I saw this book recommended by one of my favorite authors, Michael Cunningham (he wrote THE HOURS). Michael teaches a Creative Writing course at Columbia University and I'm sure he implores his students to read this one. It is an easy, simple read of "I REMEMBER..." lines of memories from the 1940s and 1950s. It is a 'must read' for any writer who has writers block as it will spur new ideas into one's head, encouraging one to write their very OWN 'I Remember' lines. I really enjoyed it, relating and laughing several times--I ended up finishing it in one day as a break from another book.

Yes, and we remember you, Joe. Lovely man (not that I ever knew the geezer) and the originator in this work of the Je me souviens format for which Georges Perec (of the pretentious/ludicrous Oulipo group)is always given credit. Did Georges discover Joe via Harry Mathews? Anyways, he wouldn'ta minded. An American original; pity he never turned his hand to opera libretti. When can we expect the Collected Writings please?

I didn't think it could be done, but Joe Brainard has managed to keep me interested through a book-length poem! It's all about the pop culture references and those universal moments of feeling just plain odd. Every stanza begins with "I remember", but he manages not to make it boring at all.

I'm a massage therapist and found this book to be a helpful resource in a number of areas (detailed below), but was disappointed that it didn't include any pregnancy massage techniques. (Instead, the author simply suggests using the same massage strokes used for other clients.) The author is a midwife, and the book is written from this perspective, rather than that of a massage therapist. That said, I found this book to be a good reference on the anatomy of pregnancy, the mother-to-be's experience through each trimester, safety precautions for massage, and some comfort tips to address symptoms such as headaches & nausea (for the mother to use at home.) This book is an excellent pregnancy education resource, rather than a pregnancy massage instruction manual.

An excellent book about prenatal massage. It is good for massage therapists and anyone else interested in relieving some of the discomforts if pregnancy. There is even a mail-in test so that you can become certified in prenatal massage. I've taken classes in this subject and found the book to have comparable information plus you can use it as a resource.

Michelle Wright, CMT

I am a Massage Therapist and I loved this book! It has a lot of information but is still a very easy book to read. I would recommend it for Massage Therapists, as well as expectant moms and anyone working with them (Doulas, midwives, etc.)

I'm a young adult with Aspergers Syndrome and I find it silly how Kate McDonnel gives herself so much credit for helping Paul succede when during his most critical years of development she was a depressed drunk. Curious how she never mentions her possibly drinking during pregnancy to contributing to Paul's Autism and Kate's Cerebral Paulsey. If that wasn't bad enough she and her husband due to their cultural/gender prejudices encourage Kate to be confident, secure and independent while making Paul needy and dependent by forcing him to go to the "special kids camp" and making him feel even worse. The psycholigists at the hospital were right to see Paul as passive agressive because later on in a relationship he threatened to kill himself if his girlfriend left him. This is classic P/A behavior, overprotective, overbearing mothers combined with abusive often absent fathers. Right now I'm very active in what I call the "Alpha" community, Alpha meaning (autistic, asperger, add/adhd). That one lady was right how the only reason Paul got so far was due to himself and his friend Allen. I myself came from a dysfunctional family but I overcame it. What Jane and Paul McDonnel have done to Paul is child abuse of a severe magnitude, if anyone out there wants to learn more about High Functioning Autism or Aspergers, please do not buy this book and continue lining this sick, pathological couple's wallets.

I read this book for the first time in a psychology class I was taking. When my teacher first handed me the book, I looked at the cover a few times before realizing that this book was written by one of my childhood friends moms. I grew up around this family and at the time I was very unaware of what the situation was with Paul. I was incredibly impressed with Jane's ability to write this book. I know this had to be a very hard thing for her to start.

After reading this book, not only did I understand Paul's situation, but I had a great understanding of autism.

I was loaned a copy of this book along with dozens of other books once my son was diagnosed. I put this book at the bottom of the heap because I was sure I would "cure" him with dietary interventions etc. I was sure I didn't want to be depressed by what I was sure would be a sorrowful experience.

