For those moderately familiar with the Bible, this book provides a well-structured review of key stories along with some critical commentary. The table of contents alone is a valuable survey tool, allowing the reader to see the scope and flow of the narrative and find stories and review their details. It's strength is in conveying the flow of history as seen through the authors of scripture. It does not pretend to give a sense of the development of the legal or ethical norms, and law and prophets are not strongly represented. However, it definitely serves a worthy purpose in renewing our familiarity with Biblical stories and characters and their context in the Bible.

An informed and readable introduction to biblical criticism and a defense of its use by evangelical churches. Balanced and pastoral. Somewhat dated (first published in 1986) but highly recommended for Christians wrestling with the question, "Are critical methods important?" The author, a Mennonite pastor, answers with a qualified but hearty, "Yes."

This is a great book for anyone wanting to know more about the IBM corp and its history from day 1 and its interesting realationship with Microsoft Corp and Bill Gates during the 1980's and 90's. Much of the information in the book comes from IBMers.

This is a wonderful book! I've given this book as a gift and and recommended it to others more times than I can count. The response has been universally enthusiastic. Learn "Simple Yoga Exercises to Do at Work" and how to "Make the Perfect Martini and 15 Other Alcoholic Drinks." Get "Time-Saving Laundry and Hand-Washing Tips" and finally "Keep Squirrels Off the Bird Feeder." You can finally "Remove a Tick" and "Ask for a Date" the right way -- all with one big, fun, colorful volume.

Of all the third-world writers Paul Bowles translated, Mohammed Mrabet enjoyed the most success-- perhaps because he managed to stay on Bowles' good side the longest. But Mrabet also has an amazingly fertile imagination that surpassed Bowles' at times. He can seemlessly incorporate elements of Western narrative innovations into his work, as he proves with The Big Mirror. Much like Mrabet's other novels and collections of stories, it's a portrait of Morocco in the 60's and 70's that's grounded in ancient ritual and myth, but in this case Mrabet seems to have tackled feelings of doom and anxiety and horror much more openly than ever before. This is the most "Western" of Mrabet's work, I would say, and perhaps also the most powerful because it so clearly walks the tightrope between cultures, between times, between logic and the inexplicable, between brutality and love. It's chilling and surreal as Jim Thompson's novel Savage Night or the juicy parts of Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa.
I'm telling you, track this one down.

This is a very good introductory text on how streams and rivers function. It covers the habitat, organisms that live in them, and factors that affect them. The book has numerous references of source material and additional reading. I recommend this as great background material for this subject area.

Ro Wauer is an excellent author, and this book is an enjoyable read. His island accounts are essentially trip reports, with additional comments on natural history, history, geography, and other aspects of the islands. The accounts average around 10 pages each, and there is also a detailed checklist at the front of the book.
My only problem with this book is that it does not include Trinidad and Tobago. It does include Jamaica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and 14 other islands.

Birds in Brazil is a big book, beautifully produced on quality paper. It is exhaustive but never exhausting on the topic of Brazilian birds . The color illustrations are beautiful, but unfortunately they are separate from the text about the birds. That is the book's only fault. The text is in smooth and enticing English, and where the same birds are to be found migrating to the United States, the information is quite comparable in completion and interest to the American field guides of Roger T. Peterson. That leads me to believe that the information about birds that we don't experience will be equally accurate. This book is captivating and well worth the price. It is a coffee-table style book that we will be proud to use and to display.

A quarter-century after Albert Hourani's much-acclaimed Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, Salem has published a successor volume, both sadder and wiser. As his title suggests, Salem finds that the Arabs suffered acutely from the impact of ideology (which he defines as "a system of highly integrated ideas, principles, and aims that are related to sociopolitical action").

Salem divides his subject matter into four main trends: Arab nationalism, Islamic fundamentalism, Marxism, and regional nationalism (under which rubric he includes Egyptian, Lebanese, and Syrian variants). In every instance, he begins with the ideology's historical career, then goes on to describe its ideas, its social dynamics, appeal, and legacy. The author manages to make this structure work; more, the rigor of his approach makes it possible to compare the movements and ideas in a surprisingly direct fashion.

Salem's grounding in European intellectual history brings an additional bonus, enabling him to show the derivation of Middle Eastern ideas from their Western sources. And herein lies perhaps the most depressing aspect of the book: Westerners must acknowledge that the great majority of terrible ideas (such as the various strains of totalitarianism) that so harmed the Arabic-speaking countries in recent times come from their own civilization. At the same time, Arabs must acknowledge that their own thinkers had precious few original thoughts, but derived almost everything from the West.

Middle East Quarterly, March 1995

This book is a compilation of nineteen essays from authors such as bell hooks, James Baldwin and Cornel West which examine the relationship between blacks and Jews in the United States. This relationship has undergone various changes throughout its' history, moving from a sort of affinity between the groups to the current state of tensions that is felt at present. The articles contained in this book are a sampling of the literature that attempts to explain the nature and the history of this conflict by examining the basis of the alliances and arguments between the groups. This book contains a number of different perspectives regarding the relationship between blacks and Jews, thereby allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions