The book covers the intense competition between McDonnell Douglas and General Dynamics to be the prime support company to Japan for their FSX program.

The book is easy to read. It presents an interesting overview of many of the issues impacting releasability of high technology and American competiveness, and the U.S. Government's participation in sensitive areas of international business. For someone with zero exposure to this arena, the book is a good place to start. Keep in mind that the book is written with an agenda in mind and has a very pessimistic view of this process. If you are pro-American/anti-hi tech export, you will love the book. Otherwise, keep a bag of salt near by during your read.

Of course, the so far unwritten sequal is how miserably the FSX program has performed. Did Japan pick the wrong supplier? Were the 'keys' unable to unlock the box? Or was the box Pandora's?

I had little knowledge of the Hunt Family, but I was able to relate to the times and events the book covered. It intermingled many events in our past and supported some theories about Kennedy's death. I felt it made me question the material goals we set for ourselves. I also realized no matter what we achieve materially the greatest needs or wishes in life cannot be corrected.

I thoroughly enjoyed Delderfield's book on the kings and queens of England and Great Britain. He's laid out the geneology in a flowing, concise way, offering tidbits of fact for each monarch. Sometimes sounding almost gossipy, Delderfield knows his subject. The photographs made a nice counterpoint to the prose, giving me a feel for the reality of all mentioned.

A good book for a condensed overview of English royalty.

A well written book about the design and evolution of the DH 98 Mosquito. I've read histories of the Mosquito before but never in the form of a real story that detailed the key people who contributed to the aircraft's development. I recommend this book to any aviation buff, especially to any who are fans of the Mosquito.

I thought that My Wild Kingdom was an excellent written book. He not only writes of facts, but also life experinces he endured during his life with nature. This book at times was boring because it was very detailed, but also enhanced the experience by you could imagine yourself there. He travells to many exotic areas during this book including the Mount Everest region where he looks for the Yeti. I highly reccomend this book.

This is a useful study of that rarest of British political animals, a multi-party government. Disappointingly, the author defines his subject in rather narrow political terms: there is little sense of the wider world outside Westminster. Diarists such as "Chips" Channon figure prominently among his quoted sources, but he appears to make little use of Conservative or Labour Party archives. Nonetheless, his analysis of episodes such as the aftermath of the 1931 election and the India crisis shows a sure touch. Most revealing of all is his summary of how Chamberlain's government fell - a perfect rebuttal of the myth that a "patriotic revolt" in parliament during the Norway debate of May 1940 was responsible. Recommended if you enjoy dense accounts of high politics.

Ashley Mote has written a very useful book on immigration. He notes that Jack Straw says that all 75 million new EU citizens from Eastern Europe can work in Britain from January. As unemployment there averages 16%, and wages are 12% of ours, many may accept his generous invitation!

But Britain is already overcrowded, especially in the South East. Our 60 million people are 641 to a square mile, compared with 269 in France and 76 in the USA.

By the Single European Act, signed by Thatcher, Britain had to end its border controls with the EU. We have now been accepting about 250,000 immigrants a year since 1997, yet are not short of labour: we have four million unemployed. Dependence on immigration deters education, depresses wages, and aids the employer.

The Civitas report, Do we need mass immigration?, observed, "Current immigration increases inequalities in the UK, because it causes a massive redistribution of wealth from those who compete with immigrants in the labour market - who tend to be poor, and suffer low wages - to those who employ them who tend to be 'rich'."

As an AEU representative said in 1947 of similar debates, "We resent also the decisions made in our name and without our agreement on 'displaced persons', and we reject the philosophy that if a job is so badly paid that no British worker will work at it, then the only alternative is foreign labour. We must fight for improved conditions in these industries."

The UN High Commission for Refugees noted in 2002 that more asylum seekers tried for Britain than for any other country in the Western world. Australia halved the number of applicants by denying entry to all without the right documents, deporting unauthorised arrivals and offering cash incentives to those willing to return home. We could do the same.

For many good reasons then, the majority of British people oppose mass immigration. Yet some sneer 'racialist' at anyone proposing immigration controls. But, as Mote shows, uncontrolled immigration harms other countries by robbing them of their labour power, and harms Britain by worsening our conditions.

This huge book is a lot more in depth and has more interesting facts about those listed than it's competitor Rolling Stone Encyclopedia. This book also has more expensive smooth glossy type paper for it's pages so will still look good after you've have it for a while. Inside you'll find info such as where the bands are from, when they signed and the usual album information. This book also tells you stuff like this star went to jail for 9 days for whatever they did and other interesting stuff. It goes a lot more in depth than Rolling Stone does. Definitely good for research for school or just for trivia nights. The only downside to this encyclopaedia is that it doesn't list all the rock stars. Where is Weird Al Yankovic?

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Security Protocols held in Cambridge, UK, in April 1996, in the context of the special program on computer security, cryptology, and coding theory at the Isaac Newton Institute. The 17 revised full papers and one abstract included in the book were carefully selected. Among the topics addressed are several types of public key cryptosystems, digital cash, electronic commerce, digital signatures, and visual cryptography. Besides original theoretical results, the collection of papers show a strong applications-oriented component.

I think this is the authoritative biography of Stevie Smith. Its attitude towards its subject is respectful without being uncritical. There is some apology towards the beginning of the book that Smith's life was perhaps too uneventful for the purposes of interesting biography. In fact, the account is gripping. Smith, we read here, socialised with names who have become legend (and many who haven't); had brief affairs both hetero- and homosexual; threw tantrums in public, and made an extravagant suicide-attempt with a pair of scissors in the office where she worked. Spalding gives very reliable impressions of the kind of writing Smith produced - poetry, novels and reviews - so that one's sense of the woman's total achievement (unless one is already unusually familiar with it) is well broadened. This is biography of exactly right the tone. It is descriptive and sanely sympathetic with a minimum of polemic and interpretation. One concludes the book, therefore, able to see Stevie Smith as both a profoundly feeling and insightful human whilst also almost certifiably insane. It is also extremely well-researched: one learns a lot of incidental information (about the educational system in England in the 1920s; the London literary scene in the 1940s and 50s; about the Church of England, and so on). It enlarges one's understanding of Stevie Smith without biasing one towards an interpretation of her.