Trends in the Hotel Industry: USA Edition 1998 (62nd ed)

Book Description

"One of the funniest and most unusual books of the year....Gross, educational, and unexpectedly sidesplitting."—Entertainment Weekly

Stiff is an oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem. For two thousand years, cadavers—some willingly, some unwittingly—have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They've tested France's first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender reassignment surgery, cadavers have been there alongside surgeons, making history in their quiet way.

In this fascinating, ennobling account, Mary Roach visits the good deeds of cadavers over the centuries—from the anatomy labs and human-sourced pharmacies of medieval and nineteenth-century Europe to a human decay research facility in Tennessee, to a plastic surgery practice lab, to a Scandinavian funeral directors' conference on human composting. In her droll, inimitable voice, Roach tells the engrossing story of our bodies when we are no longer with them.

Customer Reviews:

Who Doesn't Like Dead Bodies?.......2007-09-26

Or who doesn't after reading this book? Roach is an amazing writer. She approaches this delicate subject with a good balance of humor, respect, and enthusiasm, and the reader can't help but be absorbed immediately.

Each chapter is spent discussing a possible "life" for a human cadaver. There are many expected courses, such as anatomy dissections and cremations, but also many unexpected courses, such as crash test dummy calibrator, ballistics assistant, compost, and ingredient for folk (and snake oil-type) remedies. If you are extremely squeamish, you may be well-advised to avoid this book, but chances are, if you are extremely squeamish, you're not interested anyway. Roach does a good job, however, of not immersing the reader in overly disgusting descriptions (at one point, she decides the word "maggot" is not very nice, so she refers to them instead as "haciendas"). She simply presents the facts as they are.

Roach has researched her subject extremely thoroughly and I came away with a treasure trove of fascinating facts (now I just have to figure out how to drop them into conversation!). One of the best aspects of the book is Roach's writing. She is hilarious, and I found myself laughing out loud in every chapter. This was an excellent, intriguing book, and I can't wait to read her next book, Spooks!

Talent for Diplomacy.......2007-08-17

Ms. Roach has missed her true calling...I believe she could convince even John Bolton of her good intentions. The book was worth the $3.99 "used" price I paid. It's a light, humorous yet illuminating read if not somewhat contrived; in one section it is noted that victims' bodies aren't actually physically used in analyzing airplane crashes, thus their "lives" aren't so curious after all. Still they must be referred to as cadavers to agree with the central theme. This is a good nightstand book since you can well wait to see how it ends. R.I.P.

Really good!.......2007-08-07

In my anatomy class my teacher said i HAD to read this book. But don't read if someone you know has recently passed or if this kinda stuff bothers you. Take it lightly and humorous.

Very Interesting Read.......2007-07-30

Anything you never wanted to know about dead bodies you will read in this book. The author presents the information with a "Dry as a dry martini" sense of humor. Information that would typically not be discussed at the dinner table is what you will find in this book.

There is a variety of information, everything from how dead bodies are used to determine the best seats for airline crashes to the once considered disposal of the same.

One example is a gentleman in New York many moons ago that thought using human fat to keep the street lamps burning. He felt this was a good idea and a cost saving measure.

Another is how cremation came to be and various tried and failed techniques such as freeze drying bodies.

It is not a book of gore in the least, the reason it is not is the way the information is presented. This book is an all time favorite of mine. If you enjoy science, biology, and how things work you will enjoy this book.

