The work of Virginia Wilson in this book is to be praised. People with RLS will get so much out of this book, it is easy reading for everyone. Because of her hard work and dedication I have learned so much about RLS, having it myself after 11 back surgeries I can now tell my doctors to read the symptoms of other people that I have been complaining about for years. Because of this book I am taken seriously, I take her book to my doctors and have them read some of the pages. One of my doctors (Whom I admired dearly) put me on myopex, now I can sleep a few hours at night, compared to no sleep at night before. I don't dread bedtime anymore. Virginia, I can't thank you enough for what you have done for me and hopefully for so many sufferers. I read your book all day and thank God not all night. God Bless. Joan D'Agostino

This is a must read for RLS sufferers and their family. I have been suffering from RLS and its "cousins" for at least 23 years. For the most part, doctors have never taken me seriously. This book says it all. It describes the syndromes, the reactions of freinds, family, and the medical community (we are imagining it all), and offers some help and comfort. The latter in knowing what we knew all along: we have a real ailment that is making our lives miserable! Pressure your doctors to look into this disease. Change doctors if you must until you find someone who listens. It was infuriating for me to learn that Dr. Daniel Picchietti, a noted expert in the field referenced in this book, has been working at Carle Clinic, where I have been a patient for 17 years, and no one ever told me about him or refered me to him. I have an appointment now. Thank you so much, Virginia! [Footnote: I did see Dr. Picchietti and found relief. Daily doses of Mirapex have been a great help. For once I am being taken seriously and treated that way. Get help, fellow RLS sufferers.]

Virginia Wilson pins it down it down to a t when she gives an excellent and concise overview of RLS and how it affects it's victims. She and the doctors who wrote with her also give hope to the millions of those afflicted with what I call the scourge of my life, RLS. The book is a good source of info and places to get help. As a health care professional I felt the book was a good source for medical professionals and laymen.

I read this out loud to my 4-year-old son, who loves anything involving King Arthur, and he was captivated. His only disappointment was that there is no book to follow with more tales of the young Shan and his adventures. I highly recommend this as well as other historical fiction by Bulla. I have also read "Pocahontas and the Strangers" to my son, and he loved that as well.

Once your child has moved beyond easy phonetic readers, you'll want to find interesting books with large print that aren't too difficult or overwhelming for the new reader. Bulla's "The Sword in the Tree" fits this description perfectly.

Try reading the first chapter to your young reader to spark his interest. Then read the next chapter or two aloud together so he/she becomes familiar with the words and flow. Then sit back and listen as your child finishes reading this exciting book about greed, courage, and chivalry.

This book is an excellent source for "medieval" units. I have used it with weak 5th grade English as a Second language readers and they are very successful with it. It teaches grade level content at a lower reading level. They do not feel they are reading an easy book. It is a wonderful starter book for reluctant readers.

In this book, Rosenfeld visits 36 people - famous and not - and engages them in conversations which explore every aspect of chronic pain. Divided into patients, caregivers and thinkers (with some overlapping), the three sections of the book (when combined with Rosenfeld's linking commentary) create a mosaic which is comprehensive, yet always facinating. The author unerringly asks the very follow-up questions the reader would like to have answered. These are genuine conversations, not a collection of responses to pre-programmed questions. For those concerned about loved ones suffering from chronic pain, the insights, the information, the list of resources and the book's glossary are invaluable.

Insightful, Inspiring, Important. Whether or not you suffer from chronic pain, this book is a must read and it is truly accessible to a very wide audience. As we don't yet have a cure to offer those who suffer, understanding the pain will have to do. Mr. Rosenfeld's book is the ultimate handbook for this daunting task. After dividing the book into 3 parts, patients (that's me), caregivers and thinkers, it was amazing to see how many common threads there were. I found myself, highlighter in hand, saying, "yes, that's it", or "he got it", or "she shed thought provoking new light". This book belongs in the hands of medical students and parctitioners as well as the general public. The author has succeeded in making this a page-turner.

