Finally a book that goes further then showing some pictures...there ain't ! So all the place left is pure 100% usefull and revealing information. Not only useful for antique but also for younger, almost actual, porcelain. Indispensible for identification of the manufacturer and the age of a piece of German, Bohemian or Austrian porcelain. The information is seperately ordered by marks, by manufacturers or by names ! I don't know how I should go on without it...

Finally a book that goes further then showing some pictures...there ain't ! So all the place left is pure 100% usefull and revealing information. Not only useful for antique but also for younger, almost actual, porcelain. Indispensible for identification of the manufacturer and the age of a piece of German, Bohemian or Austrian porcelain. The information is seperately ordered by marks, by manufacturers or by names ! I don't know how I should go on without it...

This book was very theoretical, not very practical. It had a lot of examples, some of which were very interesting. But some of the examples were quite strange and weird which makes the book sometimes a bit nonsensical. I would recommend it if you are looking for examples of overly-spiritual gardens not for normal everyday gardening.

I found this an excellent and far-reaching book, beautifully organized into six "metaphors"--faith, power, ordering, cultural expression, personal expression and healing. This is a book for someone interested in exploring the deeper meaning and symbolism of gardens throughout history and in a variety of cultures, as well as the contemporary art of the garden and the exciting trend in community gardening. I found the section on healing particularly moving.

My fiance and I purchased this book as we are planning a medieval wedding. The title and description of this book implied that we would find lots of valuable information on that topic. Well, we found lots of valuable information for feast planning, or putting on a re-enactment (a la Society for Creative Anachronism), and very little concerning period wedding traditions. The most interesting parts were the recipes/redactions and the instructions for medieval dance steps. There are also several pages that contain sheet music for period songs. If you are looking to put on a reenactment or feast, this is the book for you. If you are looking for anything else, I suggest you look elsewhere.

If you are planning a Medieval Celebration of any kind this is a great book to buy. My Fiancee and I have been looking for medieval books to plan our wedding by and I stumbled across this one its been very helpful and I'm sure it will get alot of use. It has many tradations recipes and lots of fun games a must have.

The Medium of the Video Game is an anthology edited by Mark J. P. Wolf. However, to say that Wolf is only the editor is really an understatement, Medium of the Video Game is really his baby. Of the nine essays in this book, five of them are his.

Wolf is coming from a film theory perspective. Hence he is emphasizing the video part of the term videogame (a notion I disagree with. I feel the fact that they are games is more important than the fact that they are video).
More than this, however, Wolf is concerned with categorization. He lists eleven different types of spacial structures and forty-two different videogame genres. One of the problems with this is that some of his categories are questionable. Amongst his genres he lists diagnostics, demos and utilities. While it may be argued that demos are a distinct genre as they are trying to make you buy the full game (an argument I do not buy), I fail to see how diagnostics or utilities can be classified as genres of games of any sort. His rational seems to be that they come in cartridges or CD-ROM's like games and some game collectors collect them too, so they are the same as games. If you do a web search for his name and the book title you will find this chapter online, so you can make up your own mind about this issue.

There is one section that I do think deserves praise, the appendix. In the appendix, Wolf has has collected a fairly large listing of resources for video game research. He lists websites, books, and periodical articles as well as emulators. It is a valuable resource. However, I did not find the rest of the book as usefull and cannot really recommend buying it.

Mark Wolf presents a ground breaking and thorough examination of the video game as artistic medium, cultural phenomena, and a meaningful portal for understanding the context of what has become our new digital lifestyle.

