Westerns Books

Dr. Chance did a excellent job in carefully introducing the concept and outline of derivatives markets to students with basic business school training. I used the 4th edition in my undergraduate course couple years ago, and built up a solid conceptual understanding in this field. The newest version still keep its pleasant style and contain some thing more about risk management.
This book offers the best introduction to undergraduate business school students or MBA student who need not to work with financial derivatives much.
But for those non-business students wants get into mathematical finance industry, to buy a book only for concept intro may not a economy choice. Refer this book if you find the first half in Hull's "Option, futures and other derivatives" not clear enough.

I dislike Don Chance both as a person and as a writer. I find him arrogant and intolerable and that bleeds through into his writing. So, yes, I am biased.
I highly recommend instead that you seek out John Hull, a much better author, he has two books; one for undergrad and another for grad (which is the 'bible' on this subject).

This is an excellent book for non finance majors who would like to grasp the physical concepts behind different derivatives products traded in the OTC markets. The book is ideal for a preperation read for all aspiring to take Financial Engineering / Derivatives as majors in graduate programs.

If you are interested in the basic concepts governing derivatives without getting into the mathematics of it then this is the ideal book. I recommend this book for any one who is contemplating taking Derivatives as an advanced level course. The book would give a solid foundation to the concepts of risk management.

If you are a student just taken up a course in derivatives or risk management you should have this book. if you find john hull more technical, you have Don Chance who covers options and other derivatives in a greater detail and in more words. everything you want to know about how banks etc have risk mangaement systems in place and market risk instruments is here.

in case you want a greater coverage of options and pricing options, you should definatly take a look at Black Scholes and Beyond by Neil Chriss, a work of art.

Very easy explanation in book.........dont try to read whole book otherwise you will get sleep

Got this book as well as Volume I and used them as my resources for taking the Western Civ I and II CLEPS. Perfect for the job, and helped me get a very good grade, highly recommend for anyone looking to use for that purpose.

This book was horrible for AP Euro, it was not in chronological order and often confused our class. Also, he skipped over some events that were important to know for the AP exam.

Jackson J. Spielvogel has no sense of organization whatsoever. And as for those people who read this book for fun, SERIOUSLY need a life. I, however, am using this book as a text book for AP Euro and think it is absolutely ludicrous that we have to use it. It's confusing and needs to be written better. A LOT better. This book should get -1000000 stars.

After being required to read this text for a class, I bought two other history books to which I could compare this one. I thought that Spielvogel was leaving out chunks of history, and revising the ones that he included, and I wanted to double check my facts before making any accusations. Well, boy was I right. This book makes the Publisher's tag line, "Changing the Way the World Learns" seem a little too true..

If you DO get this book, here are some things to look out for:

1. He is wrong on just about everything that has to do with art or music. He cites obscure artists and names them as the most popular, most of them had Christian themed work.

2. He glorifies Hitler and the Nazis and makes the Holocaust seem like nothing but a minor glitch in history.

3. The author has a degree in Reformation History and seems to be unable to help himself from relating every single event in history to religion. So keep in mind that Voltaire had more to offer history than an anti-Christian revisionist account of the fall of the Roman Empire, as Spielvogel states.

If I were you, I'd buy a different history book to read as well as this one, if this is required for a course. Preferably one that was published for the first time in the thirties or forties and has been updated since, so that its more clear it isn't revionist history. This one was first published in 2003.

Honestly, if I could give this book less than one star I would, but there's no such option on amazon.com...

Dr. Dielman was a professor of mine. The book is well organized and useful for all people on all levels.

excellent book: This is a successful attempt to make the complicated statistics much easier to grasp and use. includes output from various softwares like MINITAB, EXCEL, SAS...

only cautions are:
1. Doesn't go into Mathematically details involved.
2. One should consider that the title reads "a second course...".

