This authentic literature is a great addition to this ESL series. This entire series is wonderful. With new migrant students entering my district everyday, I have a population of students with diverse needs. This series includes lessons in Reading, Writing, Listening, and Speaking as well as relates all to real life experiences and other content areas. As well, real, authentic literature is included in almost each new thematic unit.

This authentic literature is a great addition to this ESL series. This entire series is wonderful. With new migrant students entering my district everyday, I have a population of students with diverse needs. This series includes lessons in Reading, Writing, Listening, and Speaking as well as relates all to real life experiences and other content areas. As well, real, authentic literature is included in almost each new thematic unit.

If you are a fan of western books, i strongly recommend that you find and read any of the Lone Star series. Every book is packed with loads of action ranging from gun fights to martial arts duels. Jessica Starbuck is awesome, and Ki if was real would be one of the best martial artists in the world today.

Okay adult western fans, this ones got it all! From martial arts and shoot-outs, to rape and down right sex! Jessie and Ki find themselves mixed up with some rough types when they cross paths with a group of Buffalo Hunters. I've read all but about five of this series, and let me tell you, of the hundred plus written, Buffalo Hunters is one of, if not THE best yet.

Marguerite Henry's works, _Misty of Chincoteague_ being my favorite, stands the test of time very well. I read the book as a youngster when it was first released. It has been a book I have purchased for all my grandchildren. A magnificent work! I hope the book lasts as long as the ponies!

Marguerite Henry is a great author! I loved all of her books and thought that they were all wonderful. I thought that all of the books in this collection were wonderful, and worth reading over and over.

Without a shadow of a doubt, this is the definative study of the theology of John Wesley currently in print. Runyon's treatment of Wesley's soteriology is thorough and balanced, but offers wise reflections on the meaning of Wesley's thought for Methodists and Wesleyans of today. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the theological foundations of the people called Methodists.

This is an invaluable book for anyone who is serious about learning Methodist doctrine. Dr. Runyon provides a clear exposition of John Wesley's and the Church's understanding of critical theological views such as justification, salvation and sanctification. For those who question the once-saved-always-saved theology and are searching for assurance, this book is a must read. It also provides a true picture of what the Church of Jesus Christ should look like.

Historian, professor, and playwright Daniel Wick tells us that we suffer from the illusion of limited consciousness and are ". . .confined in a perceptual prison of our own designing." We can escape this confinement through magic, defined as "the art of effecting changes in consciousness at will." Specifically, noetic magic, magic for the modern world, which is what this insightful and enlightening book is about. The end result Dr. Wick offers is the "vision of independently constructed worlds of meaning working . . . on the mind's boundaries." This reviewer, after traveling the exciting and profound path "Noetic Magic" maps out, found a means to recreate the Self and the universe. It is a path to be traveled by adventurous people of vision and courage who wish to construct their own realities! Richard Fuller, Senior Editor "Metaphysical Reviews"

Daniel L. Wick's fascinating "Noetic Magic" gives us not only a history of the Western view of magic but a series of portraits of famous magi. My own favorites are such mysterious eighteenth century figures as the Comte de St. Germain and Cagliostro; their prominence in an age aspiring to reason, and enlightenment through reasonableness, is particularly remarkable. But Wick demonstrates that reason and magic are not exactly opposing categories, and in the second part of his book he creates a number of links between Noetic Magic and differing philosophical and spiritual views of consciousness. This is the most daring and inevitably the most speculative part of this fine book, which deserves wide circulation.

Throughout the book, that motto is repeated.

By reading and absorbing the material in this book, the reader is left with the tools and the insights necessary to derive their own numerical methods.

No longer will numerical methods be memorized as textbook formulas -- now the reader can adapt and derive a formula to solve a specific problem, instead of trying to fit one of a small number of textbook formulas to a problem.

The distinction is made between numerical analysis and numerical methods, with emphasis on the latter.

The book is roughly divided into two parts. The first part covers classical numerical methods, using classical error analysis (truncation error, roundoff error). The second part reexamines these methods under the frequency domain, analyzing how numerical methods affect various frequencies (the "transfer function" approach).

Numerical methods are derived under an information theory model, such as by finding a quadrature formula of the highest polynomial degree of accuracy, given limited information about the function and its derivatives.

Matrices and linear systems are not discussed as much as one might expect, although one chapter convincingly leads the reader to question some classical methods.

The content is well-rounded, introducing many readers to topics such as random number generators, difference equations and summation formulas, digital filters and quantization, discrete fourier transforms and the FFT, and orthogonal polynomials. A background in calculus is all that is needed.

Many real-world examples and anecdotes are cited, but without too much detail or too many illustrations given.

