I will be reading more Pat Welch books. Her mysery was well planned and believabe. But I was most impressed by the relationship depicted. I have found lesbian relationships in books to be awkward, but this was well done.

If you like crazy metaphors worked into the pages of a book like spillt lunch, you've got to give Rob Smith's stuff a gander. He writes well, he conceives interesting plots, and he throws it all together like a thousand monkeys banging on a thousand typewriters. I love all of his books, and seeing as I've met the author, I can vouch for his character and his good taste in cologne.

FAMILY MATH FOR YOUNG CHILDREN is an excellent source of fun activities to do with pre-school children. Each activity helps to instill an appreciation for mathematics and emphasizes mathematical discovery. If all young children had the opportunity to experience these activities, we would have fewer adults afraid of mathematics!

This is a great book that I am happy to own. This is a great gift book for kids and Grand Parents and everyone in the middle. My family will use this book to learn a new prayer every day.

Very enjoyable read! The story starts out pretty mellow, then cranks up the pace and packs a real punch in the end. The ending has a powerful, poetic quality to it. Jake, the main character, is an appealing guy who approaches life and those around him with an interesting perspective and almost zen-like forgiveness. Those familiar with the San Francisco Bay Area -- particularly Santa Cruz and San Jose -- will recognize a lot of local flavor in the book. Basically, the plot goes like this: Jake is a drug runner who wants to get out of the business and Silicon Valley, and to have a quiet life somewhere, possibly teaching english. While at this crossroad, he runs into some old friends at a Rocky Horror Picture Show convention and becomes embroiled in a blackmail scheme to save the local Rocky Horror theater from being sold and turned into a bookstore. It's a seemingly simple story, but with all the twists and turns, I kept wanting to know what was going to happen next.

This book is a collection of four different works of Saint Augustine. The table of contents is as follows:

"Christian Instruction", introduced and translated by John J. Gavigan

"Admonition and Grace", introduced and translated by John Courtney Murray

"The Christian Combat", introduced and translated by Robert P. Russell

"Faith, Hope, and Charity", introduced and translated by Bernard M. Peebles

Index

The supplemental materials in this book consist of fairly short introductions to each work written by the translator of that work, footnotes that explain translation issues, references to other works, including scripture references, and finally, a shared index.

Each of the four works which comprise this book will be discussed in turn.

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The title of the first work, "Christian Instruction", leaves the reader to wonder whether the work is intended to instruct him in Christianity or to be an instructor of others in Christianity. The answer is: yes. To quote Augustine himself, in his discussion of it in his "Retractions":

"I...completed the work in four books. The first three of these help to an understanding of the Scriptures, while the fourth instructs us how to present the facts which we have just comprehended."

Of the "books" alluded to by Augustine, the first prescribes the proper attitude for the study of scriptures, specifically from the perspective of "faith, hope, and charity". The second prescribes a program of education, central to which is knowledge of language: both the general knowledge of language as a system of signs, and specific knowledge of Hebrew and Greek. The third prescribes a system of hermeneutics or interpretive principals and rules. Finally, the fourth is essentially a discussion of rhetorical methods of persuasion and their application to teaching Christianity to others.

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The second work, "Admonition and Grace", was written because a number of monks had been disturbed by an a letter of Augustine which they thought so exalted the importance of divine grace as to leave no place for human free will (and responsibility). The specific question they asked was:

"Why are we preached to, and given commands, in order to have us avoid evil and do good, if it is not we ourselves who do these things, but God who effects in us the will and the deed?"

To the immediate question, Augustine in reply developed the doctrine that while man of his own free will could do no good without grace, he could recognize his own evil, and in that power lay his responsibility:

"Whenever you fail to follow the known commands of God and are unwilling to be admonished, you are for this very reason to be admonished, that you are unwilling to be admonished...You are unwilling to have yourself shown to yourself, that you may see your own deformity, and seek one to reform you, and beg Him not to leave you in your ugliness of soul."

Not content with having answered the question at hand, Augustine went further, and discussed the ultimate origin of sin, and the state of man and the fallen angels before their respective falls and the nature of those falls. Going further yet, he discusses grace with regard to Mary and the elect, and still further, ultimately ending in a theodicy.