After a few months I was going through my desk and saw the book, felt ready to read it - McDonnell's book has eased my fears. My experiences with my son mirror some of hers - but mostly she gave me a human view or perhaps a humane view of autism.

I feel that after reading her book and Paul's afterword that I am more patient and can understand more of what it is like to be in my son's mind. I hope Paul continues to do well in life - I enjoyed being able to have a glimpse into his life.

The writing itself is wonderful prose - to be expected from an English professor I suppose - describes a real life situation without promising a cure. As a parent of a "High functioning" son, I found it to be a terrific escape from all the promises, and pressure in most books out there.

Heart warming, sensitive and honest. Get a hold of a copy! You will not regret it.

... unfortunately the research and writing don't live up to their potentials. Several flaws remain: any revision should be proofread ... to catch several small common grammatical errors (that made the book irritating to read) as well as differentiating between what is known fact and what are the authors'... opinions. A good first read for someone completely unfamiliar with the hippie era at all as it isn't detailed enough to warrant as a basis for any serious research. After a major re-write, however, I'd love to see the results.

While writing an undergraduate term paper at Harvard University on the Counterculture of the '60s and '70s, I used this book as a refference. I had a good time with reading it and it was a good start to my research. Stone's own experiences and opinions as an "old hippie" help to give this book a very friendly and personal glow. It truely made me wish that I had been born a few generations earlier (not that I didn't already wish that). The first half of the book is a more in-depth account of hippy philosophies, drugs, sex, fashion, activism etc...and the second half of the book serves as more of a list of events, people, places, music, literature etc... which helped to shape the counterculture. I would suggest this book for pleasure reading purposes rather than as a source of refference mostly because it is a biased perspective (the perspective of a true and full-blown hippy) and because the accounts of people and events (all of which are extremely essential to the understanding of the hippie movement) don't go into great detail...rather they are more like extended summaries. However if you are researching the counterculture, you aren't already very familiar with it, and you need a place to start, this book will serve as a great starting point with every aspect of the counterculture nicely summarized and topped off with the thoughts of a true hippie who was there, lived it, loved it, and wants to share it with the world.

This book changed my life by telling the TRUTH about the hippies. Not only does it offer a complete history of the movement's beginnings (WoW! the stuff I learned that wasn't taught in schools was amazing!), it offers a detailed analysis of why and how the movement began. What is truly amazing about "Hippies From A to Z" is the author's associated website, hippy.com, which has evidently been operating for years with a HUGE family of hippie followers. I really like the way Skip Stone has included information gathered from the site, and the real hippies that support it. This book is full of truth, and really defines the question, what is a hippy? Skip takes it one step further, and offers timely and sage advice to new and old hippies as a reminder of why we are all hippies at heart. The book is well-written and nicely designed, making it a valuable book for your library, or or the dashboard of your VW camper-van.

I bought this book and found the first 3 chapters usable. They devote over 100 pages to Appendicies that aren't all the useful. The remaining chapters(beyond the first 3 or 4) are useful in gaining an understanding on how to attack business problems, but lack a real solution or 'good' code, which they even say themselves isn't what you would use in corporate life. Not even a good book ... Complete waste of $ in my opinion.

JavaServer Pages (JSP) is one of the hot Java technologies. For the experienced Java developer, JSP is not difficult to learn. For the inexperienced Java developer, JSP is not a good place to start. Which leads me to wonder who might be the target audience for "Instant JavaServer Pages". There are serious holes in what this book covers that will leave most developers looking for additional resources. Some examples:

* The author spends less than one page discussing taglibs, most of which is simply taken from the version 1.1 specification.
* Although using JSP with XML is prominently featured on the cover of the book, the author spends more pages discussing how to install and configure PostgreSQL to run the examples than he does on XML.
* On page 4, the author tells us that JSP can be used to generate WML but no examples of this are to be found in the book.

If this book was 200 pages long I might understand this missing material, but the author spends 500 pages explaining no more than the basics of using JSP. That being said, the book is not all bad. The author repeatedly demonstrates the proper use of JSP for creating a user interface. His many examples stress that business logic should be placed in Java Beans and those beans invoked by a JSP. The fact is, however, that although the author does well with the material covered, there is too much material left out for me to recommend this book.

I read every page of this book, studied all the code, set it up, and made it all run. It was my first introduction to JAVA and JSP. I had a very complex site running within 2 weeks! I'm now using much of the modified code in a site I'm developing. It runs well under a reasonable load although I think some of the database beans blow up if the JVM runs out of memory. I got a fast and thorough, hands on, understanding of how to build a dynamic web site with database support. As the author says, certain parts of this code may not be industrial strength, but it isn't far from it - I'm having no problems after just a little tweaking. Extremely easy to read and thoroughly explained code. This is not a book for reading on the couch; this is a book to consult while you are sitting at your computer, developing your site.

Platform: Sun/Ultra OS:Solaris 8 HTTP: Apache latest JSP: Tomcat 3latest DB: MySQL 3.23 Java: 1.30 JDBC: mmMySQL 2.04

I had to create some important code workarounds for MySQL (the book uses PostGRE). All in all, I made only about 17 changes to the original code, including about 8 errors I found. If you want a great book with ready to use code to put together your own dynamic site with database support, this is it. Use Linux and PostGRE and everything else he uses.

I'm not sure how to rate this book. For one thing, I don't know much about Greek drama. However, in some respects no one does. Our author tried to be faithful to the original in ways he feels are important: "I have tried to walk and to run, to rise and to sit, with the Master, but never by imitation, only by analogy, transposition, re-creation." He has given us the three plays in iambic lines of varying length, with inventive syntax and vocabulary (sanctioned by the example of the original). I got annoyed with the verse at various points as it seemed just wrong: the expression seemed not to reflect the intention, and words were used (dare I say it?) sloppily. Now, I know I'm on shaky ground here. For one thing (a big thing!), I have not seen the plays performed. Moreover, our author knows the Greek, and he may be reflecting it quite closely, and my criticism should be directed at the Master. On top of that, Paul Roche, from his introduction, is clearly a good writer, so I must assume that the odd things he does he does deliberately.

But, anyway, as he says in a note on meter in the Appendix, "Indeed, the danger on the stage is not that poetry should sound monotonous but that it should not sound at all." He has quite a bit more to say on the subject, which is an important one. Sophocles wrote in an "iambic" meter rather than prose. In fact, it's possible that writing a play in prose, or good parts of it in prose, made as much sense in classical Athens as writing song lyrics in prose would now, and for roughly the same reason. While the actors may not have sung all the words, certainly the chorus was singing, and song hovered around, heightening the action.

Having said all that, I think our author does some very good things. For one thing, he does give us a good verse translation with all the choral markings - the Episodes, the Strophes and Antistrophes, with nice summaries at their heads. He brings the speech into reasonably colloquial English without sacrificing the "beat". (As an example of that, I particularly liked the byplay between Creon and the sentry in "Antigone". Here he gives the sentry a Cockney accent and Creon the voice of one of those impatient stuffed-shirts in a screwball comedy.) Overall, he achieves the right balance between vivacity of expression and dignity. His introduction and appendix are informative, opinionated, and well-written. In summary, this is an excellent version of these three plays (only a trilogy by coincidence).

This was a lot better than I expected it to be. The reading is easier than Shakespeare - in fact, I like this more. Much of the credit must go to Paul Roche. Watching a clip of a video of these plays (under a different translation) showed that his translation was not just word for word, but - as he says in the introduction - a work of art that retains the melody of the poetry.

I found the sophistication of Shakespeare (and the multiple suicides/murders) - amazing for something written so much earlier. But what was here was something more human. Within the different but wonderful style of speaking (thanks to Sophocles) was a modern voice (thanks to Roche) that made this play not only readable but enjoyable.

This is extraordinary story and easy to follow. It is easily comparable to modern socitey. The tragic flaws in Creon and Oedipus are very defined. This is a classic "must read" !