This book encourages the reader to ask: "What information is available about the problem? How can it be used to solve the problem? What are the limits of this information?" The approach is practical, not merely analytical.

This book teaches what most other numerical books fail to teach: How to derive your own formulas, and thus your own solutions to problems. And that is perhaps the most important lesson of all.

This is the only book on numerical methods I can stand. But, not only can I stand it: now I love it. It's one of the cleverest books I ever met. Hamming must be a genius of insight. Even if you wrote your thesis on differential equations, I bet you will be enriched by reading his considerations on them, from the numerical precision viewpoint. The same is true for Fourier methods, only much more, as this is the main topic of this surprising and wonderful book. Since then I bought every book written by Hamming during his lifespan, which is unfortunately over.

'On-Site Management of Scuba Diving and Boating Emergencies' was specifically written for the average layman to use as a referrence while evaluating, managing or stabalizing a victim or eventuality during a scuba diving or boating emergency. It is presented in an 'easy to understand' format and covers needed equipment, management protocols, and important tips for divers, boaters, and travelers. This single source covers a library of information. A must for all divers and boaters.

Excellent Text. Will help keep you and your dive buddy safe. If there is a problem you can be prepared. Easy to read for all divers. You need to read this so you can help yourself. Its a long boat ride to shore.

This is not your typical verse by verse exegetical commentary. While it goes deep enough to satisfy your intellectual appetite, it really is more focused on giving you a resource for teaching and preaching, rather than giving you ammunition for your next doctoral thesis. In other words, it is highly practical and written for the average reader. This does not mean that serious students have nothing to gain from it. Far from it. But the goal of most students is to eventually be able to better share their faith with others and this commentary could be a very useful tool in that respect.

Before many sections of the book there is a "Preaching Focus", and what would normally be called exegetical notes are called "Notes for Preaching and Teaching." There are introductions to important sections and there are also helpful notes at the end of several sections. All in all, a very practical teaching resource organized in verse by verse commentary form.

This book is great! It's very well-organized, and full of useful nuggets for teaching.

The burgeoning literature that has grown up around organizational learning in the past twenty-five years is either uncritical (treats the phrase "learning organization" as a catchword for whatever it is the front-running Japanese or other organizations are doing and whatever the rest of the world needs to do to catch up with them) or distant from practice, skeptical and non-perspective.

In this book, the approach to organizational learning is normative and practice-oriented. The authors are mainly interested in productive organizational learning: how this kind of learning can be generated in real-world organizations and how practitioners can help to foster it.

The theory given in this book is primarily based on two types of learning: single-loop and double-loop. The authors have borrowed the distinction between single and double-loop learning from W. Ross Ashby's "Design for a Brain" (1960).

On case studies of known companies, such as Intel, General Motors, etc., the authors show "primary inhibitory loops" that inhibit organizational learning, and "conditions for error", and how to avoid them. The following list gives the most common "conditions for error" and how to avoid them:

- Vagueness : Specify
- Ambiguity : Clarify
- Untestability : Make testable
- Scattered information : Concert
- Information withheld : Reveal
- Undiscussability : Make discussable
- Uncertainity : Inquire
- Inconsistency/incompatibility: Resolve

In part I, the authors introduce the conceptual framework, both for organizational learning and for the relationship between research and practice. In part II, they introduce and illustrate concepts central to limited learning. Part III presents a brief classroom-based example. Part IV is the review of the recent history of the field of organizational learning.

Despite of the brilliant content, the book which is marked as "Reprinted with corrections August, 1996", which I have (paperback), is awfully printed. It is really the eye-killer. And nevertheless, it has some typos. Please try to find a version which is not "Reprinted with corrections August, 1996".

This is the definitive book on how people politics preventorganisational learning, especially when a company needs a doubleturnround. That is a change of culture as well as strategy. Some of the early chapters are a bit heavily academic, but the pursuit is worthwhile if you want to understand how many big old western organisations stop working - instead of reinventing themselves - whenever a competitor dramatically changes the rules of the marketplace. The authors seem to imply that what they call double loop learning across every department of an organisation is both so laborious as a change process and requires such extraordinary levels of mutual trust that it might be better to raise an old organisation to the ground, and start from scratch. Their research is full of evidence why the last two decades have seen so much downsized leadership. One question that occurs to me is will their pessimistic conclusions hold true now that companies can use internal media like intranets to turn all employees' thinking around at the same time? If you would like to discuss this or other provocations relating to this work, I would be delighted to help form an interactive book discussion club.