Things you never knew you wanted to know.......2007-07-23

This book is tied for first as my favorite book of all time. This book is informative, educational, and exceptionally well-cited. Beyond that, it is an easy and conversational read. The best parts (there are two) about this book are that a) it might be the funniest thing I have ever read. Yes, its about cadavers - whole ones, pieces of them, ones that are buried, burned or chemically digested, dismantled for research or organ donation - but Roach has an uncanny and remarkable sense of humor about the whole thing. I literally laughed out loud at several points during the book - this is not just something they put on the book jacket as a sales pitch. If you wish to be amused, pick this up. And b) my second favorite thing about this book is that it provides a new starting place for deciding about the way in which I wish to dispense with my own remains. She provides information about organ donation, donation of bodies to science, donation of brains, and the nitty-gritty of what happens to the body depending on which more traditional disposal method one selects. I'll spare you the details of my own decision about this, but suffice it to say, this book has given me a whole new set of things to think about. This book doesn't have to move you or impact your life or decision-making, but it can.

In all, a fantastic reading experience that I recommend to anyone with a sense of humor and even the slightest bit of morbid curiosity.

Thorndike Nonfiction - Large Print - Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (Thorndike Nonfiction - Large Print)

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Thorndike Nonfiction - Large Print - Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (Thorndike Nonfiction - Large Print)
Mary Roach
Manufacturer: Thorndike Press 2003
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000MCDTN6

Book Description

Latin jazz-the perfect combination of Latin rhythms and hot jazz phrasing-energizes audiences like no other music.. As part of the Smithsonian Institution’s series of major exhibitions on jazz music, Latin Jazz traces the music’s roots and routes, from the Caribbean to New Orleans and the clubs of New York City to its booming international popularity today. More than 100 rare photos from the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s show musicians and audiences in full swing, along with dozens of album covers and posters from the heyday. Stories told by the greats who were there, such as Mario Bauzá and Cal Tjader, convey all the zest for life that has made the music so exciting, and contributions by renowned musicians Andy González and Al McKibbon attest to its legacy. With all text in both English and Spanish, Latin Jazz is a spectacular and fitting tribute to this exciting musical fusion.

Customer Reviews:

damn funny........2005-01-14

If you're a tortured artist, a sucker for wit, a would-be critic, a bit of loser when it comes to attractive women, Do you have a passion for bohemian culture, want to travel around europe? Do you have a hard time trying to hold down menial jobs? Have you got a university education? Well, then "Falling towards england" is your book. If you've watched Clive in "post-cards", and remember his hillarious deadpan voice, you'll laugh out loud as you read his hard-to-put down 2nd installment within his "unreliable memoirs" series. If you're a bit of comedian and a bit of a geek at uni, then reading this book will help relieve the pain a little bit as James' details countless romantically inept experiences which he includes in what he calls "Another chapeter in the history of what never happened". pure gold.

* keep an eye out for the talking book version. listening to it is damn funny.

A CLEVER BOY.......2004-07-15

Clive James should be 65 by now, if the arithmetic of the years works in the same way for him as for me. This volume of his memoirs, the second, was issued in 1985, but presumably it calls on diaries kept in his 20's, the period the book covers, so one can't really gauge how it reflects his maturation.

His greatest strength and his main weakness are one and the same thing. He produces some brilliant one-liners, but so many of them, and so similar in style, that they become just a little wearisome over the length of even a shortish book. I became familiar with him first as the BBC film pundit and then as the television critic of The Observer on Sundays. Within the scale of a half-hour programme or a Sunday review he was absolutely unsurpassable for wit and originality. He did various other tv programmes over the years, and I remember in particular a series on a tour he had made in eastern Europe, at the time still the Evil Empire of fond memory. There was a clip of a rock band consisting of various balding 40ish gents in dull suits, on which James commented in his flat Australian accent `They don't just look like secret policemen, they sing like secret policemen'. Does that have you rolling in the aisles? It did me. It still does, and this book rarely goes two pages in succession without something of the kind. As a writer of English he is a consummate workman on his own terms. The tone is studiously light and informal, but the expression is never careless or cheap. Indeed his other fault as a stylist is a kind of demotic pretentiousness. The relaxed and plain-Joe paragraphs are liberally larded with obscure literary and cultural allusions, and it would serve him right if some readers find this patronising. What do you make of a chapter-heading `Solvitur acris James', for instance? I happen to recognise the reference to the ode of Horace starting `Solvitur acris hiems' (Sharp winter melts) but not only will it totally escape many, perhaps most, it doesn't have all that much point anyway in its context.