It?s all been done before is a familiar refrain of comics and radio DJ's. Every bit, every joke has been done to death, there are few if any real "new" jokes or ideas. The same could be said for a lot of religious attitudes that still exist today. An amazing amount of similarities and comparisons can be made between the religious customs of the modern world and the ancient and relatively unknown religions of the past. I always found some of the Egyptian and Babylonian relations to Mosaic Judaism and early Christianity fascinating, but I never gave much thought to the mysterious religion of Zoroastrianism and its prophet, Zarathustra. The duelist ideas espoused by this scarcely known man has had much more range and impact than I originally thought.

Author Paul Kriwaczek takes us on a tour of Zarathustra's impact, a tour which takes the reader to places he or she would have never suspected. As an amateur student of religion, I never really expected this book to "shock" me, but it really did with some of the theories Kriwaczek proposes. One of the more fascinating was the connection between the dualist teachings of Zarathustra and the Cathar heresy in medieval France. As I thought more about it, the more and more connections I could identify. This great heresy was identified by the Catholic Church as having spread from regions east, where Kriwaczek identifies clear examples of Zoroastrian thought and ideas. Other examples include the basis of Islam in Iran. That was a great chapter, as we often think of fundamentalist Iran as a impenetrable wall of religion fundamentalism, but a much deeper uncertainty exists beneath the religious Shiite control. The ideas and intellectual development of Nietzsche are also looked into, as his famous Thus Spoke Zarathustra introduced this eastern god to many in the west.

The book is written in a clear, travel log type of way, interspersed with some serious research and scholarship. I felt the book failed in a small way, as the actual concrete mechanisms of transmission are a bit shaky, although Kriwaczek is definitely convinced of his thesis. At any rate, he does pose some challenging enigmas of world religious thought, as the multitude of dualist systems along the lines of that taught by Zarathustra is too striking to be coincidental. This book is by no means a great study of the religion and its origins, as I think Kriwaczek would admit, but it does provide a very readable and enjoyable look at a fascinating religion, the ideas he spawned, and their far-reaching impact.

The ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster taught that the world was caught in a struggle between good and evil. He believed in one God, called Ahura Mazda, in a struggle with the forces of darkness. He was a theological monist and an ethical dualist. Human beings had the responsibility of working to bring about the good and eliminate the evil. The good would triumph in the end. Zoroaster was one of the first religious teachers to preach the afterlife. He founded a religion called Zoroastrianism which remains one of the fundamental religions of man and, although it has relatively few adherents, it survives today.

Paul Kriwaczek has written a fine book which is travelog, political commentary, history, and study of Zoroastrianism all rolled into one. Mr. Kriwaczek was trained as a dentist but subsequently joined BBC as a specialist in Central and South Asian affairs. It is good to see a nonspecialist who can write on Zoroaster with enthusiasm and knowledge and convey something of both to his readers.

The book is written in the form of a reverse chronology beginning with the present-day and progressing through successive chapters to the hazy early days (perhaps 1800 B.C.) of Zarathustra himself. We see many interesting figures along the way, and Kriwaczek is full of entertaining stories and digressions. This mostly makes the book a pleasure to read, but there are moments when the organization becomes confusing and the story gets a bit off track.

Kriwaczek spends a great deal of time on Frederich Nietzsche and his famous work "Thus Spake Zarathustra." He explains well the sources of Nietzsche's fascination with the ancient Persian prophet and he discusses the advances in scholarship contemporary with Nietzsche that helped make Zoroaster accessible.

The book continues with a mixture of travel, history, and philosophy through a discussion of the Albegensians, the religion of Mani, Mithraism, Cyrus the Great, and the Jews during the period of the Babylonian Exile and the Second Temple.
There are outstanding color photograhps illustrating the places and sites discussed in the book. Kriwazeck's treatments make no pretense of being scholarly or complete. But they are, on the whole, eloquent and thought-provoking. I enjoyed particularly the discussion of Mani, a reformer of Zorastrianims who gave his name to Manicheanism. Kriwazeck's account is based in part upon a recent novel, "The Gardens of Light" by the Lebanese author, Amin Maalouf.