For my class, the professor assigned Kleinbaum et al's textbook rather than this one. As I mentioned in my review for that book, it was so confusing and poorly organized. Luckily, I found this book in the library and used it instead and ended up a lot less confused in class than my classmates who were trying to understand the Kleinbaum book. Dielman's book is very well organized and laid out. It doesn't have colorful bells and whistles since it's a fairly upper level book, but it does have a very user-friendly layout. Furthermore, the formulas are never presented without an accompanying explanation in plain English and examples of how and when to use them. Another thing I really like about this book is that it gives thorough directions on how to do a lot of the analyses on some common statistical packages. Many of the instructions are accompanied by screenshots. They're at the end of each chapter rather than interspersed in the text, which makes them easy to find. This is actually becoming a great SAS manual for me.

For anyone struggling with the Kleinbaum book, or for any instructor considering using the Kleinbaum book, I would highly recommend this one instead.

I have bought Dr. Dielman's Applied Regression 4e textbook in Taiwan) for preparing my MBA thesis regarding the interaction effects. Given the widespread use of commercially available packages, this book provided considerately coverage on ALL computer packages about the field of regression work.

If you want to read a book of significance, look no further. While it may be a difficult read it is one of the most influential and important books ever written.

There were only 9 reviews on this book . . . what can one say. . . either something brings you to this book or it does not. . . if you are reading these reviews, then buy it.

This book is one of the most important and influential works on ethics. It is dense, not an easy read, the structure is loose and troublesome at times, but it is groundbreaking and brilliant.

There are many internet resources to guide you along the reading,. so do not be intimidated. Much of future work will rest on the contributions by Kant.

This version of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals provides a clear and concise introduction. You will find it useful to understand how Kant's moral philosophy fits within his general philosophy and to get acquainted with some of the debates around his work. Although this book is rather expensive for what it is, it is useful and worth buying if you are really interested in this topic.

As translator H.J. Paton states in his introduction, 'Kant's "Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals" is one of the small books which are truly great' despite the unapproachability of the title. Many rank this book alongside Aristotle's 'Ethics' and Plato's 'Republic'. Its main topic is the supremacy of morals and moral action, and Paton gives a section by section analysis of Kant's book. The purpose of this work is not to work out all of the implications and difficulties with the a priori part of ethics, but rather to set a foundation of the supreme principle of morality.

The centerpiece of the Groundwork is Kant's most famous proposition, the Categorical Imperative. While this is often equated with the Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you), the Categorical Imperative argues for a more universal set of moral action - for example, if one does not mind being lied to, then lying does not become a problem, according to the Golden Rule, but for Kant, this would be unacceptable as it is a violation of the rational principles of what morals are.

Kant proceeds to look at issues of law, duty, free will and the good will, and autonomy of action. Kant argues strongly for the need for philosophy to guard against whim, taste and personal desire from becoming normative agents in the way we construct the moral universe. He argue for objective principles to govern the will, and categorises these as either hypothetical or categorical. 'All imperatives command either hypothetically or categorically. Hypothetical imperatives declare a possible action to be practically necessary as a means to the attainment of something else that one wills (or that one may will). A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself apart from its relation to a further end.'

Kant goes from this discussion to the formulation of universal law and the way in which rational agents should formulate and view this kind of law. The final section of this work introduces ideas that will be more fully developed in Kant's 'Critique of Practical Reason', the second of his three-volume Critiques. He also covers some of the arguments from 'Critique of Pure Reason', but not very fully; as Paton states in his analysis, 'Kant cannot assume the elaborate arguments of the "Critique of Pure Reason" to be familiar to his readers nor can he attempt to repeat these elaborate arguments in a short treatise on ethics.' The finite, rational person must regard himself or herself both as a member of the world of experience/perception and also as a member of the world of ideas/rationality. This is the essence of the Empiricist/Rationalist split that Kant synthesises together in the first Critique.

This is not easy going - the original 'Groundwork' had 128 pages, contained here in less than 100 (allowing for type-face differences as well as translation). Paton's version has 40 pages of analysis, endnotes, an index, and a statement about the translation - it is the 40 pages of analysis, keyed to section-by-section sequence, that makes this a very useful edition. This is perhaps the best first text of Kant to read to get a sense of his style, thought, and the foundation of what has become known as his most important principle.

'Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals' by Immanuel Kant is easily the most important work devoted exclusively to thinking about morality in the history of Philosophy, especially considering it's size.