Chris Macrae, editor of Brand Chartering Handbook and MELNET www.brad.ac.uk/branding/ E-mail me at wcbn007@easynet.co.uk

I am a kid again when I read Robert Skinner, which is why I truly recommend
Pale Shadow, the fifth novel in his crime series featuring Wesley Farrell of New
Orleans. I'm breathless and at the edge of my seat as a gunman "reached down
and jacked a cartridge into the breech of his .45. The metallic clash was like the
crack of doom in the dim room."

I am a longtime devotee of Wesley Farrell, a professional gambler, a nightclub
owner on Basin Street, and (by nature) an alley cat given to prowling the mean
streets of New Orleans. This time out, Farrell seeks to help out an old friend
Luiz Martinez whose mother is dying of lung cancer in El Paso.

Farrell and Martinez go back a long ways, back to Prohibition when both worked
with rum-runners. Martinez was "a Texan by birth, a mixture of Mexican, Indian
and Negro that they called mestizo in Old Mexico." Even then Farrell respected
Martinez: "He had the kind of brains that criminals rarely have, the kind that keep
you out of alive, out of jail, and with enough money to last beyond the next
week." Martinez is a guy whose ex-girlfriends shed tears when they remember
how good they used to have it together.

Farrell learned enough in his night work that he began smuggling liquor on his
own. In the dozen times since then that he had seen Martinez, his friend "had
had some kind of new racket, and had been doing well with it."

What Farrell doesn't know is Martinez has stolen a perfect set of counterfeit

plates and the bad guys are after his buddy. Martinez, on the other hand,
knows the score. Going to the cops meant time behind bars. Returning the
plates was an admission of defeat and submission to execution. "All that was
left was to make war."

The situation Farrell has stumbled into -- a band of counterfeiters out to kill the
renegade Martinez -- can leave Farrell and his buddy as roadkill. Farrell's fight
to save his friend is tooth and claw to the bittersweet end.

Farrell has to find his friend before the evildoers do. Dixie Ray Chavez, the
hired killer out to beat Farrell, tells his bosses, "Martinez has three friends in
New Orleans. I'm bettin' he'll go to one of 'em for help, sooner or later." Who
gets there first gets to shoot first.

Chavez is one mean dude. He tortures one friend of Martinez "with a hot iron 'til
her heart gave out." On another victim, "it looked as though skin had been
flayed from her." Dixie Ray Chavez is a tuning fork for other bad guys to home
in on. He "liked to think of himself as a bullet who stayed on course until the job
was done." Chavez plans to be there before Farrell and gone before the
Treasury agents stumble in.

Farrell and Pale Shadow are fun for all Farrell's secrets, the most important
being that he is Creole and passing for white in a racist society. His next best
secret is his close relationship with his father, Frank Casey, a red-headed Irish
cop ready to retire from the New Orleans Police department.

Skinner has written four previous Wesley Farrell novels and four nonfiction
books about the hard--boiled detective tradition. He is actually a well-respected
academic at Xavier University in New Orleans.

Pale Shadow takes place during September, 1940, in New Orleans, when the
Negro Detective Squad covered the crimes the white guys won't and backed off
the "white" cases. A time for riverboat gambling. A time when "a well-dressed
man with a slick line of jive" can go a long way.

The counterfeiters are pros: "The engraving technique is so good that the
Bureau of Engraving and Printing is jealous. And the paper is good enough to
fool ninety-seven percent of the people who touch it."

No all cops in Pale Shadow are good guys, either, which surprises no one who
knows New Orleans and its histories. "If there had existed in Detective Matty
Paret even a scintilla of honesty, he might have been an outstanding detective.
He was intelligent, thoughtful, and even possessed a certain shrewd insight into
the foibles of his fellow man. Had he liked money a little less and hard work
more, he'd have been a sergeant already."

I envelope myself in this mythical past of crooked cops, honest robbers and the
gray people who slide between them like a sharpened knife edge. I luxuriate in
the world I am too young to have ever been a party to, a world I most likely
would never have survived within, a world that helps me deal the real, everyday
villains on the front page and the cable headlines.

Wesley Farrell is a questionable hero in the same way that the 1930 and 1940
movies celebrated questionable heroes with actors like Humphrey Bogart, Dick
Powell, and Bob Mitchum. Skinner writes, "Farrell moved silently through the
crowd, his eyes glowing in that peculiar way from the shadow of his hat brim.
Occasionally somebody felt the feral quality emanating from him and stepped to
the side, hurriedly dragging a companion from Farrell's path." Locals whisper
his name when he passes.

Wes Farrell has that classic tenuous relationship with the cops, too. He has
some friends, but even his friends suspect there's much wisdom percolating
behind his mulatto features.

