I've just started to use this book as my morning meditation. So far I find it very deep and rich as each day offers a different experience with the Most Blessed Sacrament.

I first read this book as an undergraduate in the early eighties shortly after the death of my father. This book would be a great gift for both children and adults alike. The language is easy, light, and open. It deals with the subject of death without leaving a heavy or depressing air. In fact, it's one of those books that leaves you with a smile on your lips.

spoiler: there's crossdressing in this book

Women want to be treated like a princess but the real world is not as we wish nor how we were lead to believe by our parents. Life in not a fairy tale, the author makes this very clear in this book.

I have studied language, the names we bear and their origins since the day I found, "Name me, I'm Yours" in our local grocery store. This book is the most concise and valuable reference I have found on personal names to this day! Unfortunately, I lost my original copy three years ago and can't find a replacement. I hope you republish... it's a Bloody fantastic book!

It's about time there was a book written about what the people of Nashville actually think about their city instead of reviews of where to go and what to see. Nashville Cocktail Napkins lets you in to the minds of Nashvillians and it's visitors. You might want to get a copy, that little thought that you jotted down just before you left the pub that evening might just be in there!

A hitherto neglected topic among the plethora of Natchez books is the return of a measure of economic prosperity during the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, and the efforts to maintain that prosperity during the early decades of the Twentieth Century. Using a remarkable collection of wet-plate photographs that span three generations of Natchez photographers and nearly one hundred years, the Gandys illustrate the effects this new-found prosperity had upon the built environment of downtown Natchez, Mississippi. With careful research evident the book makes succinct comments about these photographs. Besides the changing buildings and transportation modes the selected photographs include frequent, compelling human vignettes--merchants, workers, shoppers, parade watchers and participants--the myriad of human activity that swirled about downtown Natchez. Although this is not a book of Natchez houses, it complements such books by detailing the area and eras in which the post-bellum residents shopped and worked. I consider NATCHEZ CITY STREETS REVISITED an altogether satisfying historical document and one whose photographs will serve as a delightful, if unconventional, guide to the structures--extant and extinct--of downtown Natchez.

As an anthropologist and an information professional, I highly recommend this book for anyone researching or studying Native Americans, historical or contemporary. What makes this an essential reference tool, in my opinion, is that it provides a variety of perspectives -- many of the authors are Native American, in addition to anthropologists, historians, etc. One must keep these various biases in mind when using this resource, but this diversity of voices is an example of what makes this source unique. Additionally, the entries offer many great historical summaries but with a focus on contemporary Native America that is difficult to find in other Native American reference tools that tend to focus on the pre-contact and early contact period lifeways and history of various tribal entities rather than modern issues and tribal life.

This book is a keenly interesting look into the ways, the works, and the world-views of the early inhabitants of what today is Southern New England. Dr. Bragdon writes not in an historical style, but rather in the ethnographic tradition. Thus, her chapters are sometimes rather slow going unless you're an anthropologist. There's a lot of jargon. It's still a great read for the non-specialist, however. I would like to recommend keeping a dictionary handy, for times when the esoteric nomenclature of anthropology becomes as impenetrable as a pre-colonial flock of passenger pigeons.

The book is not divided up by tribe, as one might expect. Instead, Dr. Bragdon has divided her work by conceptual paradigms, or by umbrella descriptions of features of life shared by all the peoples of the land under discussion. Chapters delve into cosmology, ritual, or social relations, as well as "Kinship as Ideology," "Metaphors and Models of Livelihood," and "The Quotidian World:Work, Gender, Time, and Space."

By the way -- if you don't read fairly carefully at the beginning, you may miss something important. Dr. Bragdon has chosen to employ the term "Ninnimissinuok" as a blanket term for members of ALL the local Algonquian tribes. Just be aware that that what the word means -- otherwise you might waste a lot of time scratching your head, wondering who, exactly, these Ninnimissinuoks are supposed to be. I mention this because it's not nearly so well-known a term as, for example, Narragansett, or Wampanoag -- but perhaps it should be. The author demonstrates it's validity, and it's importance.

The bibliography at the end of this book is worth the book's price, all on it's own. There's a discouragingly large amount of poorly researched, pseudo-mystical writing out there, on the subject of Native Americans. Well, you won't find any here! All the cited works I've tried to locate have been of an extremely high caliber. The bibliography alone could keep you happily reading about the native peoples of Southern New England for many, many moons.

Again, this book can be a little steep going at times, if you aren't trained as an anthropologist, but it's worth the effort. Definitely two thumbs up.