Now that Wal-Mart has conquered the US, can it conquer the world? As Wal-Mart World shows, the corporation is certainly trying. For a number of years, Wal-Mart has been the largest company in the United States. Now, though, it is the largest company in the world. Its global labor practices and outsourcing strategies represent for many what contemporary economic globalization is all about. But Wal-Mart is not standing still, and is opening up stores everywhere. From Germany to Beijing to Mexico City to Tokyo, more than a billion shoppers can now hunt for bargains at a Wal-Mart superstore. Wal-Mart World is the first book to look at this incredibly important phenomenon in global perspective, with chapters that range from its growth in the US and impact on labor relations here to its fortunes overseas. How Wal-Mart manages this transition in the near future will play a significant role in the determining the character of the global economy. Wal-Mart World's impressively broad scope makes it necessary reading for anyone interested in the global impact of this economic colossus.

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Stanley D. Brunn - Wal-Mart World, The World's Big gest Corporation in the Global Economy (2006).pdf

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Nina Rappaport, Jane Amidon - Ken Smith Landscape Architects Urban Projects, A Source Book in Landsc ape Architecture (2005).jpg

USA Books - Nina Rappaport, Jane Amidon - Ken Smith Landscape Arch...Projects, A Source Book in Landscape Architecture 2005.jpg

Ken Smith is unquestionably one of the most interesting voices in landscape architecture; his works reflect the intensity and energy of their surroundings and challenge the distinction between landscape and art form. Ken Smith Landscape Architects/Urban Projects focuses on three prominent works in New York City: his East River Project; his work for P.S. 19; and his MoMA rooftop garden. Through Smith's colorful, playful drawings and photographs, the book reveals how each project explores new expressions of landscape design in the city.

Ken Smith Landscape Architects/Urban Projects is part of the Source Books in Landscape Architecture series sponsored by Ohio State University. These books present sketches, drawings, models, renderings, working drawings, and photographs. Each book focuses on a recent, important work or works at a level of detail that allows thorough study of the project from its conception to the completion of design and construction.

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Nina Rappaport, Jane Amidon - Ken Smith Landscape Architects Urban Projects, A Source Book in Landsc ape Architecture (2005).pdf

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Susan Kollin - Postwestern Cultures, Literature, T heory, Space (2007).jpg

Postwestern Cultures synthesizes the most critical topics of contemporary scholarship of the American West within a single volume. This interdisciplinary anthology features leading scholars in the varied fields of western American literary studies and includes new regional studies, global studies, studies of popular culture, environmental criticism, gender and queer theory, and multiculturalism. Postwestern Cultures, like all successful studies of western American literature, is necessarily diverse and wide-ranging; it grasps the multifaceted quality of the landscape, literature, and critical analysis by engaging postmodern theory, spatial theory, cultural studies, and transnational and transcultural understandings of the local.
This collection emphasizes the importance of understanding the region not as a confined or static space but as a constantly changing entity in both substance and form. It examines subjects ranging from the use of frontier rhetoric in Japanese American internment camp narratives to the emergence of agricultural tourism in the New West to the application of geographer J. B. Jackson's theories to abandoned western landscapes.

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Susan Kollin - Postwestern Cultures, Literature, T heory, Space (2007).pdf

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Emory Dean Keoke, Kay Marie Porterfield - Food, Fa rming, and Hunting (2005).jpg

By the time European conquistadores and colonizers arrived in the Americas, starting in 1492, American Indians had already invented sophisticated hunting and fishing technology. They gathered hundreds of plants for food, fiber, and medicine, and first domesticated three-quarters of the food crops raised in the world today. Food, Farming, and Hunting covers the many contributions that American Indians have made throughout history, including the various tools used in hunting, such as bolas, bows and arrows, and camouflage, and the different methods of fishing for each culture. The volume identifies the many foods North American, Mesoamerican, and South American Indians gathered, discusses the birth of agriculture in the Americas, and describes the plants that were eventually domesticated and farmed. Later developments and improvements in farming, such as irrigation and the use of fertilizer, are also covered.

