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This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the life and music of J.S. Bach. Not only are there translations of every known piece of writing by him, and every important document about him, but many of his contemporaries and those in the following generation are quoted on their views of Bach's stature and achievement. There is also the complete text of the first biography of Bach, written in 1802 by J.N. Forkel and drawing on information from Bach's sons Friedemann and Emanuel. This book has so much valuable and fascinating information in such a small compass that music lovers will be drawn to it again and again

Basic Bookbinding may seem underwhelmingly dull in comparison to all the other books on bookbinding available today-no gorgeous vividly-colored photographs, no sophisticated page layouts, no selection of cute or thematic projects to work on once you've learned the techniques, no unconventional material, no gallery of artists' works...NO FUN, right? But I've been both an experimental and traditional bookbinder for 12 years, and I have yet to come across a book that covers the BASICS of the craft the way A.W.Lewis's does.

It is really important to master the nitty-gritty of the CRAFT...precision of measurement, the right stitches and knots, putting the skeleton of a book together so that you understand WHY/HOW it works, and KNOW it'll last a hundred years...and only THEN should one go off and explore the big "candystore" of fancy papers, funky found-object covers, and clever bindings. When I want inspiration, I leaf through yummy picture books like Shereen LaPlantz's COVER TO COVER, or Linda F.Kenzle's PAGES...but when I want to put an archival journal of medieval proportions together so that my great grandchildren can read it someday, I return to Basic Bookbinding. My respect for the great bookbindinders of the past is renewed by this very technical, unpretentious and stern manual.

If it's short on innovation, keep in mind that this Basic Binding book is a reprint of the 1952 edition! Learning from this book feels less like a weekend crafts class, and more like an apprenticeship with some terse old master.

Gave nice clear instructions. Good graphics and explenations. I used it with my kids, and even they understood it.

I have thoroughly enjoyed reading both of the printed works by this author, BATTLE ON! and HOW GOES THE BATTLE? . His collection of humorous short stories take us to where we 'used to be'... the rural upbringing we wish we had, or if we did, in these stories, we can see 'the loner up the road', the cousins we spent the summer with, or just wander up the path for memories of how life was. He has us spell bound, holding our breath, and then laughing within the space of a few pages.

The river Battle, which flows through each of these stories, could be any river or path in our lives, each story touching and unique.

The author has the ability to visually create people, that we are anxious to learn more about. We feel what they are experiencing, through the descriptive passages and catchy dialogue.

Every story, though standing alone, and easy reading, leads us to the next...and the next...never wanting the excursion to end always wondering what adventures the next individual will have to share with us.

Well worth the read !!

Great to see a book here I've actually read. "Battle On" was enjoyable to read. I like the format where you can read a story at a time and go back to it whenever you wish without having to finish the whole book at once. It's good if you enjoy hearing about the past, or rural areas. I find that interesting and if you like that kind of stuff the author tells it well. I'd recommend it for anyone who likes rural stories or isn't afraid to try something different. It's also important to remember to read the local Canadian and Alberta authors, not just the big names from the states.

Arthur uses her characters to touch on a deeper sense of who human beings are. Simple things, a waiting room in a doctor's office, turns into a conspiricy. The writing is interesting, the observations are stellar, and the characters you either hate to love or love to hate.

This inexcusably out-of-print novel is a wonderful case of high word craft simply applied, in the ancient & honorable ways, to spinning a wise sweet funny tale. Hilarity builds steadily. Country-raised readers will recognize both superficially normal & fabulously eccentric neighbors with deep glee. Lifetime city/suburban dwellers will learn astounding facts about the peculiar potential (it is not always out here, but might be) variety of human & dog life in the sticks. Can a mere good story ever perhaps assist us in temporarily saving ourselves from some of our own most glaring/abiding/destructive idiocies? Perhaps. This could have been an early storytelling aim, one suspects, no matter how things have lately veered. Every college/university literature or writing prof in Indiana & dozens of nearby states might want to consider doing what academics can occasionally do to breathe practical life into a grand book. As a model for telling, Binding Spell is unsurpassed, worth triple the best how-to & ten times the dreadful manual of style. Elizabeth Arthur is an alert & happy & demanding & kind human animal paying very serious attention & weaving what she knows/discovers into an arresting tapestry. Or carpet. Or rug. This is 98% of the game. As lit, the book will help the mix, resist pointless shred analysis/criticism immaculately, provide nice balance against the sometimes overwhelming drone of arrogant abstraction, & elicit some student writing poured directly from student hearts. Think about this. & grin.

Dear Reader from the UK (previous review) please note that this book is about Jamaica, Jamaican Maroons and their history, which of course touches the topic of Haiti, but Haiti is NOT the main focus of this book and your review shows, that you mean a different book altogether.

