Westerns Books

I can't imagine using this book outside of a college course. It accomplishes what it sets out to do by reinforcing the economic principles form the book, and it tends to use real numbers, and a fair number of real world examples. Still it's just a work book, a mind numbing workbook, the type of which most people who went through High School should be familiar with.

The book isn't 'fun.' But that's not what I expected. To it's credit the conceptual questions it ask are often relative. For example, one question was about "Foreign Oil (palm and fruit oil) producers" and the advertising they use to increase demand overseas for their product. Things like that are useful, and help keep the class relevant.

This book is pretty good as far as text books go. For those people who are very analytical and love things explained in numeric/math forms this is the book for you. I do wish it was more conceptual aka more import/export demand/supply oriented. Though if you're an econ person this shouldn't be too bad.

Beth and Robert Yarborough have written a comprehensive text that examines the basis for trade and its contribution to ecoonomic growth and development among nations. As trade comes from general economic theory, the authors carefully present and analyze economic principles and how they can be applied to international markets and policies. The basic foundation for the study of economics is that humans have limitless desires but finite resources and alternatives available to them to attain these desires. International trade creates an interrelationship among nations where sociities may derive benefits from mutual exchanges of products and services that provide for more choices for humans to attain their wants and needs.

The authors present excellent examples of case studies and policy issues throughout the course of the book. The 21 chapters are written in a clear, straightforward manner with numerous graphical analyses to lend support to trade concepts and principles. The authors do not lose the interest of the reader with intricate quantitative formulas and calculations that many economics books often utilize. They focus on real world issues and challenges that countries often face when dealing with trade policies. The problems and questions at the end of each chapter are also quite practical and involve real world situations.

The Yarboroughs have done an excellent job in presenting an academic text for the study of international trade. This text is suitable for both business and non-business students, even those who may just have a cursory knowledge of economics. It would provide an excellent foundation for those wishing to understand how the global economy functions given that international trade is an often discussed subject and one of considerable significance in the world of marketing and commerce.

Keeping my comments simple, this textbook is too verbose. Although the material is quite comprehensive, it suffers from poor organization that makes for a tiresome read. The authors should consider highlighting or indenting important concepts and equations for better readability.

This book takes the time to explain easy concepts in great detail (sometimes rearranging mathematical equations in trivial ways), but it fell short in explaining the difficult concepts. For example, on p532, it appears that the balance of payments is always zero for every completed transaction just because of accounting convention and not because of economic equilibrium; this doesn't seem right. Also, it makes some assumptions that could use some more discussion (for example, on p493, it states that supply of foreign-currency-denominated deposits is not influenced by the exchange rate, but is that really true?)

The book did not include the online content access and was damaged when I received it. When I returned the book I was charged for shipping, despite the damage (which I did not cause). The text itself is written well and lends itself to a quick and easy grasp of the material. The chapter ending exercises, both brief and extended, expand well upon the material covered in the text.

Knowing the prices that Robert Crumb's work commands (try getting hold of a copy of his illustrated CD "That's What I Call Sweet Music" and you'll see what I mean), when I first saw this advertised I thought that the price must have been entered incorrectly, but no! Just imagine, a 240 page hardback book, illustrated in colour on high quality paper, with an accompanying 21-track CD, for less than you'd expect to pay for either on its own. The book (and CD), falls into three distinct parts, and three different techniques have been used to produce the illustrations.

I'm familiar with the jazz figures, and my comments therefore concentrate on that aspect. The first is that some of these choices are extremely idiosyncratic. Many (Beiderbecke, Armstrong, Morton) are almost obligatory, but scattered amongst them are some quite obscure figures, such as Junie C. Cobb, Roy Palmer, and Ikey Robinson. Fair enough, these are after all Mr. Crumb's heroes, but the accompanying commentary is far too brief and could with advantage have been expanded to fill the space available. Finally, whilst many of the portraits (all of which are based on photographs) are instantly recognisable a few have the look of caricature about them. All of which is to look a gift horse in the mouth, and I would disregard all of those reservations and buy it anyway if I hadn't done so already.

You really can't go wrong here...$13 or $14 for a book with wonderful artwork and brief history lessons and a companion CD with some truly timeless music.

Not a general fan of the genre, but I actually found the country music included on the CD to be the most interesting. But really every song is special.