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Emory Dean Keoke, Kay Marie Porterfield - Food, Fa rming, and Hunting (2005).pdf

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Keith Eggener - American Architectural History, A Contemporary Reader (2004).jpg

This major new text features 24 essays on North American architectural and urban history. The book concentrates on recent writings by historians of American architecture and urbanism. The essays are drawn from the past twenty years' of publishing in the field, arranged chronologically from colonial to contemporary and accessible in thematic groupings. The editor provides a comprehensive introductory essay and sets the book's themes in context.

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Keith Eggener - American Architectural History, A Contemporary Reader (2004).pdf

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Clive Seale - Media and Health (2003).jpg

`This book appears to fill a substantial gap in the literature at present. There are, quite simply, no books available which engage seriously and competently with the presentation of health issues in the media, and certainly none which focuses on representations of health and illness in as thematically coherent a manner as Seale proposes to do' - Richard Gwyn, University of Cardiff

`This is an excellent resource for students. It provides a comprehensive review of secondary literature in the field and is very well researched. Students of sociology of health and illness and in media and communication studies will find the book invaluable' - David Oswell, Goldsmiths College, University of London

`This is a comprehensive work on media health, providing an invaluable "toolkit" for understanding health and the media in contemporary society. Seale goes further than previous textbooks, critiquing the "lament" of media health promoters in order to explore the moralisation and commercialisation of media health' - Dr Annette Hill, University of Westminster

How are health matters presented by the mass media? How accurate are the messages we are receiving? This book demonstrates how health messages in popular mass media are important influences in our lives, and that they are not neutral, being subject to many determining influences. It demonstrates the importance of mass media for understanding the experience of illness, health and health care, bringing together the latest thinking in the field of media studies and the sociology of health and illness.

This book provides a thorough review of research literature on media representations of health, illness and health care, covering their production, characteristic forms and relationships with the everyday lives of media audiences. It brings together both well known and lesser-known studies in the context of an integrated, sociological argument about media and health.

Media producers are subject to a variety of influences, from medical lobbies, scientific organizations, and not least the commercial pressure to satisfy media-saturated audiences. These mean that aims of health promoters are not always easily achieved, leading to considerable tensions that require a deeper understanding of media health than has hitherto been applied to them.

This book will be essential reading for health educators and promoters, as well as health care providers interested in the cultural aspects of health, sociologists of health and illness, and students and academics of media studies.

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Clive Seale - Media and Health (2003).pdf

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Andrew F. Smith - Encyclopedia of Junk Food and Fa st Food (2006).jpg

Eating junk food and fast food is a great all-American passion. American kids and grownups love their candy bars, Big Macs and supersized fries, Doritos, Twinkies, and Good Humor ice cream bars. The disastrous health effects from the enormous appetite for these processed fat- and sugar-loaded foods are well publicized now. This was particularly dramatically evidenced by Super Size Me (2004), filmmaker Morgan Spurlock's 30-day all-McDonald's diet in which his liver suffered the same poisoning as if he had been on an extended alcohol binge. Through increased globalization, American popular food culture is being increasingly emulated elsewhere in the world, such as China, with the potential for similar disastrous consequences. This A-to-Z reference is the first to focus on the junk food and fast food phenomena from a multitude of angles in addition to health and diet concerns. More than 250 essay entries objectively explore the scope of the topics to illuminate the American way through products, corporations and entrepreneurs, social history, popular culture, organizations, issues, politics, commercialism and consumerism, and much more. Interest in these topics is high. This informative and fascinating work, with entries on current controversies such as mad cow disease and factory farming, the food pyramid, movie tie-ins, and marketing to children, will be highly useful for reports, research, and browsing. It takes readers behind the scenes, examining the significance of such things as uniforms, training, packaging, and franchising. Readers of every age will also enjoy the nostalgia factor, learning about the background of iconic drive-ins, the story behind the mascots, facts about their favorite candy bar, and collectables. Each entry ends with suggested reading. Besides an introduction, a timeline, glossary, bibliography, resource guide, and photos enhance the text. Sample entries: A&W Root Beer; Advertising; Automobiles; Ben & Jerry's; Burger King; Carhops; Center for Science in the Public Interest; Christmas; Cola Wars; Employment; Fair Food; Fast Food Nation; Hershey, Milton; Hollywood; Injury; Krispy Kreme; Lobbying; Nabisco; Obesity; PepsiCo; Salt; Soda Fountain; Teen Hangouts; Vegetarianism; White Castle; Yum! Brands, Inc.

