Petroleum Marketing in Africa: Issues in Pricing, Taxation and Investment (African Energy Policy Research Series)

Book Description

The nineties have seen a fundamental shift in the policy and practice governing the pricing and marketing of petroleum products in Sub-Saharan Africa. Strict government control has been replaced by liberalization. Oil multinationals have been permitted once more to pursue their own strategies in importing and retailing petroleum products. In this volume, the consequences of this shift are examined in the context of two very different cases: Kenya, where full liberalization has been achieved, and Ethiopia, where the transition from state control to liberalization has just begun. A comparative analysis of these cases yields valuable insights into policies and strategies that African countries need to deploy to ensure lasting benefits from liberalization.

Petroleum Marketing in Africa; Issues in Pricing, Taxation and Investment.

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Petroleum Marketing in Africa; Issues in Pricing, Taxation and Investment.
M. R. Bhagavan
Manufacturer: Zed Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000N63VGG

Book Description

VICE CITY: NEW YORK IN THE 80s... Nature made Ash Lynx beautiful; nurture made him a cold ruthless killer. A child runaway brought up as the adopted heir, hatchet man, and sex toy of "Papa" Dino Golzine, the East Coast's Corsican crime lord, Ash is now at the rebellious age of seventeen - forsaking the kingdom of power and riches held out by the devil who raised him, preferring a code he can live with among a small but loyal gang of street thugs. But his "Papa" can't simply let him go - not when the hideous secret that drove Ash's older brother mad in Vietnam has suddenly fallen into his insatiably ambitious hands. It's exactly the wrong time for Eiji Okamura, a pure-hearted young photographer from Japan, to arrive in NYC and make Ash Lynx's acquaintance... and fall with him into the bloody whirlpool of pride, greed, lust and wrath unleashed by the enigma code-named Banana Fish...

Epic in scope, and one of the best-selling shojo titles of all time in Japan, Akimi Yoshida put an electric shock into the genre and gained a huge crossover audience through Banana Fish's stripped-down, non-stop style

Book Description

In a world filled with Starbucks, E!, designer water, and reality TV, is it any wonder that pop culture icons are invading our dreams? With insightful humor (a sure sign that the only thing implanted in her cheek is her tongue), author Josie Brown explains dream symbolism in terms that any young, hip woman can readily comprehend. What does it mean to dream of Paris (France), Paris (Hilton), Prada, blogging, bridesmaids, and more? Josie can tell you. Part dream dictionary, part relationship guide, part fashion fantasy, Last Night I Dreamt of Cosmopolitans taps into its reader's subconscious, unraveling slumber-induced musings on love, lust, cocktails, and of course, designer shoes.

Customer Reviews:

Enjoyed it!.......2005-12-16

I enjoyed this authors writting so much, I bought her other book True Hollywood Lies. I look forward to reading more books by Josie Brown.

SWEET DREAMS, SWEET JOSIE.......2005-07-29

Josie Brown writes in a brilliant and amusing style. This book is filled with memorable sound bites, and it also offers up equal proportions of wisdom, shrewd insight and good cheer.

So much fun for browsers!!!

RCL
Washington, D.C.

Loved this book.......2005-05-23

I'm a person who loves fashion and clothes, and this book was given to me as a gift from a friend who often teases me about this. The book is set up like a dream dictionary, although it's more tongue-in-cheek & not to be taken too seriously! The author's many pop-cultural interpretations of dreams tickle the funny bone. I highly recommend it as a beach book, or just to keep on the bedside table for quick & fun reading anytime.

A GREAT BOOK!.......2005-05-23

This is a sweet and funny read--truly humorous, and filled with many tongue-in-cheek gags. It's not set up in the typical essay format of most humor books. Instead it's done as a dream dictionary, which allows it to poke fun at all the celebrity icons that seem to inundate our media--and, yes, I guess our dreams. I've bought a couple as funny birthday gifts for my girlfriends who are into namedropping...because they will certainly get it!

LAST NIGHT I DREAMT OF COSMOPOLITANS: A Modern Girl's Dream Dictionary

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LAST NIGHT I DREAMT OF COSMOPOLITANS: A Modern Girl's Dream Dictionary
Josie Brown
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Griffin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OTC31Q

Book Description

In the golden age of Hollywood, Paramount was one of the Big Five studios. Gulf + Western's 1966 takeover of the studio signaled the end of one era and heralded the arrival of a new way of doing business in Hollywood.

