So nice to see a clear/concise book focusing on Pillars of Destiny school of Feng Shui. The market is flooded with Black "Hat" Sect books, if you are interested in discovering your own personal element this book is invaluable. The book consists largely of charts, though there are a few interesting case studies. My two largest complaints are: that the charts only go back 1936 (this is a large problem since there are plenty of 65-70+ year olds whom I am sure would like to find their own birthdate!!) and I would like to see more suggestions on how to incorporate this information in our daily lives as well as in combination with other Feng shui schools.

This book gives the tourist 'in spe' a good guide about the Philippines. Excellent maps, good but short descriptions of the touristic sights, interesting background information about the country and its people and lots of practical guidelines... not even to mention the perfect and amazing photographs. The average tourist will be satisfied to plan his trip. The 'off the beaten track' adventurour will still be hungry.

Jan Morris (who also wrote under the name James Morris) is a fantastic travel writer - really the best - and this is an outstanding early 1964 book of hers, with magnificent photos and captions. (A later 1979 version of the book, with a similar title, Spain, omits the photos and updates the text, but I think the photos are very helpful in experiencing the book.)

Fun book with fresh and new ideas.

Evelyn Waugh compares his 1930 trip to Abyssinia to cover Haile Salessie's coronation to 'Alice in Wonderland', but there's something 'Brigadoon' about his whole journey to alien Africa, where intolerable heat, unreliable timetables and capricious inhabitants seem eminently preferable to the noisy social inanity back in England, so familiar to us from his classic comic novels.

Waugh divides his African travel book into two sections (one dealing with the Abyssinian trip, the other with an extended tour through Zanzibar, Kenya, Uganda, the Congo and South Africa), and three nightmares, vividly detailing the various, accumulative problems that beset the traveller, such as unhelpful officials and lousy food. Waugh is a much more sympathetic voyager than the more heroic likes of Chatwin or Raban - his whining about lack of bath water or pesky mosquitos is more refreshing than some writers' spiritual journeys.

Despite his attempts at objectivity, 'Remote people' is written, as we might expect, from a very jaundiced viewpoint. Waugh's experiences aren't really 'Alice' at all, simply a concatenation of minor mishaps, local eccentricites and cultural differences in very poor countries that only a very insulated Englishman would blow up and find surreal. Some of Waugh's ill-advised political theorising, especially his unconvincing defence of the notorious white settlers in Kenya's Happy Valley, make for distinctly ncomfortable reading, although one is grateful for Waugh's evident and lucid integrity to his own beliefs. It is surprising in a book of 1931 to see how many of the issues raised by post-colonial theory were already being painfully argued about.

Of course, we don't read Waugh for politics or sympathy to foreigners. Although written in a more descriptive, less dialogue-driven style than the novels, we find the same account of bewildered, uprooted Modern Man faced with the problems (and comedy) of the simple fact of other people (American professors absurdly reverent of Ethiopian religious practice; Seventh Day Adventists prone to seasickness; colonial magnates encouraging staff and guests to climb life-threatening volcanos etc.). The travelogue is less interesting than the rich set-pieces - the Abyssinian coronation; the bathetic trip to an ancient monastary; a rooftop cinema where the audience wilt sleepily in the sun; the efforts of native scouts to light a fire; a berserk ship journey down river with the captain trying to shoot game from his cabin, his passengers leaping off to search for any hits.

I chose this book to begin my Gender and Science class because it deals with language in more than one scientific field. Keller helped open my students' eyes to gendered language they were previously unaware of. The early chapters were easy to read but conceptually challenging for a class full of science majors. The later chapters use more technical (scientific) language and were perhaps not appropriate for my class. As we went on to read the work of other feminist scholars, the students began to recognize that in places Keller's analysis is inadequate (though essential) -- some of my students felt this was frustrating, but I thought it was really good for them. Overall, it was a good experience for my students and I would use it again, though I might not use as many of the later chapters.