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Andrew F. Smith - Encyclopedia of Junk Food and Fa st Food (2006).pdf

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Dan P. McAdams - The Redempti Self, Stories Americ ans Live By (2005).jpg

Who are we as Americans? What is our deep identity? How do we make a good life? Renowned psychologist Dan P. McAdams suggests that the key to American identity lies in the stories we live by. And the most powerful life story in America today is the story of redemption. On a broad societal scale and in our own private lives, we want first and foremost to transform our suffering into a positive emotional state, to move from pain and peril to redemption. American identity is the redemptive self.
Based on 10 years of research on the life stories of especially caring and productive American adults, The Redemptive Self explores the psychological and cultural dynamics of the stories Americans tell to make sense of who they are. Among the most eloquent tellers of redemptive stories are those midlife adults who are especially committed to their careers, their families, and making a positive difference in the world. These highly "generative" men and women embrace the negative things that happen to them, for it is by transforming the bad into good that they are able to move forward in life and ultimately leave something positive behind. Unconsciously, they find inspiration and sustenance in the rich store of redemptive tales that American culture offers - from the autobiographies of Massachusetts Puritans, Benjamin Franklin, and escaped African-American slaves to the stories of upward mobility, recovery, fulfillment, and release that come to us today from Hollywood, 12-step programs, self-help experts, religious stories, political speeches, business gurus, and Oprah.
But can all American lives find redemption? Some people seem unable to make their lives into redemptive tales. Instead, their stories show contaminated plots and vicious cycles. Moreover, might there be a dark side to the redemptive stories Americans love? While these stories can sustain a productive and caring approach to life, they can also suggest a peculiarly American kind of arrogance and self-righteousness. For all their strengths, redemptive stories sometimes fail, and sometimes suggest important failings in the way Americans see themselves and the world. The Redemptive Self encourages us to examine our lives and our stories in full, to apprehend both the good and the bad in the stories we live by. By doing so, we may fashion better stories and better lives for the future.

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Dan P. McAdams - The Redempti Self, Stories Americ ans Live By (2005).pdf

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Harrell R. Rodgers - American Poverty In A New Era Of Reform (2005).jpg

Summary: A good, objective review of poverty since the 1996 reforms

In 1996, American welfare policy was changed in a fundamental way. This book seeks to summarize what has has happend since then. It is well-written concise, informative and relatively free of bias. It is a good book.

The overall conclusion of the book is that the 1996 reforms have worked well, but could be improved. As he shows, the 1996 reforms have dramatically reduced welfare rolls, dramatically increased employment among the poor and raised income among the poor. He has an in depth analysis of the different approaches taken by various states. (Under the new law, states are given a good deal of latitude to experiment with poverty policy and they have, in fact, taken quite dissmilar approaches.)

A few of the factual findings of the book are worth underlining.

First, the primary cause of the rise of poverty in recent decades is the collapse of the family. Rodgers does not put it quite that way. He says that poverty increased due to the rapid increase in the number of single-parent families. The evidence supporting this conclusion is overwhelming e.

Second, from a financial perspective, Medicaid is the 800 pound gorilla of American social policy. I did not know, and found it astonishing, that Medicaid was by far the largest federal social welfare program, costing nearly as much as everything else put together. Excluding Social Security, which nearly everyone puts into a separate category.) In part, this is because Medicaid covers many more people than other programs, such as Food Stamps. Nonetheless, it is disturbing that medical care would be so large a part of the budget. Rodgers does not explore this, but clearly something is very wrong here. Medical costs are plainly out of control in this country. To a degree, the increase in costs is due to increase in quality, technology and service level. But, come on, the numbers are absurd. When we are spending more on medical care for the poor than we are on literaly anything else on this side of the biudget, something is very wrong.