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The third work, "The Christian Combat" is a short, muscular work "written in a plain style for brethren not proficient in the Latin language". Its end is to lay out how a Christian should live, and to identify heresies that Christians should avoid falling into. As befitting its audience and purpose, it is simple and direct. The basics of Christian belief and scriptural justifications for them are quickly described, then then warnings are given a series of heresies that must be rejected.

The points of Christian belief covered are the nature of evil (Manichaean dualism being explicitly rejected), the governance of Providence, salvation through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and God as the Trinity.

The list of heresies to be rejected is actually the bulk of the work. Each begins with a "Let us not heed..." introduction, followed by a description of the particular heresy, and then a justification (generally scriptural, sometimes logical) for why it should be rejected.

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"Faith, Hope, and Charity", the fourth and final work in the book, is also known as the "Enchiridion", or handbook. It was written in response to a letter containing a list of questions pertaining to Christian doctrine.

"Faith, Hope, and Charity" begins by discussing is a wide-ranging work, as its origin might suggest. Most of the work is loosely organized around the apostles' creed as a framework for explaning the faith. As such, it discusses belief in God, the goodness of creation, the nature of sin, the origin of sin, God's grace and Christ as the means of man's salvation, the church, the resurrection of the dead, the relation between providence and free will, hope and the Lord's prayer, and finally charity as the crowning principal of the commandments and the true good at which man should aim.

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For my part, the work that really stood out was "Grace and Admonition". The subtlety and power of Augustine's solutions to the problems of grace and free will make truly impressive reading. Several times, I went back to the beginning and started reading again - not because I didn't understand it, but because I was so floored by it, that I simply had to read it again right away.

The table of contents of this collection is as follows:

The Teacher (Introduction by Russell)

The Free Choice of the Will (Introduction by Russell)

Retractions, Book 1, Chapter 9, concerning "The Free Choice of the Will")

Grace and Free Will (Introduction by Russell)

General Index (Russell)

Index of Holy Scripture (Russell)

All of the works are translated by Robert P. Russell, who also wrote a short introduction to each, provided footnotes, and added the two indices. The introductions mostly serve to indicate when and for what purpose the work was written, generally based on Augustine's own comments in his "Retractions", and also the historical significance of the work. Augustine seldom needs an interpreter, and interpretive commentary is therefore brief. The abundant footnotes concern translation issues, scripture references, other references (both to other authors' and Augustine's own works), and occasionally points of interpretation.

The first work in the collection "The Teacher", which was written in the form of a dialogue between Augustine and his son Adeodatus, whose early death may have led to the dialogue's composition. The dialogue does have historical substance behind it, as it does reflect conversations that Augustine and his son actually had.

The subject of "The Teacher" is language, or more properly, signs. The structure of the argument begins with a discussion of words as signs, then moves to consider that words themselves can be the objects of signs, and that signs do not have to be words. Initially, the argument is that the purpose of signs is to teach, but by the end, the argument has moved to stress the active role of the listener in learning and (briefly) of God as the ultimate source of all knowledge. In character, the work is much more philosophical than scriptural.

The second work in the collection is "The Free Choice of the Will", which like "The Teacher" was written in the form of a dialogue. Also like "The Teacher" it is much more philosophical than scriptural in character. The purpose of the work is to defend man's free will with regard to good and evil against the Manichaean view of man as a passive battlefield for the cosmic war between good and evil. The work got him into some trouble as it was later used as a support by Pelagius in his argument for the sufficiency of free will against the necessity of grace. Russell takes pains to document this by footnoting exactly what passages Pelagius cited. Augustine himself devoted space to this subject in his "Retractions" (that chapter is included in this collection) defending that he was not denying grace in this work and that his general position on grace and free will was coherent.

The third work in the collection is "Grace and Free Will", which was written against Pelagius. It argues for the necessity of grace and denies the sufficiency of free will. The form of the work is heavily scriptural. Augustine seeks to demonstrate that the Pelagian position is incompatible with scripture, while at the same time taking pains to avoid erring in the opposite direction - that because grace is necessary, free will does not exist. While Augustine does present a positive account as to how grace and free will can be reconciled, I did not think he presented it nearly as clearly as he did in "Admonition and Grace" (as found in the collection "Fathers of the Church: St. Augustine : Christian Instruction, Admonition and Grace, The Christian Combat, Faith, Hope, and Charity"), a work that I admire enormously.