Kriwazeck concludes that Zoroaster continues to have a great deal to teach. He sees Zoroaster has a predecessor of the "American religion" or "universal religion" (pp. 227-228) which emphasizes ecumenisism and toleration in a large society composed of individuals from diverse backrounds. Kriwazeck writes (p.228) that the Universal religion:

"comprises a belief in good and evil, angels, the devil, heaven and hell, the coming of a Messiah, and an eventual end of the world. These are beliefs with which Jews, Christians and Muslims can all agree-- as well as that majority who do not claim to believe in any particular religion. Every one of these ideas first appeared in Zarathustra's teaching long before the start of recorded history, a message as influential today as it ever was."

Kriwaczek has written a fine popular study of Zoroaster. It may awake interest in the fundamentals of Zoroaster's teaching and move the mind and heart of the reader.

What a trip! What a fascinating and wonderful journey. Since they are already discussed by other reviewers, I am not going to discuss the details of this book. Suffice it to say, that this is a record of a magical travel through time and space, never staying in one place or time too long, never tedious, never boring, always enlightening, and with a very cool ending. The historical facts can be found in more detail in more scholarly works, but it is the author's imaginative and thoughtful interpretations of these facts, and their implications which make this book so precious. If you have the slightest interest in religion, history, sociology, cultural anthropology, etc., I would strongly recommend this book to you. Furthermore, in my opinion, this is a must-reading for all Iranians and Iranian-Americans. Thank you Mr. Kriwaczek for your great work.

There was not enough information as far as I was concerned. I think there are other books out there that are more specific and contain far more information.

Vendors mentioned are not in business now. The topics are way to generic. He doesn't even own his own business and I still had so many questions after reading this book. I don't ususally comment on books but felt there were other books out there which provided more insight.

I read Rick Benzel's first edition years ago and found it to be highly informative. His second edition is clearly researched and reflects the changes in the healthcare industry. I would recommend this book as a prerequisite for anyone contemplating self employment in this field. He covers all areas and gives a comprehensive look at the healthcare service business. As a medical billing service owner and consultant for 18 plus years, I feel qualified to give this book two thumbs up!!

Watson wasn't enforcing international law, there was no international LAW against the "crimes" he claims whalers committed. He has stated elsewhere that he has authority to "enforce" this law from a [non binding] UN resolution that was issued many months AFTER he started sinking ships.
This is a self aggrandizing piece of droll from a common criminal. He gives a bad name to a good cause.
I'm very glad I had someone else's copy and I didn't spend my money on it.

This book will make you laugh and cry all at once. Paul is
a great writer and has packed more adventure into his life that
all the Star Trek episodes put together. Time after time as you read you are sure he is done for this time, will be dead or
in jail, but time after time he miraculously prevails in
his Pirate Vikinq quest to save the whales.

One of the best books I have ever read! Without any question. Watson will make you laugh, cry, and most of all, get up and take action. He is one of the few humans I admire. For the most part I am so disgusted with my species I am ashamed to belong to the human race. Capt'n Watson and his crew are amoung the few souls I have any respect for. He is a true Mahatma. READ THIS BOOK!
I was taught humans are neither demons nor angels but occupy the spectrum in between. Well far too many of us gravitate towards one end of the spectrum don't we? And that's why our homeworld has become the cesspool that it is. If we make it out of this mess, it will be because of people like Watson.

I bought this version of the popular fairy tale as a gift for my niece. After I received it, I was horrified to read in detail about how the huntsman cut open the wolf's stomach to look for the grandmother. It then goes on to read, ". . . after a few more slashes a little girl jumped out.." This was not at all what I had envisioned as a gift for a young girl. I wish I had been warned to buy the story from a different author.

this book was very scary and ummmm... i-i didn't like it, it scared me!

The illustrations in this book are very similar to those of Jan Brett but darker tones used. There is always something hidden w/in the pictures for children to look for and the illustrations help enhance the tale.

I also recommend Lon Po Po.