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Harrell R. Rodgers - American Poverty In A New Era Of Reform (2005).pdf

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Eric A. Finkelstein, Laurie Zuckerman - The Fatten ing of America, How The Economy Makes Us Fat, If I t Matters, and What To Do About It (2008).jpg

USA Books - Eric A. Finkelstein, Laurie Zuckerman - The Fattening ...es Us Fat, If It Matters, and What To Do About It 2008.jpg

"What's behind the sudden, explosive rise in obesity rates? In a word, it's economics. Author Eric Finkelstein, a renowned health economist who has spent much of his career studying the economics of obesity, with the help of coauthor Laurie Zuckerman, reveals why America's growing waistline is a by-product of our economic and technological success. Because of declining food costs, especially for high-calorie, low-nutrient foods, and increasing usage of technology, which make Americans more sedentary, the environment has changed in such a way that we're eating more calories and burning off less." "Finkelstein and Zuckerman blend theory, research, and engaging - sometimes hilarious - personal anecdotes to break down the causes and the consequences of America's obesity epidemic. One by one, they explore the media's claim that obesity is making our businesses less competitive, pushing good jobs overseas, hurting our military readiness, increasing our taxes, and helping to bankrupt the Medicare and Medicaid Programs. Along the way, the authors also reveal how the obesity epidemic has spurred tremendous demand for all sorts of new products and services, creating a flourishing new market that they call "The ObesEconomy."" "The Fattening of America outlines the issues we must deal with to confront obesity. The authors explore the role that businesses and policymakers play in America's obesity epidemic, and explain that successful obesity prevention strategies need to do exactly the opposite of where the economy is taking us. They need to make it cheaper and easier to be thin - not fat. However, because obesity is a natural by-product of an expanding economy, the authors question whether or not obesity prevention efforts, even if successful, would actually leave some individuals worse

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Michael M. Topp - Those Without a Country, The Pol itical Culture of Italian American Syndicalists.jpg

In the first book-length history of the Italian American syndicalist movement-the Italian Socialist Federation-Michael Miller Topp presents a new way of understanding the Progressive Era labor movement in relation to migration, transnationalism, gender, and class identity. Those without a Country demonstrates that characterizations of "old" (pre-1960s) social movements as predominantly class-based are vastly oversimplified-and contribute to current debates about the implications of identity politics for the American Left and American culture generally.

Topp traces the rise and fall of the Italian American syndicalist movement from the turn of the twentieth century to the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927. His use of Italian-language sources, combined with his attention to transnationalism and masculinity, provides new vantage points on a range of related topics, including the 1912 Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile workers' strike, the impact of World War I on this immigrant community, and the genesis of both fascism and antifascism. Those without a Country brings forward fascinating new material to revise and refine our views of not only Progressive Era radicalism but immigration, gender, and working-class history as well.

Michael Miller Topp is associate professor in the history department at the University of Texas, El Paso.

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Michael M. Topp - Those Without a Country, The Pol itical Culture of Italian American Syndicalists.pdf

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David M. Oshinsky - Polio, An American Story (2005 ).jpg

All who lived in the early 1950s remember the fear of polio and the elation felt when a successful vaccine was found. Now David Oshinsky tells the gripping story of the polio terror and of the intense effort to find a cure, from the March of Dimes to the discovery of the Salk and Sabin vaccines--and beyond.
Here is a remarkable portrait of America in the early 1950s, using the widespread panic over polio to shed light on our national obsessions and fears. Drawing on newly available papers of Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin and other key players, Oshinsky paints a suspenseful portrait of the race for the cure, weaving a dramatic tale centered on the furious rivalry between Salk and Sabin. Indeed, the competition was marked by a deep-seated ill will among the researchers that remained with them until their deaths. The author also tells the story of Isabel Morgan, perhaps the most talented of all polio researchers, who might have beaten Salk to the prize if she had not retired to raise a family. As backdrop to this feverish research, Oshinsky offers an insightful look at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which was founded in the 1930s by FDR and Basil O'Connor. The National Foundation revolutionized fundraising and the perception of disease in America, using "poster children" and the famous March of Dimes to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from a vast army of contributors (instead of a few well-heeled benefactors), creating the largest research and rehabilitation network in the history of medicine. The polio experience also revolutionized the way in which the government licensed and tested new drugs before allowing them on the market, and the way in which the legal system dealt with manufacturers' liability for unsafe products. Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, Oshinsky reveals that polio was never the raging epidemic portrayed by the media, but in truth a relatively uncommon disease. But in baby-booming America--increasingly suburban, family-oriented, and hygiene-obsessed--the specter of polio, like the specter of the atomic bomb, soon became a cloud of terror over daily life.
Both a gripping scientific suspense story and a provocative social and cultural history, Polio opens a fresh window onto postwar America.

