The Oregon Trail is well known in legend and history for the many brave Americans who emigrated to Oregon in covered wagons. Here, Ralph Compton continues his "trail" series. Although I knew that livestock was common on the trail, I didn't realize that Oregon became cattle country for some. In this book, the trials of herding cattle across a hostile land is combined with the trials of ordinary families seeking a new life in the "promised land".

Again Compton describes the struggles, hardships, and decisons that were faced during the early and late1800's, of the many people who were traveling westward. Many were good folks, but there were some who would who would rob or kill for for the least thing. The seasoned Texas cowboys who were good to their word and not afraid to to defend what was right with out thinking twice. The Texas long horn cattle--stubborn and mean, but also would stampede at the slightest action. The immigrants who were green and unaware of the dangers of a new land. All this, Compton has written in an action packed series book describing a trail drive of the old west.

The ideal novel is a perfect confluence of plot and characterization. Usually it starts with an attention getting scene or a section of character development that gets your attention and keeps it, because you want to unravel a theme, an event, or a mystery that has intrigued you.

Historical novels have an additional dimension of interest for aficionados: one wants to revel in the recreation of a time or a place or, better yet, to find anachronisms, so that one can criticize the author's historical scholarship while conveniently overlooking their writing skills in general.

Having said all of the above I want to say that I find "the Owls of Gloucester" an interesting well written summer read, but please, Mr. Marston, don't think that I believe that the 50 monks of Gloucester Abbey drink their ale from glasses! This precious fragile material so rare in 11th century England would hardly be used for holding a monk's ale. I think you mean bowls or mugs of wood or fired clay. Perhaps the abbot drank from a pewter cup, but otherwise.... I might note in praise that my knowledge of the prescribed times of monastic prayer has been increased through reading this novel. I had known of Vespers, Compline, and Nones, but her for the first time I was made aware of Sext.

Late in the eleventh century under the reign of William, Brother Nicholas fails to return to Gloucester Abbey from collecting the rents. He remains missing for two days leading to concern and high tension among the residents of Gloucester Abbey because that is out of character for the monk. Anxiety dramatically increases when two novices, known for their misdeeds, stumble over the corpse of Brother Nicholas, whose throat has been slashed.

The Brothers and the novices panic while Sheriff Durand stuns the Abbot when he insists that the opportunity to kill the victim was only available to one of monks. In the area to resolve another minor land dispute, Domesday Commissioners Ralph Delchard and Gervase Bret travel to Gloucester Abbey to conduct their own investigation. They quickly conclude that the murder of Nicholas is just the start of an evil that will kill again and ultimately destroy the abbey unless stopped.

Instead of turning repetitive and as boring as resolving an insignificant land dispute (just ask Ralph), the tenth is a delightful fresh treat. The "locked door" who-done-it is cleverly designed and fun to follow as the lead sleuths struggle with a closed mouth abbot and an irate sheriff wanting them to stay out of his business to solve the case. Historical tidbits interwoven into the plot enhance the murder mystery. However, the key to Edward Marston's latest William era tale is the depth of the support cast which enables the audience to visualize medieval times inside a strong investigative novel.

Harriet Klausner

I read the book and found it very helpful with my plan to form a real estate parnership. I found the examples at the end of each subjet very helpful. However, it seems the authors went to a great length to demonstrate to readers that they are NOT gender biased, to the point where one would find himself sometimes cringing. Their objective could have been attained better by replacing all the He, she, him, her, with "he/she" or "him/her", and let each readers to choose the jender for themselves.

I found this title to be all-encompassing if you're considering entering into a partnership - whether it's an existing partnership or whether you're starting up a new partnership. In fact, I purchased another title on this same topic and I ended up returning it because I didn't see where it covered anything that wasn't already covered in The Partnership Book. I feel much more comfortable entering into a partnership after reading this book as I feel that I now have the necessary information to make proper decisions. I strongly urge anyone considering entering into a partnership to read this book.

