Customer Reviews (1)

Mayflower Descendants
This is an excellent genealogy book on the family of Mayflower passenger, Peter Brown.Excellent resource! ... Read more

Product Description
The philosophers of Late Antiquity have sometimes appeared to be estranged from society. We must flee everything physical is one of the most prominent ideas taken by Augustine from Platonic literature.

This collection of new studies by leading writers on Late Antiquity treats both the principles of metaphysics and the practical engagement of philosophers. It points to a more substantive and complex involvement in worldly affairs than conventional handbooks admit. ... Read more

Product Description
The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Fiction / Fairy Tales, Folklore ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is a history of the people, struggles, defeats and victories, ideas and actions that together comprise the history of the first one thousand years of Christianity. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

A great history!
Peter Brown is an excellent historian of early European and early Christian history.In addition to this book, he is author of one of the foremost biographical texts on Augustine, the major Western Christian figure of the first 1000 years after the Apostolic Age, as well as another historical reference book I use frequently, 'The World of Late Antiquity'.Brown is an excellent writer, clear and engaging, drawing the narrative to life for the reader.

One of the best features of this book, even though the title specifically speaks to the rise of Western Christianity, is that it does not treat Eastern Christianity as an afterthought or mere appendage onto the 'more important' Western history.While this book covers the period of time of the 'undivided' church (the years 200 - 1000 C.E.), in fact, as Brown demonstrates, the church was anything but uniform across the various political units and culturally diverse regions.

In Brown's narrative, there are two primary Empires of concern, and not the traditional Western and Eastern Roman Empires, but rather the Roman Empire (as a whole), and the Persian Empire.Christianity flourished in Egypt, throughout the region of the Fertile Crescent, in Asia minor, and along the trade routes into the Far East and the Indian subcontinent.Because these strands of Christianity did not lead to the Western Catholic and Protestant church, they tend to be overlooked by Western historians and students.However, they formed the basis of the greater Eastern Orthodox church, which spread Christianity through Eastern Europe and Russia, a force that may begin to grow again on the world stage of Christianity.

Brown also traces the rise of Western Christianity, not in lock-step manner as focussed upon an all-powerful Rome, but rather as a continuing process of give and take between various powerful centres of political and intellectual life, which include the Celtic influence in church survival, the 'frontier' churches in Britain, Germany, and the Carolingian consolidation.The rise of the church in former imperial lands was more assured, but the frontiers lands still had powerful systems of legend and mythology -- the Britons had monsters like Grendel (of Beowulf), the Germans and Scandanavians sharing such and similar stories.The amalgamation of popular culture (priests would 'cast spells' and perform old fertility rites, using updated Christo-centric wording) into the church's missionary framework set the stage for later diversities to re-emerge.

Brown's text shows how different the Western Church is from the Eastern Church (for which it is important to develop an idea of the Eastern Church), both in development and in outlook.This is a broad survey -- within any text that covers a thousand-year time span, the author must be selective in choosing relevant events and personalities.Brown does a good job at tracing the primary history with enough detail to keep it lively.Brown concludes with select bibliographies divided by chapter topic, various chronologies of key groups, and a good index.

Remarkably readable!
This book is one of those extremely rare achievements - a work of broad and learned scholarship which is easy to read. In fact it is more than easy, it is so fascinating and so perfectly written that I could hardly force myself to stop when I had to. It is a work of secular and religious history, of course, but it gave me in addition a sense of how people actually lived in the ancient world, an experience that only a truly great scholar could give. I recommend this book to anyone who has the faintest interest in what happenmed in the early centuries of the Christian Era, religious or otherwise.

"An interesting Perspective"
From Brown's perspective the Christianization and formation of Europe is the result of a process in which a deeply rooted Christian politic, looking outward from its mediterranean seat, gradually dispersed and emerged from within the tiny Roman sub-cultures, embedded throughout the northwestern frontiers, to establish micro-Christendoms that sucessively meshed together under aristocratic influence, martial conquest, sojourning holy men and missionaries, and the organization and education of the clergy.Brown also looks to the "East Roman Empire" where a more harmonized Christianity boldly sustained the invasions and dominion of the Muslims, and triumphantly struggled for orthodoxy under the Iconoclasts, Nestorians, and Monophysites to eventually convert the Russians, Bulgars, and Slavs.This work is definately a one of a kind, and an interesting and contributing effort to explain the rise of Christendom.