Using previously untouched sources, Bernard Dick reconstructs the battle that culminated in the reduction of the studio to a mere corporate commodity. He then traces Paramount's devolution from free-standing studio to subsidiary—first of Gulf + Western, then Paramount Communications, and currently Viacom-CBS.

Dick portrays the new Paramount as a paradigm of today's Hollywood, where the only real art is the art of the deal. Former merchandising executives find themselves in charge of production, on the assumption that anyone who can sell a movie can make one. CEOs exit in disgrace from one studio only to emerge in triumph at another. Corporate raiders vie for power and control through the buying and selling of film libraries, studio property, television stations, book publishers, and more.

The history of Paramount is filled with larger-than-life personas, including Billy Wilder, Adolph Zukor, Sumner Redstone, Sherry Lansing, Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and more. From Double Indemnity to The Godfather, the stories behind some of the greatest films ever made pale beside the story of the studio that made them.

“Clever, thought-provoking…Dick has the ability to explain the complex in-fighting among studio executives in the corridors of power in a movie studio—and their even more complex negotiations with the conglomerates who own the studios—in a way that is clear and incisive.”—Gene D. Phillips

Customer Reviews:

A little too clinical.......2001-10-03

This book probably falls more in the 3 and a half star category, because Bernard Dick does do a good job of laying out the narrative regarding Hollywood's turn toward the "dark side", becoming less about entertainment and more about business. He is thorough and meticulous.

However, the book reads a bit too much like a college text. Professor Dick's last book about a studio, City of Dreams, was a blow-by-blow history of Universal and he references his studies for that book a bit too much here. Clearly there was plenty of original research done, but it seems like some of it is missing. Also, with the exception of the passages pertaining to The Godfather, the examples (perhaps case-studies is a better term) don't really make the point I think the book is trying to make, namely that the film community is most definitely the worse off for having gone down the road of textiles, electronics, and other mainstream industries.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is a die hard Hollywood historian or movie fan, but others might be left a bit put off.

Average customer rating:
Engulfed: The Death of Paramount Pictures and the Birth of Corporate Hollywood
Bernard F. Dick
Manufacturer: NY
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000MU890G

Book Description

Many of today's hottest selling games-both non-electronic and electronic-focus on such elements as shooting up as many bad guys as one can (Duke Nuk'em), beating the toughest level (Mortal Kombat), collecting all the cards (Pokémon), and scoring the most points (Tetris). Fantasy role-playing games (Dungeons & Dragons, Rolemaster, GURPs), while they may involve some of those aforementioned elements, rarely focus on them. Instead, playing a fantasy role-playing game is much like acting out a scene from a play, movie or book, only without a predefined script. Players take on such roles as wise wizards, noble knights, roguish sellswords, crafty hobbits, greedy dwarves, and anything else one can imagine and the referee allows. The players don't exactly compete; instead, they interact with each other and with the fantasy setting. The game is played orally with no game board, and although the referee usually has a storyline planned for a game, much of the action is impromptu. Performance is a major part of role-playing, and role-playing games as a performing art is the subject of this book, which attempts to introduce an appreciation for the performance aesthetics of such games. The author provides the framework for a critical model useful in understanding the art-especially in terms of aesthetics-of role-playing games. The book also serves as a contribution to the beginnings of a body of criticism, theory, and aesthetics analysis of a mostly unrecognized and newly developing art form. There are four parts: the cultural structure, the extent to which the game relates to outside cultural elements; the formal structure, or the rules of the game; the social structure, which encompasses the degree and quality of social interaction among players; and the aesthetic structure, concerned with the emergence of role-playing as an art form.

Customer Reviews:

Good beginning for a body of critical work........2006-06-29

Daniel Mackay, The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art (MacFarland and Company, 2001)

The RPG has long been the redheaded stepchild of the gaming world when it comes to serious critical studies. Those few studies that have emerged, while valuable, haven't really looked at the RPG as an art form. Mackay makes an attempt to start a poetics of the role-playing game (it would be hubris, pure and simple, to think a single book could provide a complete poetics of the RPG, and Mackay does not suffer from hubris), a book that other critical observers will be able to build on in the future. In my opinion, for the most part, he succeeds.

The one thing of which most books of critical theory cannot be accused is readability. Mackay does a fantastic job, in most of this book, of keeping it readable; after all, his target audience is not just critical theorists, but role-players as well. He gets into the jargon late in the book, but hopefully by the time the role-players will already be engrossed enough to keep going. And there's another fortunate side effect of the book-- getting more people reading critical theory for fun. Not nearly enough people do that these days; Mackay actually addresses this fact late in the fifth chapter when he talks about the self-referentiality of modern literature, poetry, art, and critical theory.