The period narrated is from his arrival in England in 1962 until just before he went up to Cambridge. As a document of an impoverished, chaotic, Hogarthian gin-lane existence it is simply brilliant. It would be hard to describe the feel of his account as precisely introspective - Rabelaisian might be nearer the mark. In saying that, I begin to suspect that James's manner is beginning to infect me too - the style of Rabelais is nothing like what you might expect from its English dictionary definition or the common usage of the word insofar as it has a common usage. Towards the end I thought I detected a distinctly deeper tone. I wonder what he could really do if he really tried.

Very funny and clever!.......1997-12-30

This is one of a series of autobiographical books from Clive James - Unreliable Memoirs and May Week Was in June being the others - which take Clive from his boyhood in Australia to the hallowed halls of Cambridge University. Clive has a clever, satirical and self-deprecating style. The humor is sly, very personal, and tends to creep up on you. It helps if you have heard him speak and can imagine the text in his rhythmic, expressive voice. The book, although written from the vantage point of Clive's current, and considerable, fame as a television presenter and journalist, does not endow Clive with any more talent than he had at that time. In fact you begin to wonder how he would ever make his mark, let alone a living. The characters he introduces are rich and colorful, presented honestly, to be liked or hated, much as Clive did. The pace is easy and undemanding, it's a gentle book, but not wimpy, rather it is very much in the style of the author himself. I highly recommend reading the books in sequence - Unreliable Memoirs is first - but if not possible, this one is a great place to start to appreciate Clive's work.

May Week Was in June: Unreliable Memoirs Continued (Transaction Large Print Books)

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UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE
Not as good as the first two
The memoirs of a true Aussie larrikin
A 250 page CV on how Clive James became an intellectual

May Week Was in June: Unreliable Memoirs Continued (Transaction Large Print Books)
Clive James
Manufacturer: ISIS Large Print Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1850895511

Customer Reviews:

UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE.......2006-02-15

This looks like being the last personal memoir Clive James intends to let us have. After he left Cambridge he became well-known from the media, first as BBC film critic, then as the television critic of The Observer on Sundays, and latterly with several shows of his own. He must be nearer 70 than 60 by now, to the best of my knowledge his marriage has survived, and the combination of anno domini, stability and exposure has probably left him with nothing much more that he feels driven to tell us.

His Cambridge career must have given the university more of a challenge in dealing with him than the other way about. He read voraciously, but he read what interested him rather than what was on the syllabus. He devoted much of his time and energy to theatrical productions, and much of his time if not energy to watching films. To what extent he found the Cambridge experience formative I can't really tell, but it clearly didn't take him over. He mentions a number of personalities - F R Leavis who clearly angered him, Germaine Greer thinly disguised as Romaine Rand, and a few others such as the college dean who come across to me as institutions at least as much as they do as personalities. Of the institutions properly so called he has a bit to say about the Union Society, which was clearly as imbecilic a tabernacle of triviality as its Oxford equivalent that I knew only a little earlier. Other institutions were the regular theatrical events, and here we get a genuine sense of involvement. Cambridge gave him a forum here where he could develop his talent. It might have developed less if he had never gone there, but in any case he carried on with his theatre productions in London at the same time, so I'd guess Cambridge's real gift to him was the student grant that unintentionally left him free to do substantially what he liked.

