myself as a gift once I finish my PhD.

If you didn't have an opportunity to see these rare books, maps and artefacts when they were on display in New York or Los Angeles, or if you don't feel like buying a plane ticket to visit the National Library of China in Beijing, this catalogue is an economical way to savor what you missed. The editorial review does a wonderful job of summarizing the contents, so I won't repeat that. The color photography certainly does justice to the original works. I enjoyed seeing the photographs of a 1621 manuscript on Tang poetry because it's connected to my own research, but there is something in this volume for anyone who loves Chinese culture. The reader will find scrolls of Buddhist sutras, delicate drawings of gentlemen playing the game of go, specialist monographs on the varieties of crysanthemums, illustrated manuals on goldfish, albums of Beijing opera characters, oracle bones, pictorial rubbings and multi-color maps of the Chinese empire, and more.

For the specialist the bibliography is detailed enough to start tracking down other extant copies of the items in the exhibition as well as general information to be found in secondary sources.

That said, why didn't I rate this book a 5? Only a couple reasons. Some sections of maps and charts have been magnified, and are less distinct than their smaller scale originals, which some readers will find frustrating. Every reader will have a different reason why they love this book. I wanted to be able to see the whole 1621 poetry collection. A crysanthemum connoisseur will want to see every flower illustration. Map lovers will wish that all the maps had been printed. In other words, every one will wish the book were bigger and that it covered his or her interest in more detail (even at the expense of someone else's). At 337 pages, however, it's already a large volume. After savoring each page, you may find yourself falling for some new aspect of Chinese culture and you'll realize you may have to buy that plane ticket to China after all. Visible Traces will whet your appetite, but it won't quench your thirst, which is fine because no one volume could ever contain all the glories of China's print culture. DO NOT show this catalogue to your kids, unless you are happy for them to fall in love with Chinese history and art and study for PhDs instead of becoming a lawyer or getting an MBA.

One day in Teletubbyland, something appeared...

As Po visits the other teletubbies, each of their favorite things becomes enormous when the water from the magic watering can is sprinkled on it. The enormous objects are behind the flaps, helping to build some "suspense" for the young ones. The plot is harmless and light enough that a toddler can follow it.

The book, and the flaps, are reasonably sturdy. Unless your child marinates the pages, it should provide her with a few months' enjoyment.

I rank this in the middle as far as the Tubby books goes. We've gotten more fun out of "magic flag," because it provides something the child can actually *do*.

This book is about 8 pages long. The pictures are stills from the television show. In this volume, Po has a watering can which he sprinkles on items (ball, hat, bag) to make them "enormous." The flaps are large enough for little hands and sturdy. The story is: Po makes the items enormous and the teletubbies love their enormous items and each other, the end. Very small kids seem to like repetitous books, and this one isn't too expensive and at least the flaps will last. While the educational content of this whole series is questionable, children really seem to love these characters.

This book is sturdy like the other board books and big enough to see the pictures really well. The flaps get worn out though, like any flap book. My son loves to see the watering can make the Teletubbies favorite things become "enormous"! The book provides patterns which are great for young children but also introduces "higher level" words such as enormous, lovely, and disappear.

Sid Geeder is a "bombardier", an investment banker who spends every waking moment working for the Atlantic Pacific Corporation. When he's not working, he's thinking about work. Stressed beyond his limits, the only thing that keeps him going is knowing that he only has nine months before he can cash in his stock options, and retire at the age of thirty-four.

But Sid isn't the only trader with problems. Eggs Igino is the newcomer to the team, and he worships Sid as a mentor. As he tries to get the hang of life on the trading floor, Eggs finds he may be in over his head. Gorgeous Lisa Lisa may be a good trader in her own right, but she constantly encounters difficulties as she tries to make it in a man's world while hoping to find true love. And when Coyote Jack suddenly becomes unable to pronounce a single number without stuttering, he finds himself managing this team of money-hungry, dysfunctional employees.

BOMBARDIERS moves at lightning speed, but despite the fast pace of the novel, the story falls flat. Perhaps it's because the characters don't seem real enough. They don't evolve, change, or grow over the course of the novel. Or perhaps the fault lies in the overuse of investment jargon and the utter focus on the life of a day-trader, all of which loses steam after the first hundred pages.