It's the fifth chapter where Mackay seems to fall off the plant somewhat, though. It becomes obvious that Mackay is of the socialist school of critical theory, though even this comes into question at one point, when he seems to lump socialism in with capitalism as one of the reasons society's going to hell in a handbasket. I spent most of the rest of the book wondering where Mackay's coming from, but I'm guessing that most of the readers of the book won't be conversant enough with schools of critical theory to wonder about what is, essentially, a niggle.

How important a book this ends up being obviously remains to be seen. In the interim, however, it's good reading about a neglected subject. If you're a role-player, it's worth your time. ***

A New Art Deserves A New Kind of Art Criticism-& This is It!.......2001-12-03

This is the first book I have read about role-playing games that both suggests that role-playing games have had some kind of impact outside their own isolated world and, at the same time, cuts deeper into the historical and psychological origins of this peculiar, late-twentieth century phenomenon.

Mackay breaks his book up into four sections. The first examines the history of the role-playing game, particularly in relation to other forms of popular culture: fiction, film, comic books, and computer games. The second section looks at the rules that structure role-playing game. The third section looks at the social relations between players within the performance of the game. The fourth section explores the aesthetics of the rpg and includes a fascinating history of the emergence of fantasy as the key to commercialism that it is today from its humble roots as an object of suspicion in orthodox Christian Medieval Europe.

Mackay does not dumb-down his writing, and I'm sure other role-players, as well as others interested in the history of fantasy, will appreciate this. At times, he gets a bit carried away with his systems of organizing the game and describing it, but that is easily forgiven given the groundbreaking nature of this book. Of critical importance is his treatment of the performance of the role-playing game, and not simply as a game made up of a bunch of rulebooks and a bag of dice. The afterword by Marshall Blonsky is as astute and concise an analysis of fantasy gaming (whatever form it may take) as you'll find anywhere. My only question, why did it take so long for a book like this to hit the shelves?

Book Description

You’re Kain, a reluctant vampire sworn to avenge your murder. Doomed to feed upon the blood of the innocent that surround you. Forced to explore the vast, medieval world of Nosgoth to uncover the secrets that will return your mortality.

Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain—Official Game Secrets is your road map to Nosgoth.

• Detailed section maps keep you on track through the 100,000+ screens that are Nosgoth
• Maximize your magic and weapon tactics
• Learn how to take down the wicked bosses
• Track the epic story across 80+ hours of gameplay
• BONUS! full-color world map

Live the life of the undead! This book is your key to increasing your body count.

About the Author
Prima Creative Services is a team of gaming experts that has produced over 60 strategy guides for Prima Publishing, and collectively has two decades of experience in the gaming magazine field.

Customer Reviews:

Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain.......1998-06-25

Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain hint book is great to have if you are lost, stuck, or just feal like there is something missing the book is great to fall back on.

Book Description

XML is buried everywhere in the Microsoft .NET Framework, but effective XML parsing and coding in .NET requires adjustment. This book describes the set of XML core classes in .NET, introduces the .NET XML parsing model and how to program against it, and discusses XML readers and writers and XMLDOM. It examines related technologies such as schemas, transformations, and XPath, and it discusses data issues such as synchronization and serialization, the DiffGram format, and the XML extensions in Microsoft SQL Server 2000. This Microsoft Press title also reveals how to get the best performance from XML with .NET, and it offers in-depth information on interoperability topics such as when to use XML Web services and when to use remoting.

Customer Reviews:

Great VS2003 Book.......2007-03-25

Dino does a great job on this book. It is a great reference on how Microsoft handles and processes XML.

This book only has one drawback that it is outdated as it refers to Visual Studio 2003 and many things in Visual Studio 2005 have been changed or are outdated.

Hope they pubblish soon a book that is more up to date.

For Advanced readers only.......2005-04-14

I am a proficient MSXML coder but i can't get what I want (knowledge about .Net XML programming objects) from this book because the author habitually relies on advanced concepts from related technologies to explain things. So unless you are a pretty competent .Net programmer and already proficient in ADO.Net/ADO you will struggle to understand this book and struggle to understand the significance of what you are being told and why. I gave up and resorted to looking for articles on MSDN. Undoubtedly there is good stuff here but Mr Esposito writes as an extremely knowledgeable person for the already extremely knowledgeable person only.

stop punishing yourself with MSDN.......2005-01-11

Dino tells all in this superb and in depth look at XML on Microsoft's .NET platform. The book is well organized, starting at the fundamental classes and then branching out to the high abstraction level .NET classes and other Microsoft products such as SQL Server 2000 and Internet Explorer.