The cornerstone of the work, and the end result of Kant's analysis is the categorical imperative which says that a moral law are only those for which you can state should be true of all people.

In one fell swoop, Kant marginalizes all thinking about relativism in morality and at the same time distinguishes moral from religious thinking.

If you pair this up with St. Paul's statements in his letter to the Romans (3:19-28) which states strongly that adherance to the law has virtually nothing to do with salvation, it should make things pretty clear to all concerned.

Unfortunately, things are rarely that simple. As important as Kant's conclusion is, it is necessary but not sufficient for a complete analysis of morality.

One excuse may be that this work is really Kant's version of 'Cliff Notes' to his moral argument. His full presentation comes in the 'Critique of Practical Reason', which, however, is not often read.

Note that contrary to another review of this edition, the translator and commentator is the noted Kant scholar of 70 years ago, H. J. Paton.

To people who are not used to reading philosophy, I will not hide the fact that Kant is tough going. He may not be quite as tough as Hegel, the Existentialists, or the ancient Greeks, but he is definitely harder to understand than any modern nonfiction book I can think of.

The biggest argument against the 'Groundwork' and the categorical imperative is usually the fact that it does not rule out trivial rules, such as 'you must always eat a starch at least once a day'. This rule is physically possible for anyone living anywhere in the world, yet it is certainly not a moral law. It is not even a very good dietary law, but that's neither here nor there. A second argument is that Kant's argument seems a bit circular, when he says that the only thing which unqualifiedly good is a good will.

For anyone who has been vexed by moral questions, an honest reading of this work will at the very least give you hope that with the right amount of thought, one can make sense of moral issues.

A truly great book.

My history teacher in high school gave us a choice between this book and another (can't remember the latter's title), and I was more than satisfied with this book. I personally prefer the narrative style and detail of this book. My only further comment is to recommend the concise "Modern European History" by S. Viault as you read/after reading this book. It's a wonderful way to recap the important events of each period, not to mention well-phrased and easy to "get the picture."

Western Civilization: Required text for a Central Texas College course. Book is small text and takes some time to read, but the author does an interesting job of presenting the information. I am now in the second week of class and have only read the first 3 chapters, but was worth the purchase.

Recommendation: Worth buying if you'd like a good introduction to Western Civilization.

It leaves of on chapter 15 or 16 whereas, the next volume picks up on Chapter 13. Why didn't they just combine the two volumes since this book is so short anyway instead of reprinting the last 2 or 3 chapters in the second volume? What a ripoff...
Anyway, it's about as good a Western History textbook as you're going to get.

I purchased my first copy of this text several years from a college bookstore, not for a class, but because I picked it up, began browsing, and couldn't bear to put it down. Although textbooks are not usually written for pleasure reading, I've found Spielvogel's book to be truly well-written and efficiently designed. Maps, chronologies (timelines), and numerous illustrations and sidebars make the text inviting and accessible.

One of my favorite features is the inclusion of excerpts from original source documents. It's fascinating to read the writings of a medieval merchant of Paris on the subject of marriage, or excerpts from the court record of the trial of Joan of Arc. It provides a vivid, memorable glimpse of life in a different place and time.

I used this textbook to prepare for the Western Civilization CLEP, and I passed with no difficulty at all, earning 6 credits toward my bachelor's degree. Western Civ is a huge topic, and Dr. Spielvogel has done a terrific job of making it not only accessible, but enjoyable. I recommend this book!

I READ THIS BOOK FOR WESTERN CIV I & II AND I LOVED IT! NOT TO MENTION THAT I RECEIVED AN A ON BOTH TESTS. EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO READ IT FOR COLLEGE, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS BOOK. IT IS SUCH A TREAT TO READ AND I BELIEVE IT BELONGS IN EVERY HOME. EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW WHERE THE CRADLE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION BEGAN, AND HOW THE PEOPLE LIVED AND PROGRESSED THROUGHOUT THE AGES. I CAN'T WAIT TO SHARE THIS BOOK WITH MY CHILDREN SOMEDAY. HAPPY READING!

This is one of the best textbooks I've used while pursuing my MBA. Instead of being mired in academic theory, this focuses on real-world, applicable concepts. In a sea of boring, overly theoretical (and ridiculously overpriced) textbooks, this is a standout - two thumbs up!