Po Bronson drew on his own experience as a day trader to write this book, and it shows. His knowledge of the business is unquestionable, but BOMBARDIERS would have been a much more engaging book had he limited the number of essays on bond sales, and focused more on plot and characterization. Sudden and frequent point of view changes also left me dazed, and I often had to backtrack and re-read entire paragraphs to figure out what was happening.

A fragmented, uneven look at the world of investment banking, BOMBARDIERS falls short of an intriguing read.

I read this author's second book The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest first. I really enjoyed that novel as it involves characters I can relate to in an industry I'm in (high tech start-ups). Naturally, I was a little apprehensive about reading this novel as it centers on Wall Street and bond trading. I'm not a business person, but this is my reaction after reading the book:

A lot of the banking concepts such as bonds, savings and loans, securities I didn't fully understand. But kudos to the author for structuring his prose in such a way that the specifics of bond trading is not important in moving the plot forward. It's the characters and their personal ideosyncracies and relationships with one another that grip the reader. The pace of the novel can only be described as frenetic, like a movie that incessantly cuts away to scene after scene every couple of minutes. To have an author that is able to provide the reader with a 360-degree panoramic view into the heart and life of an industry while at the same time satirizing it is pure genius.

As a quick summary of the story: Sidney Geeder is the king of mortgages. He's the best bond salesman Atlantic Pacific (AP) has. He's also a couple of months away from retiring rich with stock options. Sid's hatred for the bonds he sells is what drives him to be the best. At the same time a new kid named Mark Igino (aka Eggs Igino) joins the company. Egg's is a natural salesman and also somewhat of a renegade for not having been exposed to the house rules of AP. As expected, Eggs turns the place upside down. Sid and Eggs quickly form a friendship (more like an alliance). Naturally, AP wants to control its employees, and how it does it is the focus of this story along with a supporting cast that'll keep you grinning till the end. Truly engaging!

The author has an uncanny talent for humor in the subtleties of each character. A statement as absurd as "he lost his job because of his need to floss" generates complete empathy on the part of the reader after reading through this novel. I would recommend this book to any person with any background.

LEAP rating (each out of 5):
============================
L (Language) - 4 (well-crafted dialogue keeps your mind off the technicalities of bond trading)
E (Erotica) - 1 (let's just say, bond salesman have fun too)
A (Action) - 0 (n/a)
P (Plot) - 3 (fairly predictable ending, it's the characters that are important)

Po Bronson is one of the best contemporary writers in America today. In all of his fiction he attempts to blend topical commentary with humor wrapped in a strong narative. In my opinion, with Bombardiers he was most successful. Although he is more known for his books on Silicon Valley culture, don't overlook this one! Bombardiers is an extremely funny, easy read with fun characters and an engaging plot. I actually read Catch-22 after this book and knowing it was an homage made me enjoy Catch all the more!

The side-plot of creating a trading market around breakfast was not only hilarious, but also brilliantly clever. If you enjoy reading about the creativity, anxiety, and outright insanity born out of extremely high pressure environments (like WWII pilots, or Wall St. Trading...)you'll love Bombadiers.

I find My Antonia as a very boring, long book. The thing I enjoyed most about the book, not to mention the only thing, was how the characters were very in touch with their surroundings and nature. Little things in the land brought so much emotion and attitude to the characters. Besides this good characteristic everything else was very boring and told the childhood and early life of two average people. I do not recommend this book to anyone except for the extremely bored naturistic person out there.

i had used this book for a survey history course on architecture. since we only learn about european architecture at nyit, i didnt get to use the book much, almost a waste a money, but the pictures we seen in class were taken from the book were great.

I used this book for an arch. history class I took. The text is useful and the pictures are beautiful.

I purchased this Culture Shock book when I moved to China for a year to teach English. It was my first exposure to the Culture Shock series. I found this book to have a very discouraging view of China and the book gave me all sorts of false impressions of what to expect. Granted, I found the book was geared more towards the business traveler than others, but I found most of the advice to be useless or out of date. In fact, I found most of the impressions which the book created to be false after only a short time in China. If you are planning on going to China, I would recommend that you purchase a book such as the Lonely Planet or Rough Guide series instead. These books give a better feel for the history and culture than the Culture Shock book.