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Jerome P. Kassirer, M. D. - On The Take, How Medic ine's Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Yo ur Health (2004).jpg

USA Books - Jerome P. Kassirer, M. D. - On The Take, How Medicines...licity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health 2004.jpg

We all know that doctors accept gifts from drug companies, ranging from pens and coffee mugs to free vacations at luxurious resorts. But as the former Editor-in-Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine reveals in this shocking expose, these innocuous-seeming gifts are just the tip of an iceberg that is distorting the practice of medicine and jeopardizing the health of millions of Americans today.
In On the Take, Dr. Jerome Kassirer offers an unsettling look at the pervasive payoffs that physicians take from big drug companies and other medical suppliers, arguing that the billion-dollar onslaught of industry money has deflected many physicians' moral compasses and directly impacted the everyday care we receive from the doctors and institutions we trust most. Underscored by countless chilling untold stories, the book illuminates the financial connections between the wealthy companies that make drugs and the doctors who prescribe them. Kassirer details the shocking extent of these financial enticements and explains how they encourage bias, promote dangerously misleading medical information, raise the cost of medical care, and breed distrust. Among the questionable practices he describes are: the disturbing number of senior academic physicians who have financial arrangements with drug companies; the unregulated "front" organizations that advocate certain drugs; the creation of biased medical education materials by the drug companies themselves; and the use of financially conflicted physicians to write clinical practice guidelines or to testify before the FDA in support of a particular drug.
A brilliant diagnosis of an epidemic of greed, On the Take offers insight into how we can cure the medical profession and restore our trust in doctors and hospitals.

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Charles R. Geisst - Wall Street, A History (2004).jpg

Wall Street is the stuff of legend and a source of nightmares, a force so powerful in American society--and, indeed, in world economics and culture--that it has become an almost universal symbol of both the highest aspirations of commercial success and the basest impulses of greed and deception. How did such a small, concentrated pocket of lower Manhattan came to have such enormous influence in national and world affairs. In this wide-ranging volume, economic historian Charles Geisst answers this question as he provides the first history of Wall Street, ranging from the loose association of traders meeting on New York sidewalks and coffee houses in the late 18th century, to the modern billion-dollar computer-driven colossus of today.
Here is a fascinating chronicle of America's securities industry and of its role in our nation's economic development. Geisst's narrative ranges over two centuries, from just after the Revolutionary War, to the California Gold Rush and the economic boom (for the North) of the Civil War, to the great stock market crash of 1929, right up to the recent junk bond frenzy and the merger mania of the 1980s that culminated in the fall of Drexel Burnham. The book traces many themes--the move of industry and business westward in the early 19th century, the rise of the great Robber Barons, the influence of the securities market on incredible growth of industry, particularly in the innovative financing of the railroads and major steel companies and crucial investments in Bell's and Edison's technical innovations. Geisst also looks at the gradual increase in government involvement in Wall Street, revealing how regulation had been minimal at first and many investors had suffered from the abuses of corrupt firms. But with the beginning of the New Deal, the government stepped in to pass a series of laws--centered on the Securities Exchange Commission--that severely restricted the ways that Wall Street firms could operate. Here began a heated debate that still rages today between those who want unfettered license to operate as they please and those who want the government to regulate the market to curb corruption. Of course, "The Street" has always been a breeding ground for characters with brazen nerve, and no history of the stock market would be complete without a look at the most ruthless wheeler dealers. Geisst for instance details the manipulations by which Jay Gould and associates cornered the gold market, leading to the terrifying market crash on "Black Friday" in September 1869. Here too are battles of will between powerful personalities and the determined rise to power of such "self made men" as John Jacob Astor, John D. Rockefeller, and Cornelius "Commodore" Vanderbilt--as well as the connivings of lesser known deal makers like William Crapo "Billy" Durant, reputed to have made $50 million in three months shortly before the stock market crash in 1929.