Prof. Brown writes like an angel
It is always a pleasure to read Prof. Brown's writing, prose so gracious that the author's remarkable erudition fades effortlessly into the background.What makes reading The Rise of Western Christendom particularly enjoyable (and educational) is the vast expanse of its theme.In about 350 pages, Brown guides the reader across a spectacular terrain through eight momentous centuries of transformation.With the easy touch of a consummate storyteller, Brown brings to life a cast of characters as remarkable as any novel while tracing the developments of the first millenium in Europe, the Near East, and even the Far East. The scope of the book gives Brown the opportunity to integrate themes that he has explored elsewhere into a composite survey of this age.It is a remarkable accomplishment. ... Read more

Product Description

How do new diseases become part of the public health agenda? Emerging Illnesses and Society brings together historians, sociologists, epidemiologists, public health experts, and others to explore this vital issue. Contributors describe the processes by which patients' groups interact with medical researchers, public health institutions, and the media to identify and address previously unknown illnesses, including multiple sclerosis, Tourette syndrome, AIDS, lead poisoning, Lyme disease, and hepatitis C. The introductory chapter develops a general theoretical model of the social process of "emerging"illness, identifying critical epidemiologic, social and political factors that shape different trajectories toward the construction of public health priorities. Through case studies of individual diseases and analyses of public awareness campaigns and institutional responses, this timely volume provides important insights into the medical, social, and economic factors that determine why some illnesses receive more attention and funding than others.

Contributors: Deborah Barrett, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Steven Epstein, University of California, San Diego; Phyllis Freeman, University of Massachusetts, Boston; Diane E. Goldstein, Memorial University of Newfoundland; Peter J. Krause, University of Connecticut School of Medicine; Howard I. Kushner, Emory University; Lawrence D. Mass, Beth Israel Medical Center, New York; Michelle Murphy, University of Toronto; Lydia Ogden, Global AIDS Program, CDCR; Sandy Smith-Nonini, Elon University; Ellen Griffith Spears, Southern Regional Council; Andrew Spielman, Harvard School of Public Health; Colin Talley, University of California San Francisco; Sam R. Telford III, Harvard School of Public Health; Christian Warren, New York Academy of Medicine.

Product Description
Never HIGHLIGHT a Book Again!Virtually all testable terms, concepts, persons, places, and events are included. Cram101 Textbook Outlines gives all of the outlines, highlights, notes for your textbook with optional online practice tests. Only Cram101 Out ... Read more

Product Description
A collection of deep-sky charts, star maps and location charts for the novice and veteran stargazer, providing hints on how to make the most of the telescope or how to use the stars as a calendar and a watch. This is an expanded and revised edition. ... Read more

Product Description
XML has been introduced into many enterprises by stealth, through the IT back door and with little management overview or buy-in.  This book proposes an alternative: a management-driven strategy.  Its emphasis is on the ends (information management) rather than means (technology).  It focuses on the need for high-level co-operation between all business units and services within an organisation and shows how XML can be both a technology and business integrator.  The benefits it can bring are high levels of interoperability, not only between data and text but also between application processes, business logic and entire information systems.

The books looks at:

• why information management is important
• what XML has to offer the business manager
• how to build an XML Framework
• specific areas where intelligent use of XML will pay dividends

  ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

try first implementing consistent metadata
This book offers a company a way to recast and re-implement a lot of its data handling. Surely an ambitious goal, and one that many might be reluctant to undertake. But the book strives to explain how a proper management level understanding of XML can enable these changes. It is not a book about the detailed syntax of XML and its associated standards. That is properly the remit of the programmers themselves, to understand and apply.