Sins are definitely out of fashion. The last time I came across the Seven Deadly Sins of Envy, Pride, Covetousness, Gluttony, Sloth, Lust and Anger, it was in a glossy Singaporean magazine for the trendy crowd. Under each of the headings it featured big cars, expensive condos, the current "IN"-nightspots, the newest restaurants, fashionable jewelry, designer clothes and so on. The word "sin" may have made monks and Victorians tremble; but we just shiver in anticipation of the latest thrill. Alain de Botton captures this change in attitude perfectly in his 5-page afterword: "[Today] our concerns are of a different order. We worry about whether we are cheerful or depressed, fulfilled or low in self-esteem. We worry about happiness, not sin and virtue."

"The Seven Deadly Sins" have originally been published in 1962 by The Sunday Times, and authors from England have written all seven contributions. The book does not rank the sins in any order (rankings are a very American obsession, and it seems the English have not been infected yet in the early sixties). However, it is very fitting for our democratic society to begin with ENVY, Angus Wilson's contribution, and to end the book with ANGER, W. H. Auden's contribution. Envy is the quintessential democratic "sin." Alain de Botton reflects that "envy comes from comparison and [...] the habit for everyone to compare themselves to everyone else is a particularly modern, democratic one." People envy only those who they feel themselves to be like: "There are few successes more unendurable than those of our closest friends [and] it follows that the more people we take to be our equals, the more we will be at risk of dissatisfaction." Which explains why a society of equals does not automatically lead to more happiness for its individual members. Anger is also a very democratic "sin" because anger tends to arise from a sense of entitlement: "We aren't overwhelmed by anger whenever we are denied an object we desire, only when we believe ourselves entitled to obtain it" (Alain de Botton). A sense of entitlement comes with democracy: we are not just in pursuit of happiness, we assume we are entitled to it.

Wedged between the highlights of Wilson's and Auden's articles are contributions by Edith Sitwell on PRIDE (a tongue-in-cheek confession to the "virtue" of pride), Cyril Connolly on COVETOUSNESS (a very funny short story about obsessive greed), Patrick Leigh-Fermor on GLUTTONY (an indigestible, rambling piece of writing - skip this part of the menu!), Evelyn Waugh on SLOTH ("Sloth is the condition in which a man is fully aware of the proper means of his salvation and refuses to take them," the state of rejecting the "spiritual good" which - in modern parlance - leads to depression, the contemporary cousin of sloth), and finally Christopher Sykes on LUST (a fine example of British common sense).

If we worry about happiness, not sin and virtue, why should we read about "The Seven Deadly Sins" at all? Why worry about the "good" when we can go out and have "fun" instead? The answer is: the "good" is about the value we attribute to our lives looking forward and looking back, the "fun" is just living it. In general, we are bad at "just living" or "living in the moment." but experts in reflecting on the past and planning for the future. It is a smart decision to build on our expertise and put some meaning into our lives to make looking back and forward more enjoyable. After all, the good life and the happy life are complementary, not mutually exclusive. Alain de Botton points it out just so well: "If we listen to pre-Christian philosophers, there is never a conflict between happiness and goodness. For Socrates, the sinful man is at the same time the miserable man, the good one the happy one. It's only with the arrival of Christianity that a conflict starts to appear and that, unwittingly, it starts to seem as though being good is dull and not likely to lead one to happiness, while sinfulness is bad, but actually rather fun."

SKYWARD is a terrific book about the early days of aviation in this country! Written by one of our country's greatest explorers, the most highly decorated american ever, Byrd takes us from his early trainning days at pensacola to his north pole flight, transatlantic crossing, and south polar flight, and includes some other pretty exciting adventures along the way. It is a vibrant story written by a young man who is probably best known in literary circles for ALONE , a much more introspective book which he wrote later in life.

This is a good read of the WW II era, about the choices people make during war time and their consequences....However, this book was originally published in 1973 under the title"Stanger at the Gates".