This guide offers useful tips on how western business people and visitors should behave around Chinese clients/hosts, but irritatingly leaves out any and all difficult information about Chinese habits and customs that the average vistor (including business people) may be bewildered by, due to their strangeness or initial unpleasantness, but which to know about will help them both cope with and understand China better (and ultimately, appreciate it more positively). When I lived in Hong Kong and was visiting China frequently (1990's), I (like other expats) supplemented books like Culture Shock China with Taiwanese writer Bo Yang's "The Ugly Chinaman and the Crisis in Chinese Culture." This book helped me to understand the underbelly of Chinese society that I was constantly running into (rude public actions and behaviour, personal habits I did not understand), aspects of China any westerner is bound to run into but which Kevin Sinclair shies away from dealing with.

I also agree with the other reviewers who wish Sinclair would stop going about how long he has lived in Hong Kong propping up the bar at the Better 'Ole or Foreign Correspondent's Club - being a long-term western resident in my day was a fact more to hide than to to shout about, and perhaps the author will, in future editions, use the valuable space lost to address the side of things westerners will be unprepared for with his book.

In addition to Bo Yang's useful book, I recommend a couple of others. Timothy Mo's The Monkey King, though a novel, gave insight into Chinese attitudes and actions that I found extremely helpful and accurate - I felt I met the characters in Mo's book repeatedly during my time in China. Another novel, Paul Theroux's Kowloon Tong, gives valuable insight into the mentality of long-term western residents of China/Hong Kong - like that of the author of this book, Culture Shock China.

I like the Culture Shock Series. They give me the information I most want when I am going to visit a culture that is substantially different than my own. I think the Culture Shock editors need to find a new writer for their China book-or at least a new edition should be released with a better editing job. The author repeats himself over and over--which is annoying to say the least. But, more than that there is an arrogance in the presentation that is really grating. Nobody can really understand China like him and his buddies -- we are made to endure descriptions of them at bars together drinking and talking about the old days...who care?? He is so, so in-the-know that he gets to be hard to take. I guess if I were a businessperson going to China I might have found this book a little more useful. The author aims his discussions at business practices and attitudes toward trade. But he doesn't seem to understand that travelers might want a more full picture of the people and their culture-not just how to make a deal with the folks. I was really disappointed by things like in a chapter called "Tips for Survival" the author spends pages talking about how lonely the (sic) "wives" of all the western business people can get. And as a strategy he says these lonely women ought to go to a tourist hotel and use the gym there to find someone to talk to. Now that doesn't tell me much about the Chinese. Which is what I am looking for in the book. And, he says over and over that the Chinese are super friendly, etc. SO if they are friendly why not tell the lonely "wives" pointers on how to meet some of the locals to end their loneliness with some Chinese friends. That is just one example of a number of rather strange things in the book. There are plenty more. I gave it 2 stars instead of one because, if you were going to China to do business you might find it useful. I am going there on vacation and I didn't find what I was looking for.

Questioning his own life, author Po Bronson set out to learn how others made tough career decisions -- and lived with them.
He says he talked to nine hundred people, seventy or so in detail, and he includes the stories of fifty or so career-changers in his book.

Bronson does not offer a systematic study or a self-help book. That's important to get out of the way. As other reviewers have observed, you won't find plans or guidance for your own career move.

Instead, Bronson offers a jumble of anecdotes, unsystematic and uneven -- just the sort of stories I hear every day as a career coach. People seek new adventures. They weigh the cost (and there always is a cost). Sometimes they decide the cost is too high and they back down. Sometimes they leap and experience disappointment. And sometimes they leap and find themselves soaring.

Career-changers are hungry for guidance. Bronson's interviewees often sought his approval -- and his advice. He insists that he's not a career counselor but they asked anyway. This quest for help is typical during any life transition and underscores the need to be cautious about seeking help from whoever happens to show up.

And of course this overlap of roles can be viewed as a flaw in the book. Bronson admits lapsing from the journalist role. He gets so involved with his interviewees that the story becomes a quest, a journey-across-the-country story rather than an analysis of career choices. Bronson includes his own story, told in pieces throughout the book. This feature seemed to interrupt the flow: if the author tells his own story, we should be led to anticipate autobiography.

Despite these flaws, Bronson comes up with some sound insights into career change. He observes that people avoid change because of the accompanying loss of identity. They hang back "because they don't want to be the kind of person who abandons friends and takes up with a new crowd," precisely what you have to do following a life transition.

And he follows up with a warning of solitude that also accompanies any life change. "Get used to being alone," he advises, yet many people fear being alone more than they fear being stuck in a job they hate.

WHAT SHOULD I DO WITH MY LIFE offers questions, not answers. It's like attending a giant networking event. You have to sort through the stories on your own.

Despite these flaws, I will recommend this book to my clients and to other career coaches. Career change, like any change, is messy. You rarely get to move in a straight line and you always experience pain and loss. And every move is a roll of the dice: a coach can help, but there are no guarantees.

Each story in this book is unique and your own will be too. You, the career changer, must put together your own mosaic and find pattern and meaning on your own.

A ton has been written and spoken about this book. But some things can be honestly said:
1)It focuses on people who try to answer the question What Should I Do With My Life. A great "high-concept" title for a book.
2)It is no way, by no stretch of the imagination, a self-help book that's going to help you ponder this question, take a survey and reach a conclusion. It's highly stylized in its writing and organization.
3)The book is as much about the author -- injected in the book throughout, as a character -- writing the book and meeting the people he interviews as much as the subject and the people he interviews.
4)It's very much a first person narrative book. Some chapters leave you unsatisfied. Some leave you satisfied. Some chapters seem like expanded diary entries.
Bottom line: Don't buy this expecting this is going to greatly help you arrive at the answer to this question, or read comprehensive pieces about people who struggled with this question and arrived at the answer (which would help you arrive at the answer).
Buy it if you want to read about some people who have dealt with this issue and about an author who writes about his writing project writing about people who struggle with this answer.
It has the title of a typical self-help book...but it isn't. Which will be welcome news to some readers and a big letdown to others. Dale Carnigie, it ain't...

I was very surprised to see some of the poor reviews given to this book. Up to this point, I was neither familiar with the author nor have read a summary article in Fast Company. I enjoyed the book not for its writing style but rather, for the lessons it attemps to present.

This isn't a book about answers - that was stated early on. Nor are the people profiled bred of stinkin'-rich parents. I'm certainly not one of those, though I am a Gen-X'er. I came nowhere close to any dotcom victories/traumas. Yet I still see glimpses of my demons and desires in the stories of others.

There are people who invested a lot of time and effort into becoming what they thought they're meant to become, and only when they actually become it do they realize it was not what they truly wanted. Nothing brings you down to the real world like living up to what you've signed up for.

I also identified with the story of the young Asian man who went to an Ivy League school (yes, his parents paid for it, but they earned the money through hard labor) and ended up as a teacher working for minimum wage. This case spoke to the stereotype of Asian parents, who respect education for the opportunities it provides but would have a fit should their children become educators (even worse, high school teachers).

So, please don't buy the book in hope for excellent writing styles, or for collectives of people who will not elicit your envious eye (you will read about twenty-somethings who pulled off millions from the dotcom fervor - and even then - they're STILL looking for purpose and meaning). This book isn't meant to make you feel like the magic formula is coming around the next chapter. People go from rags-to-riches and back to rags.

It's personal sacrifice, confusion, and perpetual struggle against what tempts you (title, money, sense of security) versus what may fulfill you - when you may not even know what that fulfillment may look like if it came and slapped you on the face.

This book shows its age...just like the Big Block Chevy itself! It is a collection of articles reprinted from various Hot Rod magazine titles by recognized authors of the 60s, 70s and 80s. Generally, I'd recommend this book for everyone with a 396 or 427 since it has a lot of nostalgic value but also because it has a lot of hard-to-find detail not often found in other publications. My favorite section was the "Proven Performance" article where CJ Baker details how to build a reliable 650HP 427. The parts shopping list is a bit antiquated and most of the brand names shown won't easily be found on a web page so you can order up the parts. I like the book because it is clearly focused on these two engines and it presents what you should already know...a Big Block Chevy with a little work will make a ton of power rather inexpensively.