Yes, Wesley Farrell is biracial. So few writers are multicultural, and yet this
world grows more so every day. True cities like New Orleans have always been
multicultural -- although that phrase is still rings new to the city and the world --
and yet Farrell is not part of that 1940s racist past. In the real 1940s Farrell's
story would have been played out as another Example of the Tragic Mulatto, or
worse the Tragic Half-breed. (Think of Paul Newman playing Elmore Leonard's
Hombre; a man so marginalized, he isn't allowed a name until after he dies
saving all the whites.)

Farrell passes for white, and many call him "the great white hope, Wes Farrell,
who reaches down to help all the poor, helpless niggers in distress." Farrell
generally pulls off the masquerade, but not all the times. "Men never asked him
why he did the things he did. It was always the women who tried to understand,
who wanted an explanation for why he behaved in ways that were inexplicable in
a white man."

Skinner gives these denizens of New Orleans the wonderful names that 1940s
crime novels thrive upon: Wisteroa Mullins, Little Head Lucas, cheap thugs
named Tink and Rojo, Margaret "Jelly" Wilde, Marcel Aristide and Theron
Oswald.

I love this world where bodyguards and bouncers can be murdered silently in the
night, this frontier of hard-boiled and noir. Where cons talk of "dumb twists,"
cons mumble about 'ofays," where only four aces always win.

A world that of course includes classic femme fatales: "She was tall, maybe
five-seven, with a lean, high-breasted figure and velvety skin the color of hark
honey." She has a devastating effect on men, too. Even men hard as rock get
goofy; "he had the insane urge to race around the room on all fours while he
barked the lyrics to 'Jingle Bells.'"

These are dangerous women. One of Skinner's gloriously described femmes
owns and operates Sparrow's Joint, a most curious night club down along the
riverfront warehouses. "Her sallow skin and bold, handsome features were
those of a Jew or an Arab, Farrell had never known which." Sparrow tells
Farrell, "I'll simply tell you to be careful. The other side of the world is on fire

now, but evil energy is in the air even here."

Skinner doesn't over-furnish the 1940s. We get just enough to locate us in that
special time and place. A man might wear "a carefully trimmed mustache" and
"a stylish Wilton fedora tipped over his right ear." Another has a collarless shirt
and thick glasses made of window glass. A neon sign has the colorful shape of
"a top-hatted crawdish leaning negligently against a martini glass." Drinkers
toss down rye highballs in juke joints. Where men keep bottles of whiskey and
Colt .38 Supers in their suitcases.

Pale Shadow unfolds like a movie, and I love watching as "Farrell moved
through the noise and destruction like a hot wind, his rage and blood lust blotting
out all but the faceless shadow that retreated down toward the opposite end of
the building. His gun jumped in his hand until the hammer fell on an empty
chamber."

I love the town that Skinner loves. New Orleans is a border town between the
races. More complex than a love affair, and more shifting than standing on
quicksand. "The center of New Orleans was beating like a healthy heart, and
the death of a Negro woman in Gentilly meant little or nothing to the teeming life
of Rampart Street." Meanwhile, at the bordello, one can hear the bells at Holy
Ghost Catholic Church. We may want to visit Maxwell's Chicken Shack on
Derbigny Street or the Sassafrass Lounge for an matinee drink.

Pale Shadow is great fun. It's fun to watch how Skinner makes sure all the
interested parties keep abreast of exposition. Pale S

I'm surprised that more people haven't discovered Robert Skinner's Wesley Farrell series. Skinner's work is always well written, has interesting story lines, and has believable characters. However, unlike Skinner's previous novels in this series, our hero, Wesley Farrell isn't as prominately displayed this time around. Completely absent is his paramour, Savanna, a black club owner with a voice as rich as the delta. Rather, this time around Marcel Aristide, Wesley's cousin, makes a return appearence and steps to the forefront to follow in his sleuthing relative's footsteps.

It certainly wasn't unusual for a light-skinned black man to pass himself off as a white man in the New Orleans of the 1930's and 1940's. Farrell is such a man and cunningly dangerous to boot, but he doesn't disregard his black heritage or disrepect his white father, an Irishman and Chief of Detectives, Frank Casey. Most father's would regret having a son who has been an unconvicted career criminal, but Frank Casey's life has been saved and his career enhansed because his son knows the wrong side of the law as well as his father knows the right side.

Add to the complex story line the flavor of New Orleans, the taste of danger, a bit of intrigue, a wealth of racial mix and you have one of the most entertaining mysterys around. For other flavorful African American mysteries in New Orleans, try Barbara Hambly's Ben January series and James Sallis' Lew Griffin series.