Collaborative written by ecologists Colbert E. Cushing (Colorado State University) and J. David Allen (University of Michigan), Streams: Their Ecology And Life is a superbly presented field guide packed with beautiful color photography, sketches, charts, graphs, and an authoritative text introducing readers of all backgrounds to the diverse, rich and fascinating splendor of streams and the chains of natural life that form around them. From the different types of rivers to the variety of different creatures that inhabit them and the surrounding area - birds, fish, crustaceans, amphibians, insects and more - Streams: Their Ecology And Life is packed cover to cover with an incredible amount of solid information and highly recommended for personal, school, and community library environmental studies and reference collections.

I loved this book! This superb sequel to "The Dark Green Tunnel" takes place a month after the first book in our tim, and about 750 years after the first in Mesmerian time! The twins Lara and Barnaby return to the beautiful kingdom of Twilandia only to find it in tatters and the good witch Mag Nammoder gone! Upon meeting the dwarf Quill, they discover that Mesmeria is once again under oppresion; but this time, an evil wizard holds the throne. To save Mag Nammoder and free all Mesmeria, the twins must invoke spells from the hidden "Secret Volumes of Warp" with the help of the extremely powerful wand. But in order to do this, the twins must first invade the heavily guarded Black Castle. And if they succeed, Lara has an inportant decision to make...

This book is not objective. Bloom has an axe to grind. Not that there is intrinsically wrong in this, but....Caveat Lector. Just why Bloom developed such a deeply engrained animus to the modern age is impossible to tell and the biographies that are sure to come out in the near future (I don't consider Ravelstein a biography in any sense of the word. Saul Bellow has axes to grind too.) will be interesting reads.-The basic problem I have with the book is this: The type of deep spiritual (Romantic, with a capital R) love that Bloom regards as lost in our society has always been rare. It has been confined to those who have had a cultured upbringing combined with an inborn sensitivity and spirituality. What has happened in our demotic age is that, as Bloom perfectly puts it, "Sure, you can be a romantic today if you so choose, but it is a little like being a virgin in a whorehouse. It just doesn't fit with the temper of the times and gets no support in the current atmosphere." So what? It's still Romantic love. And our age is not alone in this temper. In more or less all ages, the vast majority of the people have regarded this type of love as, well, "silly and immature." Bloom himself admits this in the chapter on Stendhal where he states, "Stendhal appears unable to depict a fully ripe man. Successful maturity is doubtful for him, and he may in this reflect a problem with the Romantic mood altogether." The most clear passage in the book, the one that comes closest to hitting at what Bloom's all about here comes in the chapter on Anna Karenina where Bloom says,"...there is an alien impression...of a gracious, semi-aristocratic civility that is now so far away from anything we can experience or hope to experience in our daily lives. The relationships of love and friendship have a delicacy and involvement with higher concerns that almost seem inauthentic. Rather than a model for our own lives, the social scene seems to be reminiscent of a lost world where people had the leisure to attempt to make works of art of their lives." It is this "lost world" that Bloom hungers for. In other words, Bloom wants us to go back to Queen Victoria and the following Belle Epoque, when the focus of society's lens was on these priveleged few. It is curious that Bloom chooses this attack on the modern world from a book in which the heroine commits suicide by laying herself in the path of an oncoming train bacause of that society's narrow conventions.-But, please don't get me wrong. I actually LIKE this book because it focuses on the most important things in life: spiritual love and friendship. It's just that Bloom expects too much and has somehow deluded himself into thinking that there was a Golden Age when it was the norm. It has always ben rare, and I don't see why Bloom is such a sourpuss about it. One gets the feeling that some deep hurt has been done to him, and now is the time for vindication. For some reason, Bloom wants us to believe that spiritual love is extinct when it is merely out of the limelight, where it is actually more authentic. After all, the most common adjective associated with the Victorian age is "hypocritical." -But the book is interesting, erudite and worth the read. Just don't get the idea that all is lost.-That part is just Bloomean bosh.

Bloom uses the term eros broadly, to cover all forms of the longing for completion--from the love of a beautiful beloved to the love of wisdom. Ranging broadly over the history of Western literature and philosophy, he also goes deep. For each book he covers, he provides a detailed summary that effectively introduces the book to the new reader, along with commentary that illuminates the book's contribution to our ideas of love, friendship, and what they and we can be at our best. I have reservations about Bloom's treatment of Nietzsche, whom he discusses briefly here and there. But having read almost all of the books he covers in full-length chapters, I find those chapters faithful to their spirit. The section on Shakespeare has been published separately, but the others are equally good. The concluding chapters on Montaigne and Plato are especially striking in the clarity and force with which they present these authors' challenge to conventional notions about living well.