"The Truth About..." makes clear how many live in pain and just how pervasive the matter is. In short, Rosenfeld's work clearly and concisely explains the issues while demystifying a series of complex problems.

While there are many philosophical and religious dimensions involved, it's equally amazing to hear how so many personal and divergent points of view all lead to the same bottom line: that none of us should ever have to suffer because of someone's hang-up about prescription drugs or about pain as a character builder.

If "The Truth..." does nothing else but shed light while comforting those who suffer in the dark without knowledge, then undoubtedly hundred of thousands, or perhaps even millions of untold sufferers will be better for it.

I first became acquainted with Arthur Lessac's work in the 1970's when I was in Graduate School. Since then, his Approach to Voice and Body Training has been the mainstay of my professional and personal life. His new book (the third version) has been written in such a way that complements the older version, yet takes us on a training journey that is wholistically and organically fresh and new. I enjoy teaching from this book, and my students enjoy learning from it!
--Nancy Krebs, Lessac Master Teacher

As a voice teacher for many years, I am always being complimented on my speaking voice. Arthur Lessac's book was not my speaking coach, my operatic training was - but the technique is the same. Lessac has done a masterful job explaining the "old" Italian, bel canto/good singing technique that's been around since the 1600's - but he's done it for the speaking voice. Singers need to use the same technique for both speaking and singing, and this is the best book I've found on speaking technique.

Now everyone can understand logically how to improve their speaking and singing voice, and perhaps operatic voices will be better understood as not being something elitist or unnatural. Using the power of your instrument to produce quality sound is amazingly natural - it ain't magic. The "magic" is being given the vocal chords of an angel, inspiration from God, the constitution of a horse, the luck of (all) the Irish, and the intelligence of an Einstein to develop that voice into a Pavarotti, a Sutherland, etc.

This is everything anybody (actors, speakers and liars) will ever need to know about discovering, developing and using with confidence the voice as a tool to communicate. Westerners especially, I believe, have trained and maimed their voices to suit ideals (The average woman speaks about 6 tones higher than her natural voice prescribes). This book, a trusted training manual in many theatre and opera schools, teaches practically and without pretence, the real abilities of the voice. This is all one needs to acquire/rediscover, with practise, how the voice can be an (extemely flexible) extension of oneself in a physical world. A wholistic adventure which necessarilly encompasses correct breathing and posture, which will eventually be effortless, simply because it is natural. From an acting perspective the Arthur Lessac voice system becomes a perfect partner to the Stanislavskyan system of acting (associated with 'The Method' in USA). The practice of the Lessac system can easily be taught to a child and has proven successful in overcoming a stutter. This probably because the learner is made aware of the manoeuvre-ability of sound and how it is created, and not only on voice as a carrier of language. The book contains many excercises, each making one discover and realise the immense power of (self-generated) sound. Living in Africa one often wonders at the vocal powers of its people. Westerners can also feel at one with their true voices. The Lessac system would be the first (and last) step on the route to rediscovery. This is a popular book (I had two copies stolen from me when it was out of print) amongst performers and all those who believe their bodies are instruments.

an excellent adventure, spiced with hints of symbolism. I loved the dialog between the characters. Well worth reading.

A candid look into the future as this conflict grows. Religon and science are the two giants of civilized mankinds mental and social discourse. The continuing conflict is something which involves all of us. Well done.

The use of people to personify the forces of religon and science was well done. I especially liked the charecter of Thomas. He adds a magical quality to the book.

I'm not Euell Gibbons or Emeril, but if you were to cross those two together, it's as close as you'd be likely to come to finding someone who might be able to write a book as wonderful as "The Wild Vegetarian Cookbook" by "Wildman" Steve Brill. Wild food aficionados in particular have good reason to rejoyce, now that Mr. Brill's new cookbook is available. During the past two months, I've made nearly 20 of his recipies, and my experience has been that each one is better than the next. Fortunately, all of them seem to be easily adapted to suit available ingredients or taste preferences. Most of the sections utilizing "featured" ingredients have an interesting background about the particular plant (or in some cases, mushroom) that adds the appreciation of the dish, and the entire book is organized intelligently, in order to make cross-referencing easy. Furthermore, I've seen nothing even remotely like this book on the market today, or at any time, for that matter. Between my wife and I, we must own close to 50 cookbooks, and this is far and away our favorite. We happen to be vegetarians, but we've given the book as a gift to non-vegetarian friends on several different occasions, (As well as having entertained company using recipes from the book) and the reviews have been very favorable, to say the least.