How reliable or unreliable these memoirs are I have to guess too, but I should think they can be believed a lot more than those of, say, Berlioz. Every newspaper review of this book since it appeared in 1990 must have pointed out that his or anyone's team on University Challenge consisted of four members and not three, and I wonder how this ever got past the proof-readers. Those of his contemporaries that he deigns to mention by name are mainly unknown to me, but some may be pseudonyms like Romaine Rand. As the book continued I started to recognise more names. These by and large are people he can mention without compromising or embarrassing them, so it's fair to suppose that some of the unknown personae are aliases to avoid problems. The story reads convincingly, and of course it reads very well. A child of that time attending a similar place of education can relate easily to his progressive disgust with the bogusness and herd-mentality of the 'intellectual' political left that drove us from any naïve revolutionary ideas back into being staid social democrats. The story of the attempt by one theatrical beauty to seduce him, in which he failed the test, is hilarious, but rather near the bone as well for someone whose occasional specialisation in such cases was just to abandon the scene or even to fail to recognise it as a scene in the first place. As for reading what one wanted to rather than what one was supposed to, scrambling through the syllabus and finishing with a better degree than one deserved - well, that rings a few bells too.

Those who know either or both of the earlier books of memoirs, or who simply know Clive James from The Observer and/or television, will know the style to expect here. It's individual, and in its way it's brilliant as well. It has 'matured' rather by this third volume - the one-liners are not so conspicuous as before, but there are plenty left and the writing has more evenness and homogeneity. He traces his developing interest in artistic and intellectual creation of various kinds, and the wide-eyed ingenu quality of his appreciation is one of the things I like best about him. The last chapter, in which he hears, as we must, the clock ticking more loudly as he continues to look into the door opening ahead of him is really striking and affecting. I sense that Clive James has said most of what he was given to say, but how well he said it all.

Not as good as the first two.......2003-03-26

This third volume of unreliable memoirs picks up where the previous volume (Falling Towards England) let off. James, in these books, is interesting, yet not as funny, at least to me, as it seems the things he is describing should be. I definitely need to give his fiction a try.

The nice thing about reading a writer's biography like this is to realize that you are not alone. It is much too easy for me to think that I am the only one with trouble concentrating on the matter at hand instead of flirting with one passion after the other.

The memoirs of a true Aussie larrikin.......2002-02-13

I love Clive James' writing - especially his wry style of combining haughty superciliousness with biting self-deprecation, often within the space of one line. He writes like he speaks, with a verbose sarcasm, and throughout reading May Week Was In June it's almost impossible not to hear his nasal, scoffing tones narrating the book for you.
And while this third (and final?) instalment in his autobiographical memoirs (following the hugely funny Unreliable Memoirs and equally hilarious Falling Towards England) contains the familiar elements of James' comedic style, it doesn't quite measure up to its two predecessors.
Unreliable Memoirs, where James told of his childhood days in post-war suburban Sydney, didn't have to exert any effort whatsoever to raise a laugh: James' skewed take on his youthful surroundings in Kogarah coupled perfectly with the countless moments of hilarity he lived through and strange and twisted acquaintances he made. In the same vein, Falling Towards England introduced us to a young man desperately out of his depth as a newcomer to the Mother Country, armed only with an ill-fitting suit and cardboard suitcase.
May Week Was In June is a continuation of James' days in Britain, as a late twentysomething attempting to forge an acting career in Cambridge while simultaneously stumbling clumsily through his English degree. Even though he's older he's still no wiser, being cursed with an overly healthy interest in women, a not-so-healthy interest in pints of ale and frustrating his teachers and himself by forgoing his assigned texts in their entirety to read countless books of his own choosing.
Yes, it's funny, and it certainly continues to reinforce James' portrayal of his younger self as more larrikin than laureate and more clown than Casanova. He's still a fish out of water, despite having immersed himself for many years in British culture, and his distinctly Australian outlook stands out in 1960s Cambridge like a sore thumb.
The funny moments, though, don't tend to come as thick and fast as in the first two memoirs. This was a shame, as episodes such as James practising his twist in his darkened bedroom in Swiss Cottage, and his teenage sex education in the back of a Kogarah garage, were what made the first two books so laugh-out-loud funny. James has grown up in his third boo, and is a slightly more serious and focused character (with the emphasis on slightly, though!), despite his shortcomings as a student and his scorn for conservative behaviour. However, the narration is still flawless in its eloquency and James proves he has not lost his sharp and unique way of observing the world around him with a cynicism that never grates, but constantly entertains.