A "Popular Electronics" January 1975 cover picture of the Altair computer kit prompted the founding of the Homebrew Computer Club, another milestone in history as we know it, which preceded the surge of features and utilities that characterized personal computers with recordable cassette tape drives in the late '70s and early '80s such as Atari, Apple and Commodore. Thus making it relatively easier for individuals to expand creative boundaries, soon to be seen as an inescapable irony allowing some early dark shadows such as "Custer's Revenge" and "FireBug", beginning a long list of collateral, ghastly underworld currents there are now. While we can trust our emerging philosophical inquiries will, in good conscience, examine the pressure to balance those freedoms with responsibility, our generation may so far have not completely charted moral consequences for a healthy society. Obviously video games are not just a fantasy theater, as some might fear, for the furious expression of male adolescent rage fueling new ideologies of terror, misogyny and brutalization throughout the modern world. "First person shooters" can visually and mentally exercise ethnic biases and assorted prejudices that assault human sensibilities and continually challenge the boundaries of those creative freedoms. And we cannot ignore some underground travesties that mimic other "unthinkables" like Columbine, Oklahoma City and Ground Zero.

Now, some groundbreaking museum venues are beginning to provide a quiet, safe harbor for contemplating and celebrating the best of this new American media, even while acknowledging the fears emanating from among its dark shadows that can be millions of times more [exponentially] powerful than the limitations we've known of the Gutenberg effect. For example, the chapter "Hot Circuits: A Video Arcade" by Rochelle Slovin, longtime creative spirit and Director of the American Museum of the Moving Image, presents insightful path markers while continuing in celebrating the best in American media history. AMMI's brilliant series begins with "Hot Circuits: A Video Arcade" 1989, distinguished by its marvelous gallery (and online, ammi.org) presentations continuing through "Expanded Entertainment" 1996, "Computer Space" 1998, and " Digital Media" 2002, marking a significant place on an historic trail of kinetic luminism preceded by other remarkable mile markers such as Wilfred's "Lumia Suite" at MOMA in the '60s, and Nam June Paik's debut at NYC's New School in the early '60s (foretelling his magnificent AMMI installation today). The history of man's cultural kinetic lightworks and precursors harkens back even to the to the magic lantern Phantasmagoria of the Renaissance and the Shadow Puppetry Theatre in Bali 1000 years earlier. As signaled in the AMMI companion essay here by poet and critic Charles Bernstein "video games are the purest manifestation of our computer consciousness", and with their engagingly playful and peculiar allure, "We've started using them as culture" observes Ms. Slovin.

The reader may find additional perspectives by looking at "Video Games: A popular Culture Phenomenon" by Berger, 2002 for a social context of sexuality, and at the "Ultimate History of Video Games" by Kent, 2001 for putting David Grossman's fiery challenge to video game violence (Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill) into an expanded context.

So, "what-if" my new digital appliance today is one thousand times more powerful, at the same price, than my PC ten years ago -- and then my next digital tool ten years from now is again one thousand times more powerful than today, at the same price ...will that million times more powerful tool routinely do things not previously thought of? What-if kids were to spend more time on their computers than watching TV? What-if "...the first primitive versions of the next PC interface have already been delivered ...and they're called video games." What-if we "put more computing power in a video game at the finger tips of a 9-year-old kid than NASA used to put a man on the moon"? What-if that 9-year-old kid in 20 years, comfortably uses a personal digital tool that is yet again a million times more...? Our new digital lifestyle is no more unnatural or less humanistic than book reading of the "Gutenberg Effect" has been. As presented here in "The Medium of the Video Game", AMMI's "Hot Circuits" and sequels elegantly mark a new path for those of us whose lifetime understanding of present reality would have more nearly fitted a society of thirty, forty or fifty years ago. Our historic environmedia landscape and our culture have shifted beneath our feet.

The real message of Mary must be to warn us and to remind us of the evil which befell the Medjugorije area just 50 years ago. In fact, her first apperance was 50 years to the day when several hundred Sernian women and children were led up the limestones hills by Croatian Nazis to be tossed alive into deep karst pits. These Croats, motivated by a deep religious zeal, killed in the name of the Catholic Church. Mary is here to remind us of that evil

Excellent work about a most wonderful place of love and warmth vistied by Our Blessed Mother.

Anyone with an unbiased view can truly see what this book is about. Something the previous reviewer is unable to do.

Midway 1942 provides an acceptable overview of the battlebut some of the illustrations are improperly captioned,the author also duplicates some charts for no apparent reason. He also confuses unti designations making it hard to interpret the details he provides. On the positive side this book provides many good pictures and diagrams of Japanese ships and aircraft.

