Detailed graphical and pictorial images of many different mechanisms grouped in catagories for easy searching. When your stuck on a mechanical design, this book can be a great help.

this book is for the person who likes to fool around in the workshop inventing things. I like to do that as often as I can and this book has really boosted my productivity in the shop. Before I start on a new project I like to scan the book again and see if I can use any of the ideas. I never fail to find something I can use. The drawings are a big help in understanding the devices. There is no other book like this. It is a gathering of all the neat gadgets all in one book.

I used this book frequently in an undergraduate mechanical engineering design curriculum. Many of the images are self explanitory, and often provide a solution to a mechanism problem at hand. A must for every mechanical design engineer!

Just look at a globe or a map. To the modern man, it all seems so final. Everything is mapped out rather specifically, with all kinds of scientifically and mathematically refined numbers and measurements ordering the physical world. Just a set of numbers can identify any place on Earth now with almost perfect accuracy. After reading Mercator, you realize what a different world we live in compared to the world Gerardus Mercator inhabited around five centuries ago. To Mercator and his colleagues, who were considered the high point of scientific knowledge at the same, the world was a dark mystery that seemed limitless in its expanse. They had little to reference, save fanciful stories of explorers and the Old Testament. It was up to a group of unbelievably talented men to make the leap that mankind needed in order to fully understand the shape and scope of the world we live on.

Gerardus Mercator was by no means born into greatness. On the contrary, the Flemish born genius was of very humble origins. As Crane reminds us, humble at the time meant barely living. Every day was a struggle. Luckily, the bright young boy that would give so much to mankind had a fairly prosperous uncle who funded his education at the Church academy at Leuvren, Belgium. I considered this part of the book to be the best. Crane does a very good outline of the emerging world of western intellectualism that was taking hold in the Low Countries. The Church and its allies, at least in certain areas, were taking fairly enlightened stances, letting non-churchmen hold ecumenical exclusive positions. This resulted in a great flourishing of ideas, especially in the field of cartography and theoretical mathematics. At first, Mercator was more of a simple student, but he soon fell in love with math and its mystical promises. Rapidly, his genius would be fully engaged with the image of the world.

Unfortunately, that image was not agreed upon by some important people. Leaders did not like to see the representations of their own land reduced in any way. Nor did the Vatican like certain new features added that seemed to cast doubt on certain church doctrines. Mercator, like many other intellectuals of the era was caught up in the net of the Inquisition. However, he lived through that experience, and we are all the better for it. Crane goes very indepth into Mercators methods and mindset. The reader gets a full understanding of the calculations and stakes involved. I felt Crane gets bogged down sometimes in minutiae, that does not really help the story, but the book is very good overall. It just brings a sense of awe to the reader that the western world could produce men such as Mercator, it truly is a credit to our civilization and the ideals we all aspire to.

Who hasn't heard of "Mercator projection"? You see it every time you pick up an atlas and look at a world map with all its longitude and latitude lines.

Well, lo and behold, Mercator was a person, Gerardus Mercator, not just a projection.

This is a terrific book for anyone interested in history that goes beyond the ordinary. In fact, there have been a lot of books about scientific history and this is a worthy addition to the genre.

Mercator was born in poverty in the Low Countries and lived to become the preeminent geographer of his time when drawing an accurate map involved doing the best you could from limited resources. Starting with globes he created the conventional way of putting a map on a flat surface with minimal distortion.

This is not the easiest book to read, but it was excellent. I recommend it to anyone who wants to deal with history beyond the usual political history.

Cartographers are generally an anonymous bunch. If you know one cartographer, it is probably Mercator, and you probably only know his last name because of his ingenious projection to make a flat map of our spheroid Earth. Gerard Mercator was a mild and modest man, less interested in making a name for himself than in improving knowledge of our planet. It was for others of his era within the bustling sixteenth century to cross the seas and bring back riches, and more importantly, geographical data. Mercator himself never even approached an ocean, his exploring restricted mostly to libraries and obscure reports from those who made the voyages. He never had a biography in English until Nicholas Crane produced _Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet_ (Henry Holt). The life of the cartographer is integrated with the tumultuous military, political, and meteorological events around him, for an engaging look at an original thinker.

Mercator was born as Gerard Kremer to poor parents (his father was a cobbler) in Flanders in 1512. He was fortunate in being helped in his education, and became an apprentice to a maker of instruments and globes. His engraving into copperplate was beautiful and influential. In 1537, Mercator published his first map, a portrait of the Holy Land. Four years later, he made his first terrestrial globe, and Crane makes understandable how huge such a project was. Making the lens-shaped map papers to glue onto the sphere may have inspired Mercator to calculate his projection, a map that was to be an aid to navigators ever after. Mercator lived in a tumultuous time, and his moderate views, shared with the humanists, about such things as faith in Christ being more important than ritualistic ceremony, were considered heretical by others. In 1544, he was actually imprisoned for seven months for alleged Lutheran sympathies (charged with "_lutherye_"). He remained busy until the end of his long life, during the final three decades of which he worked on a book of maps of lands all over the world which was only completed by his grandsons. There had been other such books, but Mercator's was more comprehensive. It was also more influential; he named it after a Titan of Roman mythology, and ever since, any book of maps has been called an atlas.