Rather, the book aims at a higher level. Even if your current digital data takes on many disparate formats, you can use XML to implement a consistent metadata view. This is stored in XML and at the very least, lets you do rich searching through corporate data. Without necessarily changing any of the latter.

The book discusses far more. But the above can be a conservative approach that lets you gather easy benefits from just a partial XML deployment. Just getting used to thinking about metadata can benefit you as amanager, by exposing new ways of thinking about your company's assets. ... Read more

Product Description
The fifth novel featuring Peter Diamond, dinosaur of the Bath CID. Frustrated by the low murder rate in the city, he is glad to have a case to get his teeth into when the body of woman is found in the garden of flat after a party. It is unclear if she slipped, jumped or was pushed. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

Have enjoyed the entire series!
I came upon Lovesey quite by accident & have been pleasantly surprised & entertained. I have now read all 8 of the series featuring the curmudgeonly Inspector Peter Diamond & they make for a quick, enjoyable romp. These are not taunt thrillers but tongue-in-cheek good old fashioned murder mysteries, set in Bath, England.Diamond & his team solve their puzzles one piece at a time in the way good Policemen do.I heartily recommend these engaging stories.

Fun Read--4+ stars
This is my favorite Lovesey of the 4 I've read so far.They are all pretty easy to take--some action but mostly puzzlers with a police procedural flavor.The protagonist tends to pull apparently separate mysteries together in solving them.I think whether one likes the Detective Superintendent (DS) Diamond books depends a lot on the characters.Diamond himself is self-centered and sometimes nasty but once in a while can be quite sympathetic.In this particular book there is a dramatic change in personnel (not a big surprise, I think), but the "guest" characters were more interesting IMHO.The perpetrator is difficult to envision as real though it does make for a surprise ending--I find it hard to see how any reader could have figured out the mystery--not a fair "Agatha" type book.However, the book is quite enjoyable--I esp. liked the character Ada who was a riot!The ending gets rather exciting--trite perhaps--but exciting nonetheless.I enjoyed the book quite a bit.

Cleanly written police procedural.
This was my first Peter Diamond novel, and I immediately liked the character. Despite a surfeit of gruff and unlikeable middle aged English detectives, Diamond still stands out as well-drawn and interesting.

At the beginning of the book, the only threat facing Diamond is that he might die of boredom. He starts investigating apparent suicides in Bath out of a lack of more obvious murders to pursue. When his investigation ties in with the mysterious case of the amnesiac found wandering the roads of Bath, his life gets rather more exciting than he might have wanted.

I had some issues with the way that the two major threads of the story were knitted together. I felt as though this affected the pacing-- particularly in the second half of the novel. Still, I liked both threads and the book kept me reading.

Recommended for fans of British police procedurals. I will be picking up another in the series when I get the chance.

One of my favorites
UPON A DARK NIGHT is one of my favorites in the Peter Diamond series.In spite of his gruff, rather unloveable personality, Peter Diamond has an amazing ability to tease out the link between two apparently unrelated deaths, a farmer, who apparently killed himself with a shotgun and a woman, who jumped/fell off of the roof of a building. While everyone else in the department figures, including his rival, John Wigfall, concludes each died by suicide, Diamond comes to believe that the cause of death is not so obvious.Complicating the cases is a missing person named Rose, reported by a notorious shoplifter named Ada, who has not exactly endeared herself to the Old Bill.Soon, Peter connects all three cases with an unlikely suspect and he races against time to prevent another murder disguised as suicide.

Peter Lovesey is one of the best crime fiction writers today.This is not an English cozy, but an extremely well-written police procedural mystery, well-paced with an intricately woven plot.I would highly recommend both the series and this book.

fantastic Diamond police procedural
Things have been so quiet lately; Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond suffers from hypertension caused by ennui as he has not had a homicide to keep his blood pressure level.Normally Diamond would ignore an apparent suicide by a farmer, but with nothing else to occupy his time, he decides to take a quick look.First thing he realizes that the farmer's arms were too small to pull the trigger of a shotgun placed under his chin

Peter simultaneously investigates what he believes is a homicide while trying to persuade his superior that someone killed the farmer.At about the same time, a girl falls off a rooftop during a party.Initial reaction was it was a tragic accident, but Diamond sees incongruities with that explanation.He investigates both deaths while an amnesiac is found in a hospital parking lot by a shoplifter Ada who reluctantly releases the woman to someone claiming to be a sister.Ada talks with Diamond, who reluctantly follows up her comments and links the two deaths and the abduction with a fourth party as he begins to find the buried connection.