As an example of why this book is so wonderful, there have been several situations where I needed to do something in XSLT that just didn't seem practical (maybe not even doable). The section on how to use standard .NET languages such as C# from XSLT is itself worth the price of admission.

Keep in mind that readers are expected to have a good grasp of XML; the book is a .NET book.

*THE* XML book for .NET.......2004-06-28

Dino Esposito has total, absolute command of the subject matter that he expertly teaches in this book. This is a template for how all technical training books should be written. I wanted in-depth coverage of the XML object library in .NET and that is exactly what this book delivers. This is THE book on XML in .NET. Don't waste your money on anything else.

It is also terrific supplemental material for the Developing XML Web Services and Server Components certification exam. I recommend Mike Gunderloy's book as an all-encompassing source (look up my review for that book); however, I recommend reading the first four chapters of this book before you start Gunderloy's book if you don't have much experience reading and writing XML in .NET. Chapters 12 and 13 on remoting and web services, respectively, are also great sources of exam prep material. In fact, Chapter 12 on .NET Remoting is the best chapter on the subject you will find anywhere.

Terry, MCAD and MCSD for Microsoft .NET

Guru's Guide to XML Programming.......2003-12-31

Gr8 book if you need assistance with xml programming and also helps in using all methods of reading, writing and using xml. Dino! High five.

Applied SOAP: Implementing .NET Web Services

Average customer rating:

Great book on .NET and SOAP
Good book, title could use some work
horrible waste of time

Applied SOAP: Implementing .NET Web Services
Kenn Scribner , and Mark Stiver
Manufacturer: Sams
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0672321114

Book Description

This book takes the reader from the architecture of .NET to real-world techniques they can use in their own Internet applications. The reader is introduced to .NET and Web Services and explores (in detail) issues surrounding the fielding of successful Web Services. Practical guidelines as well as solutions are provided that the rader may use in their own projects. Some of the issues involve lack of specific guidance in the SOAP specification, while others transcend SOAP and involve issues Internet developers have grappled with since the inception of the World Wide Web. At this time, this book has no competition.

Customer Reviews:

Great book on .NET and SOAP.......2001-12-27

Here's what you get in the book: you will learn how to use .NET in order to shape your SOAP messages. There's a lot to know and understand: manipulating XML, creating custom attributes, debugging, reading messages. This book covers all of those items in detail and has the code to save you time. The book tells me exactly what I needed to know in order to make better use of SOAP in my .NET applications. Kenn teaches this stuff for Wintellect and developed the course on this. It's also pretty clear that the day jobs for both these guys involves writing Web Services. When you are done with the book, you will understand all you need in order to write your own Web Services.

I read the two other reviews and I don't understand why the readers are complaining. SOAP is one way to do Web Services and is the only thing that the authors talk about in the entire book. Perhaps this reader has a problem with the fact that, for the most part, SOAP == Web Services? As for the horrible waste of time review, I again think that the person didn't really look at the book. This is the best book I have seen to date which describes how to mold your SOAP messages, write custom attributes, etc. These guys explain pretty well what SOAP is for. Better for Web Page scraping? I think that reviewer simply picked up a copy in a book store, read 2 pages, and that's it.

Good book, title could use some work.......2001-12-20

I really enjoyed this book but I think that the title was misleading. There was as much (or more) information about web services and .net as there was about soap.

Overall the book covered a broad set of topics and showed some good example code. If you're new to web services and soap, and you plan on using .net, this book will get you good coverage in a small amount of time. If you don't intend to use .net, there are still some interesting topics, but the sample code won't help much.

horrible waste of time.......2001-12-01

I received this book, hoping to get some inside clues on how SOAP is implemented in .NET. I was running into some more sophisticated needs. I found the book to be full of general fluff. E.g., at the beginning it brings this corny motivation for SOAP that it's a better way for web page scraping. It actually believes that SOAP was made to replace code opening yahoo financials pages, and scraping stock quotes out of it. Hello? SOAP works along EDI and Corba. It's a simplified version of both that makes it easier and language/platform independent for those cases that don't need the full functionality of EDI or Corba.

Well, then there is a quote, where the author blankly asserts that posts are more useful then gets. I'm familiar with the debate about the pros and cons. But, an author just asserting one is better and putting as a reason 'trust me, baby, I'm smart', is just so pretentious.

To put it plain from flipping around in the book, I didn't find any good information, and the author just disgusted me with his way of writing and assertions. This is a total utter waste of time and money.

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