We are less surprised by maps than those in Mercator's time; we have instantaneous satellite pictures of the world, whenever we want them, and _terra incognita_ continues to dwindle. Everyone recognizes the true silhouettes of continents. There was a time when such knowledge was still new, and tentative. Crane has written about the many influences on his subject within this complicated historical period, and has produced a remarkably full portrait. Mercator assimilated information and made a new picture of the world, a picture now familiar to us all. His influence is not even confined to the Earth he served so well; when the Mariner missions mapped Mars, the resultant charts were Mercator projections.

Hello my name is . This book is one of my favorite books to read over and over. It's about a boy that will open a church that was not opened for sixty years. And the pictures look like they were hand painted by the author. When I read the book for the first time it seemed like a true happening.

Young Alexi helps the people of his village come together to pull off a Christmas miracle in their small, deserted church. Beautiful illustrations and a heartwarming story you will want to share time and again with your family.

Hi! My name is Jacqueline Whelan. This book is a great holiday time picture book for all ages. The illustrations are wonderful, and each book appears to be had painted! A touching story, very well written.Jacqueline Whelan:-)

This is a tale about a cricket and his band. They play beautiful music for all of the animals that come to the lake. The name of the band is the Bug-a-Wug Cricket Band. Their favorite place to play is at the Little Lake and the Little Stream. This story is mainly about how soft and beautiful their bands music sounds and how it gets all of the animals to dance and have a good time. It is a good book if you would like to read it.

Josh V.

I have to say that I have enjoyed Nicholas Cricket from the very first time I read it to my daughter 9 years ago. I play the banjo myself and have always been fond of "bugs". I find the illustrations to be marvelous and evoke a joyful jazz age when banjos were hot and zoot-suits were cool! The text is lyrical and very enjoyable to read aloud. I have recommended Nicholas Cricket to all my friends and to both public and school libraries. It is a great book.

This book is full of beautiful, rich illustrations. I enjoy it just as much as my 2.5 yr old who insisted we read it every night for a month!

The goal of An Open Heart is to give the reader a basic understanding of Buddhism and to show how Buddhist practice can lead to a more compassionate and wise life. Many of the problems encountered in life are self-created. This leads to endless cycles of suffering, misery, and disappointment. The first step towards liberation from this painful cyucle is to commit and devote self to the practice of compassion in a very deliberate and systematic way.

There's a really good reason why books by the Dalai Lama are so popular. He presents himself as an equal., He conducts himself as a servant of humanity. And his explanation of Buddhist concepts is logical, intelligent, and persuasive. However, the Dalai Lama's most alluring quality is his personal willingness to "walk the talk." This book is a demonstration of his deeply personal commitment to lessening the suffering of the world.

This book received a score of 8.250 on a scale of 1(low) to 10 (high) from the spiritual reviewer. A score of 8 or higher designates the book as "a classic."

The topics of these writings, gathered from numerous lectures the Dalai Lama has delivered, range from the Need to Practice the Dharma, Compassion and Cultivating the Compassion Within, Altruism: Cherishing Others, Impermanence and Death, Recognizing the Enemy Within, Dealing with Anger and Hatred, and Universal Resonsibility. They will resonate with individuals drawn to the Buddhist conceptions of human life, and will surely provide reflections that may enlighten the daily confrontations that are the stresses and constraints of modern life.

Despite the Buddhist overtones, the practices and wisdom written in this book is universal. It tells us the way to live a fuller life and gives meaning to everyday actions. The Dalai Lama is a powerful communicator who has an intricate world view. I agree on his analysis of the problems that we face and his solutions. He claims that he is just as anyone of us without anything special of miraculous but his words are the rare words of a man who knows much more about life than most people. I recommend this book to anyone who wishes to recover inner peace through the Buddhist way, though not necessarily through Buddhism.

This book places heavy emphasis on the technical and mathematical aspect of investing. It is quite excellent but I found the math to be very advanced and therefore it is probably not suitable to most individual investors. Like the previous reviewer, I also found the book to be too brief.

This book definitely has merit, but it isn't right for beginners or the mainstream investment community. The best audience would be investors with highly specialized investing methods.

This is a very good introduction to the basic mathematics used in Wall Street. The author is a professor of mathematics, which explains the ease in which he explains all of the mathematical concepts for even the average reader. The downside to this book is that it does not go very far. Given its small size, only 100 pages, I feel that he could have gone on much further into more advanced topics. He starts with means and variances, and works his way through correlation, risk measures, performance measures, investment planning, and indexes. He wraps up with some ultra-brief comments on ARCH models and neural networks. I would love for him to come out with a much larger, much more detailed, much more advanced book.