UPON A DARK NIGHT is a fantastic Diamond police procedural as the cop is at his curmudgeon worst due to absolute boredom from no cases; only someone like Diamond could bemoan a major drop in the murder rate.Thus two homicides would have probably remained under the radar screen with the killer free except that Diamond basically had nothing interesting to do.The mystery is brilliantly established so the audience like Diamond's boss sees no foul play until Diamond's inquiries begin to cleverly prove otherwise.Peter Lovesey is at his best with this awesome who-done-it.

Harriet Klausner
... Read more

Product Description
The World Café is a flexible, easy-to-use process for fostering collaborative dialogue, sharing collective knowledge, and discovering new opportunities for action. World Café originators Juanita Brown and David Isaacs outline seven core design principles and provide practical tips and tools for convening and hosting "conversations that matter," even with very large groups. Each chapter features actual stories of Café dialogues from business, education, government, and community organizations across the globe, demonstrating how the World Café approach can be adapted to many different settings and cultures.Based on living systems thinking, this is a proven approach for fostering authentic dialogue and creating dynamic networks of conversation around your organization or community’s real work and critical questions––improving both personal relationships and people’s capacity to shape the future together. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (33)

World Cafe
If you are serious about hosting a cafe, this is essential reading especially for the variety of applications and the boost in confidence one gets with a fuzzy or "touchy feely" process.

Dialogue Made Practical--Conversations that Matter!
I have been a student of "dialogue" for at least 15 years. I was first introduced to the concept through the work of Chris Argyris on "inquiry and advocacy." And I even took a course in "The Path of Dialogue" some years ago. Very interesting concept.

"The World Cafe" by Brown & Isaacs is a practical approach to introduce and use the dialogue concepts in business settings to deal with real issues that keep recurring and for which there doesn't seem to be obvious solutions. Cross-pollination of ideas through the "cafe process" builds on small ideas, links them, uncovers affinities and connections, and creates more possibilities to explore and address.

It would be nice to get legislators to use such a process to address the significant issues we face (health care reform, tort reform, etc.) rather than the antiquated win-lose strategies they now employ. Einstein wrote, "The significant problems we face cannot be resolved at the same level of thinking that created them." It's time to employ a more enlighted approach.

The World Cafe approach is a LEAP in that direction!

World Cafe
I am enjoying this book. It is most informative. I love the illustrations. They really capture the heart of wht they're writing about. And am IN a cafe conversation process with my organization so it's very timely!

A Great Idea that Needs a Better Book
This is an incredibly hard book for me to review.As with some other business books I've read in the past, I think the ideas are good and useful.On the other hand, despite its deceptively friendly appearance, I find this an incredibly difficult book to read.

My main complaint is simple and, again, commonplace among books of this type: it is entirely too long for what it is trying to achieve.This is a two hundred-plus page book that could have easily accomplished its purpose in thirty pages.It is bulked up by vagueness, repetitiveness and numerous personal anecdotes that are only occasionally useful.With much more direct and succinct writing, the authors could have given us a clearer picture of how to make the world cafe process unfold.

Still, it needs be said that the world cafe idea is a good one.I've used it a few times in meetings and it has always been successful.If you're looking for what the world cafe is about, this is the place.

The Wisdom of The Team
As CEO Coach, Poet and author of a leadship book that helps leaders unleash the genius of themselves, their teams and their businesses, I recomend this book. I have been through the process described in this book and find it an excellent way to discover the wisdom of a team or a company. Paul David Walker Unleashing Genius: Leading Yourself, Teams and Corporations ... Read more