"Happy Foraging"

WILDMAN STEVE BRILL
THE FORAGING GOURMET
author of
The Wild Vegetarian Cookbook:
A forager's Culinary Guide
(in the Field or in the Supermarket to Preparing and Savoring Wild (and Not So Wild) Natural Foods with more than 500 Recipes.
Published by The Harvard Common Press, Boston.
500 pages with five appendices:

The Wildman's mission is thus:

"The local environment has sources of foods that are delicious, healthful and organic, including herbs, greens, fruit, berries, nuts, seeds and even mushrooms."

Q. Who is Wildman?
A. Good-natured, with a sense of humor, Steve Brill has been guiding foraging tours in and around New York since 1982. He enjoys telling the story of how he was arrested and handcuffed by undercover park rangers for eating a dandelion in Central Park, a food resource area he highly supports. He's lectured in schools, for youth programs, museums, libraries and environmental groups for years. Brill is also a foraging and natural-cooking expert whose new cookbook teaches you to use nearly 150 of America's finest wild food plants to prepare tasty meals.

Brill does caution and wisely so:

"It is the reader's responsibility to identify and use the information in this book sensibly." He sums up the 29 pages of pre-foraging information with an admonishment to pay particular attention to correct identification of foods in the wild and recommends the additional use of his book, Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not so Wild) Places.

A TRIP THROUGH THE BOOK

The Wild Vegetarian Cookbook starts by introducing wild and purchased natural foods and basic methods for preparing them. He gets into seasonings, tips on adapting natural ingredients to traditional cooking methods and explains how to harvest wild foods safely.

Next he goes into recipes for "unwild foods." Tofu-based cheeses are basic to many of Brill's recipes, and he presents his recipes for Tofu Cream Cheese, Tofu Cottage Cheese, Tofu Sour Cream, and the like. While he employs a lot of in-book cross-references, he creates few, if any, unsolved mysteries.

The book is divided into seasonal sections featuring:

Winter and early spring: hearty wild greens and roots
Mid-to-Late Spring: best time to find wild vegetables
Summer with its plethora of fruits, flowers, greens and mushrooms.
Autumn: The further abundance of mushrooms, fruits also nuts.

His Table of Contents is a large, helpful, non-alphabetical, listing of recipe names grouped with the wild food it calls for, plus page numbers. His Index is an alphabetical index of types of foods and associated recipes. Here's an overview of just a few of his recipes:

WINTER WILD FOODS

Winter Cress Kimchi
To winter cress, he adds garlic, red onion, dill or coriander seed and chili paste to taste.

Chickweed Bean Spread
Brill combines adzuki beans, olive oil, vinegar,
bayberry leaves, herbs and dried epazote leaves, stems or flowers

EARLY SPRING WILD FOODS

Daylily Wine
Sugar, water, daylily shoots, lemon juice tarragon, dill, poppy seeds and a little champagne or wine yeast

Curried Dandelions
A small amount of oil, dandelion leaves,
garlic tofu, miso, fresh lime juice and
curry powder (recipe also in the book)

Stinging Nettles Indian Style
The Sauce: Chick pea flour, Garam Marsala
(recipe in book), seasoning,
tumeric, tofu, lime juice, water
The veggie: garlic, chilis and 8 cups
stinging nettle, chopped

Scalloped Fiddleheads
Spread fiddleheads in a casserole dish,
top with Tofu Cream Cheese and Bread Crumbs (recipe in book), bake

MID-TO-LATE SPRING WILD FOODS

Garlic Beans
Black or white beans, wild garlic bulbs, fresh chopped epazote leaves, cumin, olive oil and seasoning