Joan Halifax brings deep wisdom and caring to every moment, and this book is one more example of the gifts she shares so freely. We all deal with death and dying, now or later, ours or others, and this wise book will help us traverse the terrain more gracefully.

Honey Ward
www.ExperienceYourPower.com

Healthy, clear, concise guidance, including reflective meditation to care for those who are dying.

At the same time in developing compassion and fearlessness to face the dying, it concurrently provides a guide for healthy living.

Who knows what is most important in life? Those who deny it and live on in ignorant bliss, or those for whom it is already knocking on their door.

Whether as a collection of various primary texts, or as a textbook for an intro to philosophy class, making students shell out fifty-four bucks for this is a mistake. Like two other reviewers said, this text offers nothing useful but the primary texts. Since that is the case, the only question that would remain is whether it is worth fifty-four bucks for these primary texts. It is not, in the slightest. One can buy all the direct reading an "intro" student should ever do, via a handful or approx. ten dollar books, and come up with better readings, better introductions, more to read, and twenty bucks left over.

This is obviously an overpriced textbook meant to cash in on the carelessness of professors and the victimization of students. "Intro" students probably need a lot more than a lump of primary texts--and even if you don't think so, buy 2-3 smaller collections, for much less than the price of this thing--and they will have better editor/translator introductions, and probably better translations, too.

For instance, take a look at some of the cheaper books with Plato, the Presocratics, and then anything else one might throw into an "intro" class after that (maybe Hume, Nietzsche). Is the point of an "intro" class to get you to misunderstand as many philosophers as possible in a misunderstood context?

This is a massive and invaluable book for the student of philosophy. It has over twenty complete works of classical philosophy. Including many of the great works by Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kierkegaard, Hume, Mill and many, many more. And it also includes fragments from the presocratics and careful abridgments of over forty more works from a full spectrum of philosophers, ancient to modern. All of this comes in one large yet manageable volume. So it is ideal for a student or someone who wants a single volume philosophy reference. I highly recommend it.

this is an incredible anthology of philosophical works. it unfortunately lacks the textbook approach needed in a classroom. the anthology includes an incredible number or work by every philosopher from Plato to Russell, including some obscure philosophers.if you want an anthology of works, a source of documents, this is not a bad bet.

however, an intro to philosophy requires understanding and interpretation beyond the philosophical texts, which this book unfortunately does not offer. its summaries are a joke. its partial works sometimes barely suffice in class. and its organization does not even deserve the name.

overall, i would not buy this work if you have the choice. i only give it three stars because it offers an incredible variety of philosophical texts, crammed up into one book.

I use this work as the sole text for my Survey of Philosophy course. Both the breadth and depth of the readings are impressive, and the book lends itself to any number of combinations of readings, which makes this work uniquely versatile in my experience as a philosophy professor.

I also believe that the earlier reviewer was overly harsh in his disparagement of the introductions and summaries to each philosopher's work. While some of the introductions and summaries are indeed rather weak (although even these are generally adequate), others are quite good, and it is in any case the part of the instructor to guide students through these works. A novice instructor with insufficient background in the history of philosophy would indeed find this text difficult to use.

The text is poorly edited in parts, with any number of rather glaring errors in spelling, punctuation, and grammar, but these are minor when compared to the overall usefulness and versatility of this text.

Yes, I could not read this book.
I bought it from Amazon and it wasn't delivered.
Disappointing.
The 1 only star is symbolic of this disappointment.

Clear explanations; ample charts, tables, and diagrams; and a writing style that's easy to read are what make this an outstanding marketing strategy textbook. The authors have thoughtfully devoted a chapter to business ethics. And there are some case studies conveniently located in the second half of the book.

Paul Francis Musgrave, author of Indispensable Marketing Strategies - How to Outwit Your Competition, Attract and Retain Customers, and Multiply Your Profits - Marketing Strategy Secrets for Profitable Small Business Management

This text makes for very interesting, up to date reading. A great textbook for my Marketing Management Course. It is also excellent as the examples used are from some of the most recent times and so one is able to identify with the information. Two thumbs up!