Osprey Campaign series does it again. Why does it take the British traditionally to hire detail illustrators as good as this series? For the modeler who wants to REALLY display his stuff DIORAMAS do it better.

As the book opens, an unnamed narrator has returned, after twenty years, to the small Italian village in which he grew up, alone and unloved. A foundling abandoned on the cathedral steps, the narrator was brought up, for a fee, by a destitute farmer, who treated him more like a workhorse than a person with a soul. Eventually escaping as a youth to the United States, he worked his way to California, but when an accidental fortune leaves him "rich, big, fat, and free," he returns to Gaminella, where he confronts the harsh memories of his childhood and the even harsher wartime events which traumatized the town after he left.

In cold, realistic, and unemotional prose, the author alternates bleak memories of the boy who was always an outsider with his observations about his later life in the U.S. and his growing awareness of the atrocities that happened in Gaminella during the war. As the speaker reconnects with the characters from his past, particularly Nuto, a friend and musician, he notes the sameness of their days, their lack of hope, and the emptiness at the heart of their lives. The speaker has always believed that "a town means not being alone, knowing that in the people, the trees, the soil, there is something of yourself, that even when you're not there it stays and waits for you," a belief which acquires enormous irony as the town's collusion in events during and after the war become clear and as bodies mysteriously surface.

In language which is both understated and rigidly controlled, Pavese creates a world as bleak and cold as the moon, a world of secrets, a world in which there seem to be no dreams. His detached, almost off-handed presentation of horrors sets them in high relief and heightens their impact. Only when Pavese describes the attraction of the speaker to his employer's two daughters do we get a feeling that there's a heart beating within him, yet he remembers his "place," something which makes the daughters' fates doubly affecting and ironic for the reader. The moon and the bonfires, men and the land, nature and spirit, and ultimately life and death all combine here in a story about a small town, and, Pavese points out, "one needs a town, if only for the pleasure of leaving it." Mary Whipple

i came across the book because i was reading some material on jean-luc godard, from which i learnt that godard read pavese's work, so i got the book from the library... i really don't know how to say anything about the book, but it certainly is one of the few books that really touched me... the protagonist's nostalgic sadness on reflecting his childhood and its innocent charm, the solitude of (impossible) love were depicted as they were natural, natural but not natural enough for him to be at ease. the style is bare but this bareness proved to be great merit, it's like hou hsiao hsien's film

Mark Johnson is a capable writer, who demonstrates the weaknesses of any moral theory that insists on absolutes. In a redundant manner most of the book is about this weakness. However, didn't we already know this? That absolutes were guidelines, helpful rules of thumb, but not always completely applicable. Still it is a very good review (why I gave it three stars). Yet Johnson does not demonstrate that "moral imagination" really gets us anywhere. Is it really any more insightful than the old rules? Johnson takes us up a flight of stairs only to find the door at the top locked.

This is a very important book; though aimed at philosophers and the cognitive science communities, most general readers should enjoy it. Here are several quotes:

"[There is] a deep tension and dissonance within our cultural understanding of morality, for we try to live according to a view that is inconsistent with how human beings actually make sense of things, I am trying to point out this deep tension, to diagnose the source of the dissonance, and to offer a more psychologically realistic view of moral understanding -- a view we could live by and that would help us live better lives." (p.19). "Narrative is not just an explanatory device, but is actually constitutive of the way we experience things. No moral theory can be adequate if it does not take into account the narrative character of our experience." (p. 11

Mark Olson wrote this book after 20 years of pastoral ministry in various states and while serving as pastor of Hope Lutheran Church in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. His book joins the ranks of several books calling for the escape from the CEO approach of the predominate school of Church Growth.

His book passionately calls pastors to a systemic approach to Church Health and Growth through relationships and radical dependence upon God instead of through programs and man centered self-confidence.

While Olson does not write academically, his stories and content demonstrate an accurate application of the family systems theory to the church. I see this shine through the best in Chapter 8. Here, he illustrates very well how conflict often arises in a church when the pastor and pastoral family fuse with a church.