Exotic Rice
Mixture of wild and sweet brown rice, currants, shredded coconut, raw cashews, red onion, Garam Masala, bayberry leaves and seasoning

SUMMER WILD FOODS

Mulberry Kiwi Ice Cream
Soy milk, tofu, glycerin, honey, barley malt, lecithin granules, lemon juice, vanilla, liquid stevia and mulberries

Blackberry Spiced Wine
Ala Brill: sugar, water, blackberries, spicebush berries, cloves, cinnamon sticks and champagne or wine yeast

AUTUMN

Hot Cheese Tacos
Tofu cream cheese, red chile sauce (in book), acorn tortillas (in book)

Acorn Noodles
Brown rice flour, acorn flour (in book) arrowroot or kudzu, nutmeg, marjoram, sage, seasoning, corn oil and water

Vegetarian Chicken Salad
Chicken mushrooms, celery, romaine lettuce, olives, almonds, Wild Mustard Seed Mayonaise (in book) and chopped field garlic leaves

Simply Oysters
Olive oil, oyster mushrooms, chiles, garlic, lemon juice, fresh dill, tamari soy sauce and White Oak Wine (in book)

If you, somehow, cannot roam the woods for your particular culinary adventure, this is a great book to deliver the adventure to you, also witness the sincere inventiveness of its enthusiastic author. ...

Foragers who enjoy using wild ingredients will appreciate Steve Brill's Wild Vegetarian Cookbook, a unique vegetarian cookbook which focuses on natural foods available in field and in market. From ramp leaf pesto and milkweed rice Indian style to purslanepotato salad, Wild Vegetarian Cookbook is packed with unusual dishes which need only access to wild ingredients to prove successful.

Out of left field, from the editors of The Collected Letters of George Gissing, comes a refeshing new view of Gissing--plus some charming turn-of-century Americana. The oddly successful combinaton comes about in this way. When the English novelist, desperate to escape for a time from his miserable marriage, visited Italy in 1897-98, he met there a 20-year old American traveller named Brian Boru Dunne. The precocious young man, who would later become a journalist in Santa Fe, New Mexico, kept a diary of their conversations over several months, recording Gissing's opinions on literature, modern and ancient Rome, and everything else that interested them. Years later, he wrote p some of his notes. The diary is lost, but the editors have used Dunne's surviving materials to create a fascinating portrait that shows us a more unbuttoned and humorous Gissing than we knew. Because Dunne is worthy of interest in himself, they have seen fit to include some other pieces: William Jennings Bryan's unconsciously hilarious rules for oratory; Cardinal Gibons' recipe for longevity; and an interview with Mark Twain written by Twain himself. Their 40-page introduction to Dunne and Gissing is unexpectedly fascinating. The voluminous footnotes explain so much, and in such style, that they are an integral part of the reading experience. This beautifully produced, amusing, and illuminating miscellany should attract all Gissing readers, and they will be rewarded by more than they bargained for.

As a long-time student of George Gissing's work and one of his first biographers, I was delighted to read this vivid and perceptive first-hand account of his activities and opinions. Few people who knew Gissing personally have left memoirs of him, and Dunne's is certainly the fullest up-close portrait that we have. He describes Gissing's writing and eating habits, his attention to clothes, his reactions to Italy and his people, and his opinions of other writers, and all this helps to clarify the novelist's character. I especially appreciated the excellent informative notes, which provided much needed background, and brought Dunne himself forward as an interesting and significant figure.

I stumbled onto George Gissing two years ago through his travel classic "By The Ionian Sea: Notes on a Ramble Through Southern Italy." I had not read much late-Victorian writing, except for brief forays into Thomas Hardy. Now I have found a new champion -- George Gissing -- and am discovering that post-industrial era through his works. In this process, I discovered Dunne's delightful memoir and was drawn to it because it recalled a time in Gissing's life when he seem most happiest: his 1897-1898 tour of Southern Italy, the setting for "By the Ionian Sea." Dunne's memoir -- wonderfully edited to fully explain all references, from obvious to obscure -- can be read on more than one level. First, it gives a vivid recounting, through an innocent young journalist's eyes that miss little, of a golden three or four months or so in Rome, hobnobbing with Gissing and two other Victorian writers, H.G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle. It also can be seen as "a work in progress" where the reader can examine how Dunne, by now in middle age and an accomplished writer in his own right, moved from diary through drafts of memoirs. And particularly important for the Gissing enthusiast is the introduction, which puts the era in perspective and paints a vivid picture of the players in Dunne's Roman holiday.