Haiti is a country that provokes strong responses and Libete is the perfect introduction to the wide variety of voices that have commented on the country and its history. Inevitably, there is much tragedy to relate both in the brutal history of slavery and in the later oppression and exploitation of the Haitian peasantry by the wealthy elite and the consistent interference from successive U.S. governments, which sadly continues to this day. Each chapter focuses on a particular topic, drawing on around 20 different commentators, both foreign and Haitian. Many of these are contemporary reports, relating true life stories from the city streets and country villages, showing a life that many people living in affluent Western culture simply have no concept of at all. Yet the story of Haiti is also one of struggle and courage in the face of adversity and these voices are clearly heard as well in Libete. Many good people working in small ways to the best of their ability to improve life for the poor, who form such an overwhelming majority. Another message that comes through the book is that it is this majority who constitute the soul of Haiti, which is so vibrantly expressed in Haitian culture. In the section on literature, it is significant that Haitian authors, largely drawn from the elite class, either celebrate peasant culture or despise it - it is clearly too strong to simply ignore. Vodou is also an integral part of this culture and the extracts included reflect the diversity of attitudes towards this much maligned spiritual tradition. One of my favourite sections is the selection of proverbs, amongst which is "Money goes where money is" which seems to sum up current economic theory very neatly. Buy this book and find out how the majority live!

This book gives an interesting profile of one of the great commanders of World War 2. Although written in a dry style, it brings to light many little-known facts about this most controversial man. Known as Bert to his friends, "Bomber Harris" to the press during the War, and "Butch" (short for "Butcher") to his aircrews, Harris took a demoralized and dispirited RAF Bomber Command in 1942 and built it up into a most formidable force that played a vital role in the defeat of Nazi Germany. The author points out that the policy of night-time area bombing designed to destroys the cities that served as the locations of the German war industries was decided upon before Harris became Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command. Within a few weeks, he put together the extremely risky Operation Millenium, the thousand-bomber raid on Cologne, whose success proved to skeptics the power and effectiveness that Bomber Command was capable of wielding. Although it really took another two years to make the bombing campaign really effective, it has been proven beyond a doubt that German war production was severely damaged by the bombing campaign since it has been shown that German production increased rapidly when Bomber Command was forced to change its targets from the German cities to others in France related to Operation Overlord in the first months of 1944.
It is true that Bomber Command suffered high casualties (a crewman had only a 30% chance of surviving a 30-operations tour of duty) but their sacrifices helped keep Stalin and the USSR in the war in 1942 and 1943 at the time when they were suffering immense losses and the prospect of a Second Front looked far away (Churchill was always afraid that Stalin might secretly make a deal with Hitler and pull out of the War). Harris worked diligently day and night to get the resources and aircraft Bomber Command needed and to keep the morale of his personnel high. Although he refrained from visiting the air fields, probably due to a reluctance to face men who could possibly be flying to their deaths in a few hours, as well as the knowledge that the station commanders could be putting on a "show" for him that masked real problems, he did maintain continuous contact with low-ranking people from the air and ground crews in order to find out help them do their jobs more effectively and comfortably.

Probert, although very sympathetic with Harris, does not hesitate to point out flaws in his subject's personality. For example, Harris broke up his first marriage by having an affair while he was away from home and after his divorce he had a problematic relationship with his children. After the War, Harris developed a strange admiration for Hermann Goering who was not the "noble knight of the air" that some may have thought but was one of the most powerful and cruel of the Nazi hierarchy and was one of the key figures in the Nazi terror even before Hitler's rise to power and who played in role in the Holocaust. Similarly, Harris opposed the Nuremberg Trials. He also said he only felt "hatred" for the Germans once, during the bombing of London whereas others like Battle of Britain hero Group Captain Douglas Bader was not ashamed to say years after the War that he hated the Germans for the evil they brought to the world. In any event, perhaps these quirks gave him the personality traits that were needed to cooly, night after night, send thousands of young man on very dangerous missions to bring death and destruction to the German enemy. Maybe someone more sentimental and emotional, both to his family and to the enemy, would not be able to stand up to the strain. We could perhaps compare him to other great commanders like Generals Patton, Montgomery and MacArthur who also had personalities that rubbed many people the wrong way:
Probert also demolishes myths that have sprung up after the War such as:
(1) Harris ordered the supposedly unnecessary bombing of Dresden when Germany was already supposedly defeated out of some sense of blood-lust and vengeance. In reality, he opposed the mission since it was located in eastern Germany and would expose his aircrews to extra danger due to the longer trip, but the allied leaders insisted on having the raid carried out since it was not at all clear at that time that Germany was at the point of collapse and they wanted the Soviet Armies to advance into Germany as fast as possible
(2) Harris had a contempt for "colonials" and sent them on the more dangerous missions as cannon fodder in order to spare "real" Britishers. In reality, Harris moved to Rhodesia as a young man and considered himself a Rhodesian. After the War he went to live in South Africa, so he indeed considered himself a "colonial"
(3) Harris was not given a peerage after the War as were many other senior British military commanders because the Labour goverment felt "embarassed" by the strategic bombing campaign and wanted to forget about it. In reality, there is some truth in the fact that people wanted to forget about the bombing campaign, and it is also a fact that no "campaign decoration" was given to the air and ground crews in Bomber Command, but Harris was indeed offered a peerage, but turned it down, partly as a protest against the refusal to grant a campaign medal, but also for personal reasons in that outside Britain (where he intended to live) a peerage was not necessarily viewed as something desirable.

