Frank Gohlke captures the landscape of mid-America like no other photographer has! You can see deep into the soul of farmland by looking at his photographs, which were taken with a large format camera.

I did a lot of research about the American grain elevator. It was hard to come up with information that discussed aspects other than dust explosions and engineering. If you want to know about other aspects of the grain elevator, I would recomend this book. It also has great photographs!

This is a brief,clearly-written,well-organized monograph for a manager seeking guidance in planning and implementing a multistep project. The book is a very useful guide in helping a project manager in structuring an approach and monitoring the progress through to final conclusion.

Project management is how you achieve change to a product, to a service or to a process. Vital knowledge in our fast-changing environment! Change is achieved by moving tnrough five project phases: Initiating, Planning, Executing, Controlling and Closing. This booklet takes you through the project management process in a "user-friendly" way, putting you rapidly and easily in a position to "land running" with your project.

Ever since I fell in love with They Might Be Giants, I have always wanted to learn to play the accordion... I bought an accordion almost a year ago but never got serious about it, but finally decided to just LEARN. On a whim, I bought this book from Amazon and now - TWO DAYS after receiving it - I am able to play waltzes and other complex music I'd never thought I'd be able to play!!
It is important to understand just HOW little experience I've had with musical instruments. Before buying this book, I had no concept of any kind of musical theory, I couldn't read sheet music, I'd never made any kind of music in my life. Now I feel like there's no limit to what I can do!

The legendary Chet Atkins, who recorded something like 175 albums, even wrote an "Ode to Mel Bay." This series of instructional books has been around for decades. When I was a whippersnapper, I thought they were terribly boring. I've played piano for about 40 years, and recently developed a curiosity about the accordion. I bought this to learn some basics by myself , without benefit of a teacher.

If you were alone on a desert island with nothing but an accordion and this book, (how's that for a scary thought?) you could become a decent accordion player. This book is appropriate for the total neophyte to music, as well as someone with musical experience who is new to the instrument. It is organized in a logical and stepwise manner, with successive exercises and tunes building on previous ones.

I highly recommend this book

For more than 20 years, I relied on Schickel for guidance when determining which films to see; also, for gaining a better understanding of the films I had seen. In this volume, he provides interviews with eight great directors: Hitchcock, Capra, Minimill, Cukor, Hawks, Wellman, Vidor, and Walsh. In recent weeks, I have also read Robert J. Emery's two The Directors (Take One and Take Two) and Bogdanovich's Who the Devil Made It which also offer interviews and conversations with various great directors. Don't worry about duplications; that is, what Cukor, Hawks, Hitchcock, Walsh, and Wellman have to say. Bogdanovich, Emery, and Schickel have different questions to ask, different nuances of film making to explore, and approach the directors from quite different perspectives. The responses they obtain from the same directors differ. For that reason, I strongly urge fellow film buffs to purchase all of these volumes. The order in which they are read is unimportant.

What differentiates Schickel from Bogdanovich and Emery is the fact that, for many years, he wrote film reviews for Time magazine and thus had an immense audience with which to share his opinions about more than a thousand films. Also, he is the author of more than 20 books about film making which include biographies of Marlon Brando, Cary Brando, and James Cagney. Over the years, he has earned and richly deserves his reputation as one of the most thoughtful and knowledgeable of film authorities. In this volume, he interacts with eight of the greatest film directors. At no time does he seem intimidated by them nor does he ever disrupt the flow of information exchanged with self-serving observations. He guides each director into subject areas which are probably of great interest to most film buffs but he also allows each director to ramble, digress, etc. when reminiscing or when sharing specific opinions about films and actors with whom they were associated. Sure, there is some delicious gossip. And yes, some insights not otherwise available. However, for the most part, Schickel sets up various subjects and then allows each director (many of them a personal friend) to proceed wherever he may wish, at whatever pace he may prefer. His brilliant orchestration of responses ensures their scope and depth. That is to say, he did not merely turn on the recorder and then let each of the eight take it from there. On his reader's behalf, Schickel remains actively involved, indeed engaged in the exchange of information but at no time is intrusive. Within its genre, this is indeed a "classic."

This film critic's survey of eight of Hollywood's finest directors and their works uses the interview process to explore the work of American filmmakers over the last decades. Hitchcock, Capra, Cuckor and others share their achievements in a revealing set of interviews covering special challenges and observations.

After all that has been written about Jackson, Vandiver's treatment is still the best. Highly recommended.

This is an essential book for anyone's personal library. Smart, concise, well-illustrated, and comprehensive it tells the story of one of early America's greatest field commanders. Never engaging the question of North versus South and the issues that sculpted the Civil War, Vandiver focuses on the man, his legend, and the simple values he built his life around.

i am an engineering student and i enjoy reading this book. Although many topics are about psychology, you can find all kind of different subjects that you will never find anywhere else. That is way it is so valuable. the book is very heavy.

