Pretty good detail on Frank Shorter's rise from a pretty fair HS distance runner to a versatile athlete that could run national and world class 5Ks, 10Ks and marathons. He and Prefontaine kicked off the running boom. Shorter was part of the great USA running elite and central character in the outstanding Florida Track Club. Also, detail in his fight to establish more control of the American track athlete's rights to compete from the then AAU and the now TAC. Although I enjoyed the book I found it a bit choppy. It reminded me of a telling told in a series of interviews that sometimes overlap in detail. I think a greater collaberation would have been more effective if Kenny Moore (Sports Illustrated writer and 4th place USA finisher to Shorter's gold) wrote it with Shorter.

I have a copy of this book at home autographed by Frank himself, and I've enjoyed it immensely. Some people might find it a bit dated. It covers Frank's days at Yale U. when he decided to work harder at running to see how good he could get. It follows his post-graduate days, his training, the other famous runners he hung out with (from roughly 1969 to 1972), then there is an extensive write up on his 1972 Olympic gold medal and he discusses each stage of the race. The book I have was written before the 1976 Oympics, where he won the silver medal (beat by Waldemar Cierpinski from the GDR who was alegedly under performance enhancing drugs). Anyway, the book is a very fun read, lest we forget that Frank Shorter "invented" running and with the help of ABC's Roone Arledge, created the massive running boom that started after his victory, sustained throughout the 70's and still continues today. I still think he is the greatest long distance runner the USA has ever turned out. This book, more like a pamphlet than a hardbound tome, is still inspiring and great fun to read. It has lots and lots of pictures, all in black and white.

George Washington's voice faltered -- he was "unpracticed in . . . civil administration," he said, when he took office in 1789 as the first President of the United States. The new government he led was a gamble, liberty itself at stake.
In personal glimpses such as this, OUR COUNTRY'S PRESIDENTS, by Frank Freidel, gives a new depth to figures everyone remembers. It reveals personalities and policies with carefully chosen detail and keen insight.
"His Accidency" John Tyler rose from his chair to warn the Cabinet he inherited from President Harrison, "I can never consent to being dictated to . . . . I, as President, shall be responsible for my administration." For the first time a Chief Executive had died in office. But "Tyler Too" insisted that the office lived, all its powers as complete as ever, unbrokwn and undying.
OUR COUNTRY'S PRESIDENTS shows how men too easily forgotten sustained the pattern of integrity that Washington had set with unfaltering courage.

This book presents the men America chose. Its 248 pages contain more than 280 illustrations, 173 of them in color. It appears as the first in the National Geographic Society's new series of Special Publications. Dr. Melville Bell Grosvenor, President and Editor, calls this series "as rich in interest and varied in scope as the Society's magazine itself."

The 5-10 page descriptions of our first 40 presidents (the edition I read ended with Ronald Reagan still in office) provide a literally colorful look at America's history. Each description includes the presidential portrait and is accompanied by plentiful photographs and contemporary illustrations. The book is a collection of a 5-part series National Geographic published some years ago and thus the high quality of that publication is included here. Since it covers each president in its less than 300 pages, this is admittedly an overview / introduction to the presidents and does not go into depth on any issues. But given that this was its purpose the book does a fine job. Younger readers will find the pictures and captions get across many of the main points, while older readers can use it as a springboard to seek out more in-depth books focusing on either specific presidents or specific events in America's past.

L. Frank Baum is known best for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a children's fantasy that has achieved classic status through its multiple reprintings and because of the movies based on it, including the MGM classic The Wizard of Oz starring Judy Garland and the 70s musical The Wiz. Part of the appeal of Baum's fantasy is that it is quintessentially American, set in the heart of the midwest, and in some ways deals with the American spirit. Academic commentators have gone further in their study of Baum's work, saying that it can be read as a treatise on the America of the late 1800s, citing various political undercurrents in the novel. These arguments are based on Baum's work as a newspaper publisher, editor and columnist in South Dakota. Now the University of Nebraska press has made available a collection of the "Our Landlady" columns[1] written by Baum from January 1890 to February 1891--forty-eight installments about a fictitious boarding house in the town of Aberdeen where Baum's newspaper was published.