Are the folks at Kirkus really suggesting that good things necessarily last forever? Are the poor stewardship of following generations and the sad inevitable decay of all things, good and bad, entirely unimportant? In the same way that a dish of my favorite ice cream will surely melt, so will Rome fall eventually. But what does that have to do with anything? As Whit Stillman has indicated in "Metropolitan", ceasing to exist is not evidence of failure - we all cease to exist, but we are not all failures. Bloom's books (and the books of his fellow "Straussians") are, in this reader's opinion, the closest thing to clarity we have in books these days. Intelligent, elegant, romantic, penetrating. If Kirkus has a better suggestion for remedying the "contractual" nature of relationships (which IS out there - take a sympathetic look), I await it with anticipation. Bloom's commentaries on Tolstoy, Shakespeare et al are clear and free of abstraction - the antidote to the glut of theoretical (read: unerotic) drudgery that exists out there on the subject of love. Perhaps Bloom doesn't say it all, but he shows a filial loyalty to those who have come close, which is surely more than we expect nowadays.

very useful book, which contains clinical tips

I am a CRNAP practicing in an ansethesia group that does a great deal of regional anesthesia. We have developed a library of texts to be used for reference/review. This text is the best of the lot with clear concise illustration and excellent text. If you wish to have just one book to use as a reference, this one is it.

Nate Heller novels are always fun. When I reviewed the last one I had read, I made the observation that you must accept one big whopper: that a single detective could do everything he does, in all of the various historical cases the author gets him involved in. If you can live with that, then you'll thoroughly enjoy the books, as I do.

In this installment, it's early in Heller's career, and he's still a Chicago cop. He's finishing up the first part of his involvement in the Lindberg kidnapping when Clarence Darrow calls. Heller knows Darrow because Heller's father owned a radical bookstore some years before, and Darrow was a customer. Darrow wants an investigator to accompany him to Hawaii, and help him with the defense of a quartet of accused murderers, who apparently killed a man accused of rape. The accused include the rape victim's husband and her mother. The kicker is that all of the accused rapists were Asian or Polynesian of some sort, and the rape victim, and all of those accused in the killing, are white. Racial tensions are running high when Heller and Darrow arrive in the islands.

The story is typical Collins, and a rather good example of what he does. The mystery is well-presented, and interesting. The author knows the characters, and the issues, involved in the real-life crime that he portrays. Most people think that Hawaiians are easy-going types, and many are, but there is also a considerable amount of anger about past discrimination on the island, percieved or real. This book does a good job of portraying that.

The other thing Collins always does is cameo appearances by celebrities. In addition to Darrow, and the defendants in the case, Heller runs into a young Buster Crabbe and a much older Chang Apana. The latter was a well-known Honolulu police detective who was the basis for Earl Der Biggers' character Charlie Chan. Amusingly, Detective Apana repeats some of Charlie Chan's quotes from the movies, with tongue firmly in cheek.

I really enjoyed this book. I think most others who are interested in history, and in detective novels, would enjoy it also.

Max Allan Collins is one of my favorite writers. His books which employ the character Nate Heller are some of the best mystery novels ever written. Nate is always placed in the middle of a true-life incident, sometimes historically significant, sometimes not. In this case, the incident was not particularly historically significant, if not for the appearance of an aging Clarence Darrow. As always, this Heller book informs regarding the incident and truly entertains. I have read dozens of mystery series. Nate Heller ranks right up there with Travis McGee and Elvis Cole as one of my favorite detectives. Perhaps Heller is the most developed and interesting of the bunch.

...but still a good read! I've always liked the works of Poe. This book was a little hard to follow and the names were a bit long but I enjoyed it. If you have any interest in Poe, you should read this book!

Edgar Allan Poe is probably best known for scary mysterious stories. The Cask of Amontillado is a perfect example of Poe's bizarre and peculiar style.

Poe's unusual writing style is not typical of most 19th century writers. Poe writes about death as if he was a psycho, obsessed with murder. This technique works because the reader is continuously trying to find out what happens on the next page.

In The cask of Amontillado Poe peculiar writing is at his best. The main character holds a revengeful grudge for his friend Fortunato. He takes him to taste a fine sherry, but he really buries Fortunato alive. The main character burring Fortunato is alive in a stone crypt. There is suspense throughout the whole story, the reader is always thinking about what is going to happen next.

Most of Poe's works are suspenseful, well written and exciting. The Cask of Amontillado will invite the reader into Poe's bizarre and peculiar imagination.

I have found use for this book in the practice of pharmacy. Drug prices are included which is good. The best part is where there is evaluation of the drug in the context of similiar drugs that are available. This information is helpful when deciding if a new more expensive drug is worth the money over similiar drugs that are less expensive.

I am a specialist physician. This is very helpful with practical dosing, formulations and cost of medications. Easy to look up side effect listing. This book makes me hate the PDR even more.

It may seem odd to devote an entire book to a single song, but if ever a song demanded such an exploration, itÕs Billie HolidayÕs recording of Strange Fruit. Almost everyone thinks itÕs brilliant, yet few people listen to it often. Holiday makes this depiction of a lynching so real that the song is physically painful to listen to. To this day, itÕs rarely played on jazz-formatted radio stations. ItÕs too disturbing. IÕve always wondered how Billie Holiday managed to get it recorded in 1939. Did radio stations play it? And where did she sing it? I simply could not imagine Lady Day, with a gardenia in her hair, singing such a horrifying song to people in a nightclub while they sipped martinis. And if she did, how did her audience react? The fascinating thing about this book is that it not only answered my questions, it also raised many issues I hadnÕt thought about. David Margolick has collected comments and anecdotes about Strange Fruit and HolidayÕs performance from a wide variety of sources Ð musicians who worked with her, people who saw her perform the song at different time in her life, and contemporary singers who have recorded the song or performed it. What they say raises a lot of interesting questions about the relationship between art and politics, as well as the relationship between an artist and her art. The most fascinating Ð and shocking Ð thing to me was the number of people who worked with Billie Holiday who insist that her performance was a fluke, that she did not understand what she was singing. She was an uneducated, not terribly intelligent woman, her "friends" say, and didnÕt even know the meaning of the songÕs words. To anyone who has ever heard the song, that suggestion seems insane. The words are powerful, but it is what Billie Holiday does with them that makes this the most disturbing recording ever made. It is clearly a song with a deep, personal meaning for her. In the end, after reading the book, and hearing about how she performed the song throughout her life (sometimes sharing it with an audience she thought would be sympathetic, but just as often using it as a slap in the face to an audience she felt did not respect her), you canÕt help but see that what makes HolidayÕs recording so personal, so deep, is that for her it wasnÕt only a song about lynching, it was a protest against all kinds of racism, including the racism of dismissing a brilliant artist as one more empty-headed "girl singer." Margolick makes a strong case that it was the first cry of the civil rights movement that began more than a decade later.

The late John Hammond, who literally listened to Billie Holiday's music until the moment he died, considered "Strange Fruit" to be the song that took the strange beauty he had discovered and nurtured and in making her art, took away her primitive integrity and aesthetic, and replaced it with inauthentic artiness, making her a celebrity for all the wrong (political) rather than the right (soulful) reasons.

Strange Fruit is far from my favorite Billie Holiday song, but David Margolick is right in assessing it as the fulcrum of her career and in a strange way, of her location in the history of black America, the civil rights movement, the American left, the relationship of the left to jazz and of jazz to the American intelligentsia, and the tragic misunderings among all of the above and each of the above in relationship to the coarse country that gave them all bith.

Margolick is one of the few remaining writers in America whose every sentence illuminates American culture. His is a quiet brightness, not a showy one, but my god can he write, with nuance and feeling, making prose do what Billie beauty once made do with sound. A great book from a writer whose feelingful, rich work at Vanity Fair shames the shallows where the rest of the publication's writers dwell.

David Margolick, a well published writer and journalist, has gathered the threads of an amazing story in STRANGE FRUIT. He deftly weaves together a sort biography of Billie Holiday, that gifted and troubled singer, with the story of her most famous song, a disturbing reference to the lynching of African Americans in the early 20th Century South. While many others recorded STRANGE FRUIT (a handy discography is included at book's end), Billie's moving version has remained the standard. The author also goes into the story of Lewis Allan, aka Abel Meeropol, the song's author and political maverick. Margolick draws upon a wide array of documentary sources and interviews to capture the song's and singer's dynamics, including numerous quotes and also a smattering of photos. I was thoroughly informed and impressed, as will be all readers.

While not as good as, say, Shakespeare's Politics or Shakespeare as a Political Thinker, this book is quite fine and analyzes a few of the plays in the Shakespeare cannon. Especially good is the analysis of Propero, Romeo & Juliet, and Antony and Cleopatra. The short final chapter on Hal and Falstaff is quite interesting as well. This book makes a fine read, even if it is not as good as some of the other books on Shakespeare's deep thinking.