I agree with him that the pastor must maintain some critical distance while also staying in contact with the congregation. This is the healthiest approach for the pastor, and for the congregation. We must always remember that we are their pastor, not their overly familiar friend. I think every seminary student, new pastor, and experienced pastor who is inclined to over-function would benefit from reading this one chapter.

The focus of this book is pastoral theology. It does not claim to be a book on the sin problem of humanity nor on the primacy of Scripture. Nor is it about the ordination of women clergy which my Methodist heritage is not at issue with. Neither does it offer any pat answers for moving beyond church growth. His main objective is to get the reader to think differently about a more biblical vision of being and doing church. His creative use of stories accomplishes that goal.

I only see one main flaw in Olson's book. I would prefer a stronger use of biblical teaching on the church in each of his chapters. It is not only time to move beyond Church Growth, it is also time to move beyond a family systems only approach to church health.

What specific things ought a post-systems approach to healthy churches incorporate? It would help unpack the systems view already contained in the NT so that people focus more on God's grace & wisdom via scripture than human insight and technique via systems with just a dash of Christian language. If we are not careful family systems can become a new theology regardless of what view you take of the Christian faith.

I appreciate Olson writing this thought provoking book! It?s too bad that he passed away in November of 2002. I?m sure others will work on the seminal thoughts found in his book.

I so wanted to give this the five-star treatment, but couldn't.

Pr. Olson has so much good to say: that Church Growth is not working and more importantly that it is not God's way of growing the church, as is modernity's approach not that either.

What he presents is return to being a traditional pastor with a twist. The twist being trusting completely in being a means of grace pastor and then letting God build the church.

How well put. Except, he doesn't really ever come clean about the inerrancy of God's Word and repeatedly seems to back female ordiation as Servants of this Word.

Nor, does he come right out and speak of sin and its defestation, nor the pure gospel as the only remedy. Unless these means of grace put forward this pure healing balm, there is nothing.

Well serving as this book is by making pastors reflect on what their "God-given"task is and who they are accoutable to (and there is much good stuff on this), this book falls ultimately short in not clearly declaring a confession of faith that this reviewer can Amen.

Much to commend one's reading of this book. Much to support what confessional Lutherans have always and still are saying with the above corrections noted.

Mr. Waldstein is a bargain-hunting angel. This book is well-organized and a fun read, though sometimes directions are sketchy and hours of operation or phone numbers are wrong. It is less like having access to a city's reference librarian than meeting a friendly person who's lived in the city for years and knows all the best places though not always the details.

This was the first book of the Mr. Cheap series and is now in a second edition. Organized into four main sections (shopping, entertainment, restaurants and lodging), reviews are informal and newsy, usually around 100 words. The index is adequate and an appendix lists restaurants (the most comprehensive section of the book) by food type/ethnicity.

Well worth its cost though not the only reference you'll need.

Cheap internet cafes, public library lectures, poetry readings,kayak trips, jazz music...... Retail sections also form a large part of the book: infomation on second hand musical information is available; if you want to bring in your instruments to trade in. Similary, second hand bookstores offer the same service. A wide range of CDs, books and furnishings and electronic equipment for the bargain hunter with also locations of fabric stores for designing clothes as well as dress patterns. Besides listing the locations of more unusual supplies like where to get portfolios, there are address guides of the chains of larger stores. A good supplement to Mr Cheap's Guide is Romantic Days and Nighs in Boston by Patricia Harris & David Lyon. It gives great ideas for strolls in the parks, cycling, afternoon teas,picnics and brunches for two. Mr Cheap's guide does not provide maps or comprehensive transportation information and is ideally used as a supplement to a travel guide with location guides. Instead of a travel guide, a travel map is also ideal: hightlight the spots of the map of interest and then plan where to go and stay. Most of the information should ideally be used as early as possible; for bookings of hotels as well as current information on talks and free concerts. It is recommended that internet research is done with the book at hand: for the university lectures, performances, concerts and symphony sessions, current information is needed so read the book over and highlight places of interest and check up for more information. Some organizations also require that you write to them so do armchair travelling in advance.