The columns are edited and annotated by Nancy Tystad Koupal, who does an outstanding job of placing the column in the appropriate time setting, explaining to the modern reader the differences that one hundred years have made on newspapers, political parties, mercantile exchange, and other aspects of frontier life. This is especially important in the context of the "Our Landlady" columns which were intended as editorials on the doings of city hall and the state legislature. The column also mentions, by name, actual townspeople in Aberdeen, and these people are described by both Koupal's annotations and in a separate index of important people and places of South Dakota in 1890.

For adult readers of Baum's children books, these columns are a rare insight into the mind of the author, dealing as they do with his strongest personal opinions. His advocacy of suffrage and the rights of women help explain the strong female characters in the Oz books (best seen in the strength of Glenda the Good's magic compared to the ineffectual humbuggery of the Wizard). One can also see his interest in the future, including fantasies of unlimited electrical power and methods of irrigating the plains, interests that were then displayed in the Oz books as different magical lands. Finally, you can also see him honing his talent for satire and humor, from broad-based visual pratfalls to punning wordplay, all things that would late prove useful in his career as a children's novelist.

Baum failed as a newspaper publisher and editor in 1891, just as he had failed years earlier as a shop keeper. But these failures proved useful when he finally found his calling as an author of whimsical children's novels, as he turned his experiences on the frontier into settings and characters for his books. Today, Baum's books are constantly in print and remain in the hearts of children of all ages. Koupal's rescue of Baum's earlier work is a blessing for those people interested in the real Wizard of Oz.

"Our Landlady" is a book filled with the newspaper columns Baum wrote for his newspaper. They are stories about daily life and problems during the 1880s-1890s. Baum wrote thse before his Oz books, but they are just as good and just as funny. (For example, Mrs. Bilkins, the landlady, says when talking about a group of girls that fight in the army "They are all single, and are bound to stay that way until they get married.") I would strongly recommend reading "Our Landlady" if you like to read Oz and other books by L. Frank Baum. I'm sure you'll love this as much as the other books.

Frank's account of the life of Lady Gordon is an interesting addition to the previous work by Lucie's great-grandson, Gordon Waterfield. Frank brings in elements not touched on by the 1937 bio, although Waterfield's account is equally as interesting. Both books do an admirable job of conveying the story of this remarkable and unconventional Victorian. If they pique your interest, be sure to seek out Lucie's own works. Gordon Waterfield's 1969 reissue of "Letters From Egypt" contains more of Lucie's letters than the original publication did. Lucie's daughter Janet also wrote bios of the family and her own autobiography, "Fourth Generation" is interesting in its self-portrait of Lucie's very odd eldest daughter.

Lucie Duff Gordon was raised unconventionally in an age that placed great premium on convention. As a young woman in Victorian London, she was part of a literary circle that included Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle, John Stuart Mills, Tennyson and others. Lucie made a living by translating books into English - but her greatest literary work was brought about by the circumstances that lead to her death.

Seeking out a hot dry climate in a search for a cure for her tuberculosis, Lucie traveled to Egypt in the 1860. And there, in a house built on top of one of the ancient temples of Luxor, she made her home. Unlike some colonial British who recreated a piece of England in foreign lands, Lucie embraced the culture and people of Egypt. And she was, in turn, embraced by the people she met. Noor a la Noor - Light of the Light - was the name bestowed upon her by the people whose lives she touched. Her letters home, with their vivid descriptions of the life she found were published to great acclaim. Lucie died in Egypt far from her family but surrounded by her Egyptian friends

Romano gives a wide-ranging (if sometimes disjoint) overview of PDF's uses in prepress, with one of the most comprehensive summaries of existing Acrobat plug-ins available. Romano knows prepress, and he succeeds in giving valuable insights into the proper uses of PDF and Adobe's Acrobat products in a printing or prepress environment. Romano also knows PostScript and gives valuable insights into PS's relation to PDF. Weaknesses include cursory coverage of the Portable Job Ticket Format and zero coverage of PDF's internals (operators, data types, workings). Buy this book if you're into prepress, not if you're into web publishing.