All in all, this book is must reading for someone interested in World War 2, military history, and the characterists of a great military commander.

There have been many books and comments about Bomber Harris over the years. Even Harris published his own book but didn't cover everything. This book was written using all of Harris's private papers.

Not only does the author, Henry Probert, do a great job of presenting Harris's point of view but he presents opposing points of view as well. This book probably does the best job of presenting the most objective view of Harris to date. In some respects it does favour Harris since it is from his private papers. This is an extremely valuable book about Harris and is a must for any student of Bomber Command.

The author does a great job of presenting Harris the man from birth until death and deals with such topics as his leadership style, the public's image of him, his contemporaries views etc. The many misperceptions of Harris and how people once meeting him in person said Harris was not anything like the image that has been painted of him. A very excellent book! We need more like this one.

I enjoyed this book tremendously; I read it for the first time when I was in elementary school. I was thrilled to find a copy of it (since it was out of print at the time) years later. I heartily recommend it.

I first read this book in junior high, after which I read every Ruth M. Arthur book available. When Amazon opened its web-doors, it was one of the first out of print books I ordered.

This is a story of an English girl who must come to grips with the strange and twisted past of her ancient family. This mystery centers around a doll named Dido who seems to exert supernatural control over its owner. A truly delicious and delightful book.

British libertarian economist Arthur Seldon exposes the failings of socialism in general and of Britain's welfare state in particular. The author's antidote for the welfare state is to reduce the scope of government to only those functions that the free market can't duplicate. He considers and rebuts all criticisms -- economic, political, moral -- of the free market. This book has its shortcomings: It's directed towards a British audience, so it requires some familiarity with British history. Written in 1989, the book is a bit dated; e.g., the Soviet Union (which the author repeatedly considers) is extinct. Also, the author often repeats his basic argument; namely, the market is directed by a price system, which is controlled by individual consumers (hence market economies are prosperous and democratic), whereas the welfare state is directed by politicians, producers and interest groups (hence welfare states are poor and authoritarian). Finally, the author's syntax is often awkward. Nevertheless, friends of the free market will find in this book both an armory of rebuttals to capitalism's critics and abundant useful references.

What Ayn Rand does for philosophical reasoning, Arthur Seldon does for economical reasoning. Provides the reader with a firm foundation for arguing the free market proposition. Extremely reader friendly.

I found this helpful but pretty basic. I had already learned most of the book contents by surfing the net and going to responsible medical sites (e.g., OncologyChannel, Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, etc). I bought it primarily as a reference to keep on hand as my mother goes through treatment for ovarian cancer. I was able to skip about half the book as it was so elementary, but others may find that information more of a revelation and useful. I do think it will be a helpful reference to have at my fingertips as time progresses.

"...I wish there had been a book like this one to help our family understand what dad was going through and to guide my mother and us children during such a difficult time...Caregiving is a thorough and accessible resource for family members and friends thrust into the confusion, demands, pain, and frustration of coping with cancer." - Former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, author Helping Yourself Help Others, Founder, Rosalynn Carter Institute of Georgia Southwestern State University.

THE ONLY BOOK OF ITS KIND FOR THE CANCER CAREGIVER! Includes sections on cancer treatments, managing care, emotional and physical conditions associated with cancer, and living with cancer and cancer treatments. Provides step-by-step instructions on how to deal with situations or conditions that may occur when giving care to a person with cancer. Contains a comprehensive list of resources available to the caregiver that will make his or her job easier.

I'm purchasing my second copy of Caring for Your Collections. I am the curator of a house museum with a very diverse collection and I have found this to be a handy reference guide with easy to follow instructions for dealing with a wide variety of materials.

This book was assigned reading in the Museum Studies program I completed several years ago. I found it to be very readable and useful. It is geared to the person who is serious about preserving the treasures he or she has collected or inherited. Among its lessons is the fact that virtually everything we do to maintain our everyday household objects is not appropriate for objects that we would like to see survive for the long term. This book provides valuable guidance on what can be done to preserve the objects we value most. Today, I am a curator of a diverse museum collection, and still find this book helpful and a good refresher.