Ralph J. Roberts has found that a devotion to family and geology can lead to a life well lived and he relates the story of his life well in A Passion For Gold. Roberts spent 44 years with the United States Geological Survey and after retiring, became a private consultant. His most important discovery was the Carlin-type gold deposit. The reader with a non-geologic background will want access to a copy of the Glossary of Geology to help with the few technical sections included in the book [there is a glossary at the back of the book, but it is not thorough enough]. There are a few awkward sentences and some extraneous commas [I think, being the extra comma and awkward sentece king myself], but this is a suprisingly comfortable read considering that most of Mr. Roberts' earlier writings were technical papers. I trained as a mining/exploration geologist and so it was easy for me to relate to this autobiography, but non-geologists should find much of interest in Ralph Roberts' life story. It was on top of one of the mines near Battle Mountain, Nevada that Mr. Roberts writes about that I found myself deciding to abandon my masters thesis in geochemistry and to devote my life to the education of America's younger citizens [I teach earth science at the high school level]. I knew I couldn't help folks did big holes in the ground just for a little gold. I enjoyed this book and recommend it to anyone with an interest in geology, but I can't give A Passion For Gold a full five stars because I think the technical sections could have been handled in a way that would have made this book a little more accessible to a wider audience.

Excellent read with good intermix of personal and professional history. It is inspiring to read as well as educational. Thank you Dr. Roberts.

This book is easy to follow and the included cd makes solving the problems easy. It also has online links for each chapter.

I had one of the worst instructors on the planet this semester. I literally had to teach myself this entire course.
This book made it so much easier. Great diagrams, simple explanations. I ended up with an A.

This book certainly has moments of great insight. Emerson's passion is quite clear and often well-articulated. But this is a very lengthy book, and many of the essays no longer have as much to offer as they perhaps once did. There are several that are invaluable, of course, but many of them have simply become too obtuse and arcane to be really relevant anymore. I read the book all the way through, but my recommendation would be that people purchase it simply for reference, and maybe to read the more famous essays now and again. In the end, many of the essays have disturbing undercurrents of racism or anti-democratic sentiment and Emerson's inability to see nature as a dark force, as it can sometimes be, sinks large portions of the book. We must bear in mind that Emerson was writing in a different time and that his comments that are now unacceptable were not always that way. Clearly this book is historically important, and it is obviously a worthwhile one to have sitting on the shelf to quote or occasionally reference, but it is certainly not the bulletproof guide to living that many have made it out to be.

This book is the complete essays and lectures of ralph waldo emerson. It contains everything you could want from emerson, save his journals. His writing is beauty in it's truest form. What he speaks is what you have forever felt to be true. When he warns against self-distrust in self-reliance you feel that he is not only speaking to you, but speaking for you. Reading this book is not only seeing what he has written, but is a demonstration of what he has written. When he writes in "self-reliance" of the reoccuring situation where people have to take their truth from another, the medium becomes the message. Emerson's work as presented in this volume has been under rated by philisophical circles for years. Here you will see that not only is he a great essayist, but that (while unconventional)he is a great philosopher.

A must for any Texas Tech Red Raider Football fan. From the days of Pete Cawthon to the Glory Days of Steve Sloan. This is a very informative book worth reading. I only wish I could get another copy as I loaned mine out to someone who never returned it in College. Mark in Raiderland

If you are a die hard Red Raider fan, this is the book for you. Summary of every year and every big game from the early days to the Steve Sloan era. Brought back many memories, though mine have only been for 32 years...it is very worth while and informative!

GO TECH!

Charles Kuralt never really believed how good he was at his profession. That's hard to believe, but it's a sad truth and maybe at the heart of the man who traveled the country for over 30 years, chronicalling what he saw and felt in his "On the Road" series for CBS News.

By that time he graduated college, Kuralt had a work record that would be the envy of a college journalism graduate. As recounted in "Remembering Charles Kuralt," a collection of interviews and essays edited by Ralph Grizzle, the high school senior had worked for a radio station, helping to call the baseball games of the Charlotte Hornet. The summer he was 13, he had a once-a-week radio show. He had won an essay contest on democracy and delivered his speech in the House of Burgesses in Colonial Williamsburg.