This is an excellent resource for someone who has some basic experience with PDF files and/or digital prepress and who wants a more profound understanding of how PDF works, how to optimize its production, and what can potentially go wrong. It is *not* a book for computer beginners or people trying to learn the basics of digital printing; its apparent intended audience is publishing students or professionals familiar with the industry and its terminology. As a journal editor converting to PDF prepress, I found it helpful in explaining the steps I don't see after I ship digital files to our printing company, and very informative on the "innards" of Acrobat and PDF. The book would have benefited from rigorous copyediting to remove repetitions and to clarify the book's organization. All in all a solid reference for publishers/printers using Acrobat 3 and PDF 1.2, though some details may not apply to the just-released Acrobat 4 / PDF 1.3.

i am teacher and i was sport in young so pole vault every interesting for me.

This book is considered to be the standard reference work on basic pole vaulting technique. While times have changed in the sport, Dr. Ryan's approach to it is considered one of the fundamental applications to the basic methodology of technique and tactics in the sport and is a must read for all who are just entering the sport or who have already developed intermediate skills. It is now out of print and has become quite a sought after item among coaches.

I originally saw the movie with George Hamilton and Suzanne Pleshette. They still show it periodically on Turner Classic Movies. Of course, I had to read the book to find out what is always missing and implied in the movie. Naturally, the book was out of print. However, I found a copy. I was right the book was better. Of course I was disappointed to find that Suzanne (Margery Lansing) was written into many seines.
While looking for his new book I found to my amazement that "The Power" has been re-issued. However upon reading the book, I found dates and places changed. The changes were not significant. I just wished that he did not do it. Arthur Nordlund was in the Korean Campaign and that was before me. Now he was in the Gulf War and that was after me. Luckily, I know if I had met him, he would have been from the Vietnam War. I would have named this book "You've got to have Hart"

I just finished rereading "The Power". Robinson apparently updated the text very slightly to set it in the 90's instead of the 50's. I haven't read the book in at least 25 years, so I can't recall all of the details, but it seems that he also cleaned up a couple of minor plot points. Overall the book is still quite good, but I think that he should have left it in the 50's, since that was its natural era.

The basic idea behind the plot is that a university gets a Navy contract to identify the factors that result in survival in battle (or other harsh conditions). They develop a questionaire, the people on the committee take it anonymously to "test the test", and one of the test scores is off the charts, but no one will admit to it. And then people start dying...

This is a very 50's idea at its core. This was the heyday of tests like the 16PF, which purported to be able to uncover people that were thieves (for instance). The idea was that you could write a test that included a lot of questions whose significance you barely understood yourself, give it to a big group of people that had a different "levels" of whatever trait you were looking for (measured independently -- that is, they survived desperate circumstances through something other than complete luck), and you'd apply statistical methods to construct the scoring formula that would be able to magically identify and quantify that trait. This is a great idea for use in a sci-fi thriller, so never mind that it didn't work very well. The only problem with pushing the book into the 90's is that this plot device needs some gee-whizzing to be contemporary, and that didn't change in the update. So my advice is to set it mentally in the 50's so that it's okay for the hero to travel by train, and ignore the references to the Vietnam and Gulf wars (which are glancing, at most).

I have used this text in our PLC class for three years. I really like that it is specific to Allan Bradley products. The workbook that goes with this text has programming assignments to reinforce the concepts. As I train on AB SLC500s exclusively, it is almost ideal. I say almost becaue there are many references to obsolete instructions used with a PLC no longer manufactured. It is due for a new edition. But until then, it remains a very good text to teach from, or if you simply want to know more about the subject.

The text used in conjunction with the accompanny study guide were required text for an automation and control class. No errors noted, very easy and comprehensive reading. An excellent reference manual. One of the best required text books I have used.

This book offers a wonderful introduction to the lessons of the Old Testament. It avoids missing the forest for the trees, while still giving specific biblical stories, and it never loses sight of the Old Testament's relevance to the modern world. The book takes a semi-chronological look at the books of the Old Testament, hilighting stories and lessons of particular interest. A wonderful way to come to the Bible for the first time, or to gain a greater understanding of it.

This book is the best kept secret. Mr. Jarvis really knows what he is doing. Keep up the great job Frank!