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George Comstock, Erica Scharrer - The Psychology o f Media and Politics (2005).jpg

Research indicates that people discount their own opinions and experiences in favor of those of "experts" as espoused in the media. The framing of news coverage thus has a profound impact on public opinion, and political decision making as a response to public outcry. However, the choice of how to frame the news is typically made to solicit viewership and high ratings rather than to convey accurate and meaningful information. This book discusses why people discount their own opinions, how the media shapes the news, when this drives political decision making, and what the effect is on the future of society.

Issues addressed include:
* How powerful are the media in shaping political beliefs/judgment?
* How has this power changed in recent years?
* How does media influence voting behavior?
* To what extent do media opinions affect political decision making?

* Demonstrates the ways in which the media both constrain and facilitate democratic participation
* Provides insight into why individuals have varying levels of attention to and interest in politics
* Discusses such issues as political advertising, polls, debates, and journalists' pursuit of scandal
* Describes why only some Americans turn out to vote in prominent elections.
* Offers a model of personal- versus social-level influences that extends beyond politics into other important topic areas
* Brings together research and theories from the fields of Communication, Psychology, and Political Science
* Reviews hundreds of key sources, both historical and contemporary

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Sean Nixon - Advertising Cultures, Gender, Commerc e, Creativity (2003).jpg

`Nixon's study is a major contribution to the cultural sociology of the new service sector professionals and their gendered identities.It's importance lies in it's skilful synthesis of detailed ethnographic research and social theory. This is a genuinely innovative book which reopens cultural debate about advertising and society' - Frank Mort, Professor of Cultural History, University of East London

`Advertising Cultures is a lucid, thorough and highly engaging account of advertising creatives that unlocks two crucial issues for understanding the culture industries: creativity and gender. It marks a major new contribution to the cultural study of economic life' - Don Slater, London School of Economics

The economic and cultural role of the `creative industries' has gained a new prominence and centrality in recent years. This new salience is explored here through the most emblematic creative industry: advertising.

Advertising Cultures also marks a significant contribution to the study of gender and of commercial cultures through its detailing of the way gender is written into the creative cultures of advertising and into the subjective identities of its key practitioners.

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Sean Nixon - Advertising Cultures, Gender, Commerc e, Creativity (2003).pdf

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Susan Jacoby - The Age of American Unreason (2008).jpg

Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon--one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, she surveys an anti-rationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought." Disdain for logic and evidence defines a pervasive malaise fostered by the mass media, triumphalist religious fundamentalism, mediocre public education, a dearth of fair-minded public intellectuals on the right and the left, and, above all, a lazy and credulous public.

Jacoby offers an unsparing indictment of the American addiction to infotainment--from television to the Web--and cites this toxic dependency as the major element distinguishing our current age of unreason from earlier outbreaks of American anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism. With reading on the decline and scientific and historical illiteracy on the rise, an increasingly ignorant public square is dominated by debased media-driven language and received opinion.

At this critical political juncture, nothing could be more important than recognizing the "overarching crisis of memory and knowledge" described in this impassioned, tough-minded book, which challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what the flights from reason has cost us as individuals and as a nation.

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Richard G. Rogers, Robert A. Hummer, Charles B. Na m - Living and Dying in the USA, Behavioral, Healt h, and Social Differentials of Adult Mortality (20 00).jpg

USA Books - Richard G. Rogers, Robert A. Hummer, Charles B. Nam - ...alth, and Social Differentials of Adult Mortality 2000.jpg

The simplicity of using one data set in addressing the relationship of single variables to mortality distinguishes Living and Dying in the USA from other recent investigations of mortality. The authors use the recently released National Health Interview Survey and the National Death Index to make a definitive statement about demographics and mortality. By surveying demographic and sociocultural characteristics associated with mortality, socioeconomic effects, health-related conditions, and health status, they reveal connections among several factors related to mortality chances. Easily understood and cited, their study emphasizes the statistical methods underlying their revelations and invites readers to duplicate their results.

Key Features
* Comprehensive coverage of US adult mortality differentials
* Based on a new and innovative data set
* Includes factors rarely examined in related mortality research
* Not only documents mortality differentials, but explores explanations for them
* Extensive list of references associated with each chapter
* Consistent, straightforward methodology used throughout aids readers in both understanding the content and in comparing results from chapter to chapter

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