The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences - "MITECS" - is a truly excellent book. MITECS is the book I spent four years wishing for back when I started studying cognitive science. MITECS is also a very *large* book; I've set out to read all 471 articles, and I'm currently on "Computational Neuroscience" (p. 166 of 900), although I've also read a lot of other articles as circumstances required. From that sample size, my comments:

The good news: There are some truly excellent articles in this book. Microcolumns and macrocolumns, cerebellar chips, the pathways of the visual system - you can read this book and find out a hundred amazingly cool things that you never even realized you desperately needed to know. Oddly enough, MITECS is also a pretty good as an encyclopedia - if you suddenly need to know more about vision, you'll find what you need to know in "Visual Anatomy and Physiology". (Or "Visual Processing Streams". Or "High-Level Vision". Or "Computational Vision". Or "Mental Rotation". You do need to do a certain amount of hunting, if it's a sufficiently broad subject. More than half the cerebral cortex is devoted to vision - see "Mid-Level Vision" - and MITECS reflects this fact.)

MITECS *excels* as an authoritative reference; you'll almost never need to quote anything else. If you're familiar with cognitive science, you'll often laugh when you get to the end of an article and see the author's byline: "Columns and Modules" by William Calvin, "Chinese Room Argument" by John Searle, "Evolutionary Computation" by Melanie Mitchell, "Evolutionary Psychology" by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.

The bad news: If you try to read MITECS linearly, you will find that many of the articles, perhaps even a majority, are eminently skippable. (For the record, I read them anyway.) As all of the articles were written by independent individuals - none of whom could read the book first, since it didn't exist yet - there is understandably a great deal of duplication of information. Every third author feels the need to inform you that the mind is a computational information-processing system. (If I had one request to make of the hundreds of authors who write the next edition, it would be: "Skip all the introductory material and the philosophy and try to pack in as much useful detail as you can.") There are also some understandable problems with depth of coverage, made worse by the aforesaid tendency to write introductions; whenever I read an article about a topic that I had earlier studied in more detail, it really brought home the realization that each of these 471 articles tries to cover a topic about which *multiple* entire books have been written.

There are several things I'd like to see in future editions of this book. First and foremost is *less philosophy* and more focus on concrete details, particularly *surprising* details, or details that have something substantial to say about how the mind works. I don't want to know what David Hume thought about causality; I want to know if anything interesting happens when research subjects are asked to reason about causality. (I must also confess myself uninterested in most of the biographical articles that form much of MITECS - but then, that's probably because I'm not using it to study history.) Finally, I would like to see a neuroanatomical index as well as a table of contents. It's already a big book, but they can afford another six pages to show a detailed neuroanatomical map, with names for the areas, and references to the appropriate sections of the book. Such a map would be an enormous help to those of us trying to build up a concrete visualization of the brain.

Conclusion: This is a *really good* book. It's not so much "a good book with a few drawbacks" as "an excellent book with tremendous potential for *even more* improvement", and I mean this in all seriousness. If you're a cognitive scientist, you have basically no choice but to buy this book. If you're a student of the mind or a cognitive hobbyist, then this may not be the *first* book you buy, but you will buy it sooner or later.

It's just such a great book.

quite happy with the purchase. Seller has good communication and speedy shipping. the book is wonderful.

I liked moonbears pet because it is about a friendship that is ruined and then restored at the end.

I love this book because the pictures are great and I can relate. This story is about a bear that wants to dance with the moon but was scared to ask. So Bear asks the clouds, "Clouds, will you dance with me?" The clouds didn't answer so Bear went inside for bedtime. The next morning fog was outside and Bear was happy until the fog left. Bear cried and his friend Little Bird told him they went to work. Bear had work too, so they went inside. Next time Bear looked outside there was rain. Clouds sent rain to dance with Bear. After the rain left Bear wasn't sad. Did Bear ask moon to dance? Read the book to find out.

This has always been one of my favorite chidrens books. I lovereading about bear and bird trying to dance with weather. The authoris very creative describing things such as when the fog comes bear thinks he dancing with the clouds. My little brother has also loved this, and he hardly likes any books. I also love it when the moon reflects of the puddle left by the rain, and he thinks he's dancing with the moon. This will always be one of my favorite chidrens books of all time.

This is one of the most complete collections of information on waterfowl available. It contains beautiful pictures as well as complete information on waterfowl from all over the world. The written text is excellent giving many details about each species as well as general descriptions of the behaviors including courtship, migration, feeding, reproduction, flight, etc. This is a must for all nature lovers including wildlife artists, naturalists and birders.