A must have for any Crumb or roots music fan.

In 20/20 hindsight (or hindsound?) I bought the book intending to learn about music. Taken purely as an introduction to three genres of early American music, the book is a success. The pictures (and introduction to R. Crumb the artist) were a huge bonus. Wow! The CD with it completes the trifecta.

This is a fantastic introduction to multiple artistic elements - perhaps a few that will catch the reader/viewer/listener off guard. Enjoy!

Richard Nevins of Rounder Records first came up with the idea for Robert Crumb to illustrate a series of early Blues, Jazz, and Old Time Music and Bluegrass greats along the lines of the baseball cards of his childhood. Crumb went for the idea and produced what became three boxes of cards with illustrations taken from old photos on the front and write-ups about the players on the back (many of them by Nevins).

Now the famous fine arts publisher Abrams Books has designed and published a superb volume that includes the Crumb artwork as never before -- in brilliant color and on a larger scale than the cards -- along with expanded bios and a bonus CD that samples some of this great American roots music. Anyone interested in high-level cartoon art and this powerful expressive music will want to own this book.

Wow! Every so often you run across something that knocks your socks off. R. Crumb's Heroes of Blues, Jazz, & Country left me barefooted.

In the 1980s, Robert Crumb, whom Robert Hughes appropriately once called the "Breughel of the 20th century," created sets of trading cards featuring some of his favorite blues, jazz, and country musicians. (The plan was to include one card per LP sold by innovative record firm Yazoo.) This collection, edited by Terry Zwigoff, the same guy who directed the documentary "Crumb," pulls together the illustrations from all three sets. They're wonderful. The blues and country illustrations are drawn, and are vintage Crumb: crosshatched, brooding characters. The jazz illustrations are water-colored. They're identifiably Crumb, but have a definitely different feel to them.

Crumb is a fascinating genius. Although his art and comics tend to be avant-garde (a term he might well disdain) and iconoclastic, Crumb also has a real affinity for late 19th and early 20th century American culture. Part of this love for an earlier time, no doubt, stems from his intense dislike of the fast-paced, loud, and garish American culture he eventually fled in the 1990s (Crumb now lives in France). But part of it is that he thinks the music produced in the early 20th century represents folk art at its finest and purest, before music became an industry. Crumb began collecting old 78s when he was still a teenager, and his love for the older music has never waned.

And so to the piece de resistance of this book: the accompanying 21 cut CD. Crumb personally chose the pieces, and they're absolutely fantastic. Except for a couple of the blues and jazz musicians, all of the artists are virtually unknown except to the afficionado. But man oh man, are they wonderful. Skip James' rendering of "Hard Time Killin' Floor Blues" is a heart-breaker. Dock Boggs' "Sugar Baby" and Burnett & Rutherford's "All Night Long Blues" are haunting in their strange but beautiful ways. And no matter how bad things get, Bennie Moten's Kansas City Orchestra's "Kater Street Rag" will pick you up. My son and I have listened to the CD over and over and over, and we never get tired of it. He prefers the blues and jazz, I'm in love with the hillbilly blue grass cuts. But the whole CD--well, it just knocks your socks off.

Wow.
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* From R. Crumb's essay "To Be Interested in Old Music is To Be a Social Outcast!", The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book, p. 191. "You play old records for most people, and, if they listen at all, after the record's over they turn to you and say, 'So what is it you like ab out that old music?' You just want to throw up your hands."

As a lover of the french philosopher and his time i can only
recommand with passion his works and especially Candide together with the other stories issued by the so prestigious Oxford
world's Classics -its a genuine pleasure

Voltaire is a master saterist, not a comedian. As with all satire, it hslps if we understand the contemporary world in which the author writes, but Voltaire's skill raises Candide above this level of satirical writing. He is masterful in the use of comedy to poke fun at the customs, mores, and beliefs of his time and show us the silliness to shich theunenlightened mind can go in the pursuit of perfection in an imperfect world. As a commentator on human culture he is followed by Mark Twain. Not that Twain can match Voltaire in his skill, only in some of his perceptions. This is an "old" book by new world reckoning, but as a masterpiecce well worth the time and effort of exploaration it is a timeless masterpiece. I highly recommend it to both believer and non-believer.