If you purchase this book here, do NOT buy it from the vendor names "lesse". The man has MAJOR problems!

If you're only going to buy one of the volumes of the Complete Sherlock Holmes, then this is the one I would recommend. The later stories are very good, too, but the ones in this one are better.

If you are a mystery fan, this is a can't-miss collection of the early Sherlock Holmes stories. While most of the stories are not as clever as the ones in the original Sherlock collection ("The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes"), this book introduces two pivotal figures in the series - Sherlock's eccentric brother Mycroft and the evil mastermind Professor Moriarity. Most fans agree that the stories in ADVENTURES and MEMOIRS set the standard to which all other Sherlock stories are compared.

Richard Rorty is set up as the strawman in this book and this is unfortunate. Apart from this the book is an interesting read that Rorty would have little problem with. Indeed this is the case (see Rorty's review of the book).

I think Williams in this book is saying much the same thing as Dan Dennett and is on the same critical wave length with Dan in his criticism's of Rorty. Which seem to me to be quite "Rortyian" in style i.e the critiques are politically motivated.

From a meta-philosophical perspective I believe there is little "practical" difference between Rorty, Williams and Dennett - not to mention Putnam (see his new book).

Therefore as a political (and hence usefull or something we should care about) work this is a good book.
The most interesting move in this book is the use of Nietzsche.
Very Rortyian indeed.

I found Williams' treatment of truth to be an important contribution. I thought well enough of it that I'm coming our of retirement to do a graduate course on the book in the Fall. Non-philosophers will find it tough going, but well worth the effort. I think this is an important book and everyone I've recommended it to has agreed with that judgment.

Williams is one of the wisest and more learned of philosophers working in English, a man of capacious intelligence and brilliant insight, and a man gracious enough to have learned how to write lucid, enjoyable prose. I share Michael Colson's enthusiasm, although I share none of his worries or dislikes. His "Enemies List" is not mine. And I think it should not be Williams's. I remain unpersuaded that the account of what we mean by true discourse given by the bogeymen of postmodernity amounts to a denial that anything's true or that in matters of the mind "anything goes." Williams is on the right track but turns off a little too soon--in what amounts to a failure of attentiveness. But the second part of the book easily compensates for the occasional disappointments of the first part. One can feel he is not entirely fair to some of his philosophical contemporaries, and still feel a great deal of gratitude for the pleasure of his company.

The best part about this book is that Evans offers a historical text which is an alternative to the histories printed by other researchers and writers of the past. His links to other texts, etymologies and traditions is quite substantial and his application of this learning to modern day times in the Western world is still appropriate today, even though this book was written in the 1970's. The only drawback is that he advocates the use of violence in activism in order to get the gay/witchcraft point across, and although this may just be a sign of the time when this book was written, it does put a bit of a dampener on the rest of the text, especially when taking into consideration the wiccan rede. However, this book is a must read for any witch studying history, or any lesbian, gay or bisexual person trying to trace their historical roots.

This little book is full of amazing and interesting material. I highly recommend it to any LBGT person that is interested in Witchcraft, alternative lifestyles and religions, and historical accounts.

Although some of the information is dry and dated, the overall presentation of information is excellent. I bought my copy used and even though the condition of the book wasn't great, the content definately made up for it.

This is the type of book that should be in every queer library. If you read and liked Randy Conner's book, Blossom of Bone, you will definately enjoy this little masterpiece.

This excellent book details the direct connections between our cultural mistreatment of homosexuals and the European/American historical religious killing of 'witches' (women 'considered bad') by Christians.