Chicago has published the Shakespeare part of _Love and Friendship_ separately. Not knowing the play, I had to skip the chapter on Measure for Measure, but found the interpretations of Hal and Falstaff, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and the Winter's Tale intriguing. They seem to me to be a little long on plot detail, particularly in the last instance, but what Bloom wrote about Ulysses, Hector, Antony, Falstaff, Mercurtio, Romeo, Friar Laurance, and Prospero is at least tenable. And he is particularly acute about Juliet, Prospero, Octavius, Achilles, and Falstaff.

I am not convinced that Shakepeare was so conscious a political theorist as Bloom supposes, systematically surveying different kinds of political communities. (That was Aristotle!). or illustrating Machiavelli (that was Leo Strauss and his students such as Bloom) Shakespeare certainly portrayed a range of human relationships, though with some more reucrrent patterns than one would guess from reading Bloom.

In particular, I think that Bloom fails to examine the generally one-way erotics of many friends disappointed by being abandoned for wedlock. There is very little representation of what happens after the weddings which are the "happy endings" for some youth, while disasters flow from established marital and quasi-marital relationships in Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Othello, and even Romeo and Juliet, including the deaths of all the title characters in these plays.

Bloom's notion that Rome's imperial expansion was over by the time Octavius defeated Antony is very peculiar. Is it that there is no great literature about Trajan than makes Bloom ignore the later imperial growth? There was no "end of politics" or shortage of enemies, internal or external, for later emperors to contend against.

As an introduction to Bloom's values and ways of thinking about canonical texts, this volume is far superior to Saul Bellow's fictionalized memoir, _Ravelstein_. _Shakespeare's Politics_ is even better an introduction.

Though not as tight as Shakespeare's Politics, this group of essay's by Bloom is the fruitful result of many years of careful study. Of particular interest is the section on Hal and Falstaff. More clearly than ever before, Bloom discusses the pleasure and ambiguity of the highest sort of friendship. Philosophy and Falstaff are congruent but not equal....they both hover just outside of the city and must remain there except in the case of friendship.

Cosimo Rucellai

True White Tantra is founded in perfect concordance with the teachings of Krishna, Buddha Shakyamuni, Padmasambhava and Jesus of Nazareth, all of whom expressly declared that desire leads souls to suffering, and only purified souls can enter the superior worlds and positively awakened consciousness. Although it contradicts the Western concept of sexuality, true White Tantra demands the absolute renunciation of the animal desire. True White Tantra leads the repentant soul along the path of absolute purification from all that is based in desire, craving, aversion, fear, anger, pride, envy, lust, etc. Obviously, the most potent and most advanced teachings of Pure White Tantrism are the teachings of Sexual Yoga, in which the practicioner must completely conquer their lust and rejuvenate the soul; this is accomplished by transmuting energy, by converting the base energies into refined energies, and this is possibly only by saving every atom of sexual energy, thus the practicioner of White Tantra must renounce the orgasm. The various teachings that recommend occasional orgasms are what is called "Grey Tantra," as they are diversionary teachings designed to seduce naive seekers into believing they can pursue spiritual work while still fulfilling their animal lust. True White Tantra always requires the complete removal of animal lust, and any practice that sustains lust or ignores it is a door to Black Tantra. Black Tantrism attracts innocent souls through their desires and leads them to profound suffering. For more information, read "The Perfect Matrimony," "The Mysteries of the Fire," and "The Mystery of the Golden Blossom" by Samael Aun Weor.

This book loses major points by suggesting that it is okay for a man of 30 to ejaculate once every two days, and a man of 40 once every three days. As a comparison, Daniel Reid in his book The Tao of Health, Sex and Longevity recommends a general regimen of 24 ejaculations per year, or about once every two weeks, varying the frequency depending on age and the time of year.

Anyone who does qigong, taiji or similar work with their qi would understand that the ejaculatory frequencies suggested by this book are far too high. Three days is simply not enough for a man of 40 to replenish his energy levels and fully experience Eastern sexual techniques.

The book simply does not want to tell men that they should reduce their frequency of ejaculation in order to build up qi levels - my guess is that they would not sell as many copies if they told Western men to reduce their ejaculation frequency. Besides, most men are already ejaculating as often as this book mentions, as according to Esquire a few years ago the average number of ejaculations by men was 2.7 per week (about once every 3 days). In my opinion this ruins an otherwise good book.

I truly enjoyed this book. It describes everything you need to know to succesfully begin into the Arts of the East and West, with plenty of practical applications. Anyone interested in improving their level of activity will be surprised by the usefulness of this book. Great Choice !