A great selection of stories where Voltaire shows off his literary style and espouses his philosophy on different topics.
He is a great story teller and has a great sense of humour too.

This was a first source cited in "A Visit From Voltaire" which turned me on to the man with its lightly comic approach to a formidable subject, BUT I have to add that I only understood it bettert after knowing what role Candide played in the political mayhem of his life fighting "infame," and only after I knew more about his social/irreligious context, did I really "get" what he was doing in Candide. I'd send light readers to "Voltaire in Love," and wannabe scholars to the Portable Voltaire and whatever basic biographic texts they can find, as well as Visit from Voltaire, A which is hilarious fun.

Voltaire's Candide is a scathing satire on one of the more popular metaphysical theories of his day: that is, we live in the best of all possible worlds. In spite of the disasters and disappointments that befall mankind, Candide and an array of companions attempt to make sense of their personal tragedies while shoehorning it into the Leibniz theory.

Candide is well-written, and sprinkled with cute and clever irony. I also enjoyed the references Voltaire makes to his personal enemies in Candide. However, the optimistic theory that prompted this satire has been rejected, which leads me to believe there isn't much purpose for this book any longer. Really the only reason left to read Candide is to become 'culturally literate', I suppose. Don't get me wrong; the ultimate message of this book is a good one. However, I hope readers don't think Candide's lesson must preclude optimism all together, or love, or friends, or God. That fact is obscured to make a literary point.

The only interesting question that remains to be asked from this book is: why does such cyncism accompany 'enlightenment'? Both French and American societies are rife with it after all, so much that I doubt even Voltaire could manage much of a smirk. All he could do would be to join the choir and tend the garden he has sown.

This was an excellent guide for people who have never been to Arizona. You can't get lost with it. The way it's organized makes it easy to read. You can go directly to the section you need without wasting time flipping the pages.

I love Native Americans, I'm studying their history in University and this is very interesting. I have to rea this book for this class and frankly, I'm glad of it because it is very well written and amazing!

As a Senior in highschool, I selected this book as an outside reading material. To my surprise, apart from the boring sections of this book there was actually some really good things. Stories and tales fill the book as Archilde learns to live with the father he despises and learn from his mother, whom he rarely understands. Overall, this book gets 2 thumbs up, and they'll probably be black by the time you're through with this book.

D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded, is an excellent fictional text. Written around the time that can be referredto as "forced assimilation", "The Surrounded" deals with identity conflicts affecting Native youth. Native kids are being forced to attend boarding schools in order to assimilate to white culture. The protagonist, Archilde, is torn between pursuing life within the context of white or Native tradition. His mother is Salish and his father is an immigrant farmer from Spain. This further complicates his search for identity, because, while his mother is Salish, and does not want to assimilate, his father is Spanish, and is already an example of an assimilated minority.
The text does an excellent job of incorporating the thoughts of all the characters, and it is interesting to consider what is and is not "lost in translation" between the characters. I am not speaking merely about the translation of languages, but of the ways in which the characters perceive one another, how correct these perceptions are, and to what degree these perceptions affect their actions in the novel. Native and white cultures want Archilde to assimilate in their interest. The dialogue between language and cultures is fascinating. In the beginning, Archilde seems to be very interested in white culture, but as time rolls along, and he explores the effects of assimilation on the reservation, his viewpoint begins to shift.
Archilde's progression throughout the novel and the ways in which he learns and begins to understand those around him, is written in a poignant and emotional way that does not beg sympathy. Instead, the writing asks for understanding. The reader is asked to consider the perspective of U.S. history from the other side in a way that he/she can relate to through character usage. In this way, McNickle's work is an essential read for anyone who wishes to understand a little bit better, one small piece of the complex history between colonists and Indians, as told by one who experienced it.

Some of the best books are those that have been retrieved from the shelf and dusted off. Such is the case with The Surrounded, first published in 1936 by the late Native American anthropologist, D'Arcy McNickle. Through this singular work of fiction McNickle attempted to generate understanding about the realities of a people and a culture disrupted and all but destroyed by assimilation into white society. The Surrounded is a measuring stick by which we can read the failures and progress of first Americans and America itself.
The Surrounded is replete with oral origin stories and native traditions juxtaposed with the poignant stories of characters representative of a culture divided and camped on the edge of extinction. Set on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, McNickle's story revolves around Archilde Leon, a young Native American educated in white ways who struggles with feelings of alienation when he encounters the unchanged dysfunction of his own family and the longing of his tribe for the old ways:

. . . it was funny to come home and sit at his mother's feast. His eyes saw the old faces, faces he had forgotten about, never thought to see again; and now to be sitting in the circle of firelight and looking at them-but it wasn't really funny, not deeply funny. The deeper feeling was the impatience, irritation, an uneasy feeling in the stomach. Why could he not
endure them for just these few hours? Why did they make him sick? (62)

Even as he eventually softens toward his own culture, Archilde is caught up and ultimately destroyed by the influences of the reservation. Archilde's story could be that of any reservation Native today.
The Surrounded portrays a Native culture encompassed and diminished by white neighbors, white law, and a white social system. Rather than blending or accepting help, however, the people cling tenaciously to tribal loyalties, even when it means their destruction. Symbolically, Archilde attempts to rescue an emaciated mare and her foal existing in a grueling land. Despite her extreme condition, the frustrated Archilde cannot reach her-she is simply too wild to understand that he is trying to help. In a desperate attempt to save the creature, he ends up driving her to her death: "The sun had set and in the evening light a rider on a strong white horse led an unprotesting skeleton on a rope. It was grotesque" (241). Prophetically, the scene depicts his own fall, and reflects the fine line that modern first Americans walk.
McNickle's writing captured the Native American heart, at once spirited and broken, and projected it down through the years to the present. As literature that imparts empathy for the dilemma of first Americans, The Surrounded is a book for our times.

I must admit that I have not completed this book yet. But, what I have read is the most wonderful work of all time. It is philosophy that reads as fiction and fiction that reads as genius.

An undergrad like me cannot do it justice in a review. So, I will let it speak for itself, but buy it. It is wondrous.

This is Kierkegaard's first work, and contains already major themes which will be part of his oeuvre throughout. The choice between the aesthetic life represented in the first part and the moral life defended in the second is one such theme. So is the masking of his own identity, the division of himself into a multiplicity of names and identities behind which the true identity is a question. The story of the seduction, however ironically transmitted here is some variety of that fundamental story of Kierkegaard's life his engagement to Regina Olson which he broke because as he later said ' he lacked true faith'. And this perhaps also a cover for the ' thorn in the flesh' that limitation which is central to Kierkegaard' life of abstinence, and perhaps relates to his physical condition , or perhaps to his relation to his father. The aesthetic, the moral phases and what for Kierkegaard is beyond either/or the transcendent phase of the religious is also in this work in the question of who is the ' true Christian'. All of these themes are presented in the multipled- voice ironic humorous suggestive prose of a great imaginative writer and thinker . This is the first masterpiece of many to come, and the opening of the career of the one who would be the ' only Christian in Christendom'.
For the religious Jewish reader like myself aside from the difficulty and pleasure in trying to make something of the depth of Kierkegaard's thought there is the message of the lone creative individual more individual than other individuals in realizing himself in a kind of philosophical literature only Kafka and Neitzche and Pascal are perhaps the true equals of.

there is a countervailing advantage this edition offers against the princeton volumes even though its abridged... this is a lighter and smoother English translation. English is not my native language, but I believe many American readers would find the Hong translations as tough-going as I did (even if meticulous). Kierkegaard is already very wordy so this translation is a pain reducer.

As Soren is, arching literarily, trop acute. Often edifying, slightly hilarious. This collection kaleidoscopic. Gay alto lank. Solo writhing smoking tea. I would propose it to HE whom seul desirs richer marryhoods, way.

I mistakenly purchased this without noticing it was abridged. It seems dishonest to only mark this on the back but not the front of the text.

Would you like to determine your own motivation / leadership style? Are you task-oriented or people-oriented? Although I have not used the entire book, Chapter 12 of this book presents several self-assessment surveys based on McGregor's Theory-X / Theory-Y, McClelland's Achievement-Power-Affiliation, and Herzberg's Motivators-Hygienics models. Chapter 10 has a self-assessment survey based on Likert's System (Authoritarian-Benevolent Authoritarian-Consultative-Participative). Very useful.