This is really the most beautiful and complete book about waterfowl I ever bought about waterfowl. About 450 pages and many, many (about 700) full coloured pictures! For all waterfowl lovers, breeders, enthusiasts etc. a must to have! You can find all screamers, ducks, geese and swans with great and usefull information about their habitat and many more.

This book is an absolute must not only for loyal followers of a natural rights theory as basis of the US constitution. Every scholar who wants to research the foundations of American constitutionalism in depth should have this book in the personal library. It his here that he will find pure Lockeanism and is here that Zuckert puts forward his case of Lockean natural rights and social contract theory as ideological basis for the founders in such a concise way that it is difficult to argue against his case. Of course this is what avid Zuckert readers are used to. This book, however, in referring to Jefferson as a natural rights thinker argues the natural rights theory with one of the most convincing witnesses you can find in American history: Thomas Jefferson. Zuckert depicts the Declaration of Independence and American political thought from an interesting perspective, Jefferson's viewpoint. He succeeds in disputing the main opposing theories to the natural rights theory such as the exemplary role of classical Greece and Rome, the continuity theory based on Puritan thought and Bailyn's point that Locke was only one among others influential on American political thought, to name just a few. I did note, however, a certain tendency to neglect historical facts especially as far as the influence of the English common law and Whiggish thought on the framers is concerned. Finally, that Zuckert did not examine the Constitution itself as closely as the Declaration of Independence is not only excusable. It serves a good purpose: to underline the importance of the Declaration of Independence as an outflow of quintessential American thought, thus a document America should be proud of.

Yet again, Michael Zuckert has produced a forceful, challenging, and overly fascinating work of scholarship. His previous work, "Natural Rights and the New Republicanism," in many ways a "prequel" to this volume, was a historical and not to mention philosophical landmark. This work picks up right where he left off. Part I of the work consists of an in depth analysis of the Declaration of Independence. This interpretration bristles with new insight. Unlike many past scholars, Zuckert makes an overt effort to place the Declaration in context. He does this by examining other sources of information, e.g. Thomas Jefferson's "Notes on Virginia" for instance. The end result, I must say, is brilliant. Contrary to modern conceptions, he demonstrates what the Declaration was really meant to say, and, at the same time, how philosophically sophisticated it really was. In Part II, Zuckert endeavors to prove that the United States was indeed founded as the natural rights republic, in a modern, dynamic, forward looking philosophical climate. To begin with, he picks apart the thesis that the American Revolution was merely an extension of the Glorious Revolution undertaken by the Whig ruling class in the late 1680s. This however, is nothing new, especially if one has already read his account of the Glorious Revolution and natural rights philosophy in his previous work. Nevertheless, he shows conclusively the incompatibility between the two Revolutions, primarily, but not wholly, through a comparison of the Declaration of Independence and the English "Bill of Rights." Moving on, Chapters 5 and 6 address the issue of Puritanism and its legacy in early America. Many scholars have proposed that the American Revolution was merely an extension of ideals held by the early Calvinist settlers of the 17th century. It is this thesis, however, that Zuckert completely demolishes. He conducts and in depth analysis of Puritan ideology, as well as its sources. Of particular interest is discussion of Martin Luther's concept of the "Two Kingdoms," and its influence in American thought. To make a long story short, he demonstrates how dramatically Locke's ideas clash with those of the early Puritans. This contention is driven home clearly by an examination of important political/relgious thinkers in 18th centiry New England, Elisha Williams and Jonathan Mayhew in particular. Finally, in Chapter 7 finds Zuckert further pushing his case for the natural rights republic. He takes on the so-called "classical republican" or "civic humanist" thesis expounded by such scholars as J.G.A. Pocock and Gordon Wood, deftly making mincemeat of them. Pressing on, he examines Thomas Jefferson's evolving political philosophy to reveal the truly radical, natural rightist foundations of American republicanism. Although the book is by and large solid, I do have several misgivings about it. First and foremost, Zuckert's Jefferson scholarship is highy suspect, as can be devined through use of Merill Peterson's biography, as the small, unscholarly Library of America collection of Jefferson's writings. I was very surprised that he did not cite Dumas Malone's definitive 6 volume biography "Jefferson and His Time," or Julian Boyd's definitive collection of Jefferson's papers. Also, Zuckert's refutation of the Puritan "Continuity Thesis," strikes me as a bit odd, as it does not prove anything at all concerning the colonies outside of New England, none of which have any Puritan heritage whatsoever. Despite these shortcomings, the work as a whole is brilliant. This volume, as well as his previous offering, is an absolute must for anyone interested in the relevant disciplines.