A 250 page CV on how Clive James became an intellectual.......1997-10-22

Having so much enjoyed the first two volumnes in this series, I was not prepared for this turgid list of self improvement. Yes Clive is well read, English and Italian, yes he does know the difference between a Donatello and a Michelangelo, but do we need to know every book he read in the two years, every painting he saw and how it moved him. The simple answer is no. Unfortunately it takes 250 pages to find out. The story of how a drunken extemely funny youth becomes a sober mildly funny old pseud.

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Software no-good

Discussions of how to plan and lunch a successful GIS system within a business environment

GIS for Managers, Not for Teckies

DO NOT ORDER THIS EDITION

exciting applications

Thinking About GIS: Geographic Information System Planning for Managers
Roger Tomlinson
Manufacturer: Esri Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Designing Geodatabases: Case Studies in GIS Data Modeling

Measuring Up: The Business Case for GIS

Getting to Know ArcObjects (With CD-ROM)

A to Z GIS: An Illustrated Dictionary of Geographic Information Systems

Modeling Our World: The ESRI Guide to Geodatabase Design

ASIN: 1589481194

Book Description

Targeting those charged with launching or implementing a geographic information system for their organization, this book details a practical method for planning a GIS proven successful in public and private sector organizations.

Customer Reviews:

Software no-good.......2007-03-11

The software that comes with this book is too old to register and use. The graduate class I needed it for required the use of the software. If this product is used for college studies, buy it brand new from the bookstore.

Discussions of how to plan and lunch a successful GIS system within a business environment.......2005-12-03

Roger Tomlinson's Thinking About GIS: Geographic Information System Planning For Managers has been revised and updated to provide practical details on how to implement a GIS system - and Tomlinson is known as the creator of GIS, so is in the perfect position to provide the methodology behind the practices. His background launching GIS systems around the world lends to discussions of how to plan and lunch a successful GIS system within a business environment.

GIS for Managers, Not for Teckies.......2005-10-13

This book starts off saying 'If you're holding his book, perhaps it's because you've been charged with launching or implementing a geographic information system a GIS for your organization.' That single sentence pretty well sums up the intent, the intended audience, and the direction that this book takes.

This is a new paperback edition that has been updated in response to customer input and with data updated to reflect happenings since the last edition. The bulk of the book hasn't changed that much, after all the basic concepts of what GIS can do for you and how to implement it haven't changed that much. To be sure the details of the available software have changed a bit, but the basic concepts have not.

This is not a technical book on doing GIS, this is a book for managers that will tell him what can be expected from a GIS system and gives the manager enough information that he won't be snowed by the teckies implementing the system.

DO NOT ORDER THIS EDITION.......2005-08-12

There is a revised, updated version of this text (that is less expensive) - and if you order this one, Amazon will ship it to you, charge you for it and not refund the sale. They claim that its not their fault that they'll ship you an outdated edition.

Check the publication date and get the updated softcover edition!

exciting applications.......2005-04-08

For a manager who might be considering a GIS implementation for the first time, this book can be useful. Tomlinson offers an overview of the main issues that you may have to deal with. These include designing the database and, very importantly, limiting the scope of the project. You should be careful not to attempt too much in a first GIS project. Rather, attention should be paid to devising explicitly the remit of the project, and what it will not attempt to do.

The examples in the book can be very useful in helping you do the above. Treat them as case studies that illustrate the manifold ways to intensively use geographic information.

The book also shows how GIS has invigorated geography. For decades, it was a relatively sleepy field. But the availability of massive amounts of geographic information and cheap computing has turned this field into an exciting place for the new century.

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