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The collection as a whole is interesting in part because it showcases the variety of styles Augustine used in writing: dialogue vs. straight prose and philosophical vs. scriptural, and also because it shows Augustine as a defender of a complex position against oversimplifications in two different directions. Before I read Augustine, I admit that my eyes had glazed over at the thought of reading anything to do with "Manichaeanism" or "Pelagianism" - after all, why should I care about arguments against long-extinct sects? Well, the reason is that a good heresy never dies, it just changes its name and moves to a new address. Far from being a dusty exercise, I found Augustine's writings on these controversies to be very much of current interest and well worth anyone's time.

I can't recommend "The Feline Patient" highly enough. The information in this book has saved the lives of two of my cats. Soon after I bought this book, my 15-year-old Maine Coon cat became very ill, was diagnosed with diabetes, yet the ever-increasing doses of insulin that were prescribed didn't seem to improve his condition. The more insulin he was given, the higher his glucose level became. Concerned, I began to research the problem on my own, using this book, and hypothesized that my cat had not only diabetes, but also chronic pancreatitis, and that he was not only unable to produce sufficient insulin, but was also unable to effectively use the insulin he was given. Based upon the information in this book, I requested that several other diagnostic tests be performed. These tests confirmed my hypotheses, my cat's treatment has been revised, and I now look forward to more happy months and years with him.

While grooming my ten-year-old Cymric, I felt some very small, hard bumps in her back. These were approximately the size of an ordinary matchhead. Although they were very, very small, they were painful, and she cried when I touched them, even lightly. From having read this book, I knew that any unexplained bump or lump beneath the surface of a cat's skin should be evaluated by a veterinarian immediately. My cat has required two surgeries, but thanks to early detection and treatment, her prognosis is far better than it would otherwise have been.

"The Feline Patient" was written for veterinary practitioners, so the lay person will find the vocabulary challenging, and will probably require a good veterinary dictionary as a companion to this book. Nevertheless, the person who loves and cares for feline family members will find that the benefits greatly outweigh that challenge.

Thank you, Amazon.com, for making this book available to the general public!

I'm not a poet. I'm just a guy who likes chopping wood and watching Godfather movies. Several decades ago, I used to read novels and poetry, etc.. Then, I went through university, received a degree in English, and the passion subsided.
Today, as I write this against a backdrop of a bullet-strewn Church of Nativity and Palestinian girls blowing themselves up,
I find myself returning to poetry in order to maintain sanity.
Reading "Ferry Woman's HIstory of the World" made me realize what I felt long ago: we need our poets far more than our politicians. In this case, the poet remains nearly invisible "threading words through the eye of poetry's needle"
(from the Afterword). Susan Andrews Grace, the author, has the skill to make the ordinary seem extraordinary. Against a backdrop on nine hundred years of religious, historical and family conflict, Gilliosa Mary Fitzgerald, the protagonist, journeys from childhood to womanhood. If you think of Ulysses wondering how he came to be a housewife, you will have some idea of the scope of this beautiful narrative. It is a rich and complex serial poem, filled with humor and tragedy, wit and innocence.
One suggestion: if you're a bit lazy like I am, read the Afterword first. I your a serious, disciplined reader, read the poem, then the Afterword and then the poem again.
Terry Stimpson

This Festschrift for Le Cam was organized by former students and colleagues on the occasion of his 70th birthday in 1994. It did not actually get published until 1997. There are numerous papers written by prominent probabilists and statisticians who worked in the area of asymptotic theory that Le Cam was so well known for. Erich Lehmann provides an essay on Le Cam's years at Berkeley. Diaconis and Freedman talk about the consistency of Bayes estimates in nonparametric regression. Dudley reviews empirical processes. Yang provides an application of Le Cam's work to sodium channel experiments. Stigler provides an historical account of maximum likelihood through the work of Daniel Bernoulli and Leonhard Euler. van der Vaart covers superefficiency. Donoho and Johnstone present some new results on minmax estimation based on wavelets. Many of Le Cam's colleagues at Berkeley contributed interesting articles including Beran, Blackwell, Brillinger and Freedman. There are nearly as many applied papers as theoretical ones in this festschrift. Other well known contributors include Aalen, Millar, de Acosta, Picard, Ferguson, Pollard, van Zwet, Roussas and C. R. Rao.