Kuralt knew what he wanted to be a reporter early in his life, and he pursued it with a single-minded determination. But not only that, he did it on his work ethic and talent alone, and in a good-natured manner that came through in his television appearances. "I never heard Charles say anything unkind about anybody," jazz pianist and friend Loonis McGlohon said, "that's true, and in thinking about it, it's pretty unusual."

"Remembering Charles Kuralt" covers the whole of his life and career: his upbringing in eastern North Carolina, his growth as a writer and reporter, his career at CBSNews, and his life in retirement, his illness, decline and death. It's an affectionate look that reveals more about the man than Kuralt probably would have wanted.

This is a well-written, intimate portrait of Kuralt presented in a way which itself reminds the reader of Charles Kuralt's own journalistic style. A beautiful edition including original photographs and a variety of personal and professional perspectives. Recommended for any fan of Charles Kuralt or for the reader who wants to learn how and why this charismatic individual transformed the nature of American journalism.

Louis Ferdinand Celine was one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. Louis Ferdinand Celine was a caring doctor and a man with a deep vein of compassion. Louis Ferdinand Celine was an almost insanely vicious racist and anti-semite, calling for the extermination of the Jews in three infamous and untranslated pamphlets and raving about miscegenation and the coming extinction of the white race. These are all facts and trying to explain the contradictions between them deserves a lot more attention than has so far been given.

In the meantime, read Rigadoon. It is not in a class with Journey to the End of Night or Death on the Installment Plan, since its focus is narrower. Celine's racism is more clearly in evidence, and even admirers will find the first thirty pages or so very trying. Celine was not a collaborator, at least not in a legal sense, but on hearing him rave about race suicide or hurling abuse at the resistance, who understandably hated him, one thinks that he should have been grateful he wasn't shot. After that, we get to the novel proper, which is a lightly fictionalized version of the last months of the war. Time, and much else is rather hallucinatory. At one point, Celine says it is May, at another point he is told about Rommel's funeral, which would have been eight months or so earlier. Rigadoon consists of his nightmarish account of Celine's ultimately successful attempt to flee, with his wife and cat, from Germany into Denmark as the war ends. As he is doing so Germany is being systematically pounded into rubble and Celine provides some horrifying passages about painfully slow trains that could be doused at any minute with phosphorous. At one point Celine suffers from a concussion. Along the way Celine and his party meet 17 mentally retarded children, and despite much abuse of these pathetic children, Celine manages to see them safely into Denmark. It is rather revealing though that he never mentions that the Nazis tried to slaughter precisely these children. Through it all we see the trademark Celine style, the famously obscene vernacular, the pages dotted with ellipses, a style which looks so easy, and yet Celine worked so hard on. Obviously, this is a novel which should be better known.

This is one of the best books I have ever read go out and buy it now

Ralph Bagnold, brother of "National Velvet" author, Enid Bagnold, was a self-educated physicist, who was the first person to describe the movement of sand as a fluid. This fascinating account of desert exploration of the 1930's reads like an Everest-style expedition to the Sahara. Passing reference is made to Count Laszlo De Almasy, Ralph Fiennes character from the film, "The English Patient." Bagnold is a fun and witty writer in the best self-effacing English sense. His contributions to our understanding of fluids is undeniable. I fell in love with sand - a beautiful and fascinating medium.

I came across this book purely by accident, as I researched sediment transport for a thesis. I found the content totally absorbing and regret that I will never get to meet the author, who's writing style and experiences marked him as a real human treasure. This is a book for all ages, with concise anecdotes that have you laughing and wondering. It is interesting to read about the involvement of New Zealand troops in the LRDP and Bagnold's determination for this group to succeed; ironic when you consider a Kiwi is generally known for his ingenuity and this group were led by one of the most ingenious men of all, an Englishman. I especially like the concept that discovery and research do not require either tertiary learning, or expensive lab equipment, just an enquiring and analytical mind and a good dose of common sense. Thank you Mr Bagnold, for sharing a part of your life with me, I am much the richer for it.