Savvy investors in the stock market need knowledge of the math behind the market, and The Math Behind Wall Street provides it: a slim book masks a wealth of information covering statistics, probability, and other practical applications of business math concepts. From risk factors to annual rates of return, The Math Behind Wall Street will prove invaluable.

This book would be wonderful for a first time mom or a mom who is breastfeeding for the first time and has a cranky child. The book has good nutrition guidelines and information on what might be causing your child to be distressed during or after feeding. If, however, you have been dealing with lactose or milk protein problems with your other children as babies, this book probably won't give you much more information than you already have. If you are like me, you've been searching for help on what foods could cause stomach upset, and how to deal with dairy problems in breastfeeding. This book gave me no new information. The recipes looked like good basic recipes but there was nothing there that I haven't seen in other cookbooks.

As a first-time mother who hadn't considered breastfeeding until my daughter was born, it just felt like the natural way to go. As we had encountered our first tough night, and couldn't calm our crying daughter, I wondered, was it something I ate? I frantically searched the web for help, and decided I needed an entire book on the subject. I ended up with several books, and this one was the quickest and easiest to read through. It has lists of possible "gas-producing foods", and "cow's milk-containing foods" that helped solve our problem. It was very down-to-earth, and explained everything I needed to know to help me understand how to best feed my daughter. She is now 8 months old, still breastfeeding (and on some solids), and is the happiest baby I know. Thank you!

Jill Dalley deserves an award for her effort into this incredible book........She must have spent years on it's development and research......

I was a member of Roger Guillemin's Nobel Prize winning research team for several years at the Salk Institute, and was later invited to also work with and in the laboratory of the Nobel-laureate Andrew Schally at Tulane University/Veterans Administration Medical Center in New Orleans for several more years. As far as we know, I am the only one who was a member of both teams for years each. I know what happened because I was directly involved in a little more than the last half of the book. I have also conducted research in other similar laboratories, both independently and collaboratively for decades. Nicholas Wade wrote more about the spirit of the activities which occurred, as compared with what actually happened. This book did provide, however, some insight into the almost incomprehensible pressures, the phenomenal strivings toward a stellar goal (reaching for the stars), the dreams and the unimaginably grueling work (24 hours a day, 7 days a week - nonstop) which inherently resides at these intellectual levels, and did in our research groups. I felt, however, that THE NOBEL DUEL did not go far enough in some instances, and was simply incorrect in other instances. This book does, however, provide the general public with a glimmer of what it is like at these levels, and what is involved in winning the most coveted research award in the world, The Nobel Prize (in Medicine/ Physiology).

. . .of the behind-the-scenes research activities and fierce competition behind two teams of scientists both on the same 'track', racing for the greatest scientific prize of them all -- the Nobel. One thing is certain -- human nature is as evident in the laboratory as it is everywhere else!

Having had a long friendship with the lead chemist to one of the teams, the late Roger Burgus, led even more enjoyment to this book.

This book is a fascinating blend of actual science and human passion and spirit. Scientific research used to seem so cold and unhuman but after reading this book, you realize that many people put all of their lives...money, heart and soul...into the pursuit of science and in this case, the Nobel Prize. Makes for fine reading.

The main reason I read Nicholas Delbanco is for the musicality of his prose: the cadence, tempo and unusual rhyhtms of his sentences, here addressed to a conventional drama of Professor Meets Girl. I'm reminded of an American ensemble who could only explain jazz to Chinese musicians by playing a traditional Chinese melody a la Theolonius Monk. Delbanco is like that. Each sentence reveals careful thought, each chapter orchestration. Not unlike a jazz musician, Delbanco receives too small attention: hunt down his novels and essays, and give a listen.

In 1969, thirty-something Professor Paul Ballard teaches philosophy at Vermont's Catamount College. Paul is normally aloof in the classroom until Elizabeth Sieverdsen attends his class. The student and the teacher fall in love and begin a torrid affair that abruptly ends when she rejects his marriage proposal. She leaves him without informing him she carries his baby. Not long afterward, Paul is injured in an accident, ends his teaching career, and becomes a hermit on his remote farm. Elizabeth gives up the baby for adoption.

Over the years, Elizabeth marries and has children with her spouse, but never forgets her first love for Paul nor her abandonment of their child. With her marriage over and her nest empty, Elizabeth finally returns to Vermont for the first time in a quarter of a century. She meets Paul and hesitantly they try to regain what they lost.

OLD SCORES is an intriguing modern day retelling of the classic Abelard and Heloise tale. The story line works, especially the subplot occurring in 1969, due to the genuine feel of the interrelationships between the characters. Although not quite as masterful as WHAT REMAINS, Nicholas Delbanco provides a complex, intelligent tale centering on the difficulty of forging a relationship even when love ties the players together.

Harriet Klausner

Nicholas Delbanco is an extraordinary stylist with a compelling purchase on the human condition. In this, his latest novel,the author scores an ancient story (love found, relinquished, and recovered) so that it resonates and sustains long after the final notes are struck. Delbanco has found the emotional center of his subject without the sentimentality or maudlin cliches with which a lesser writer might have been content. Here, instead, we have a discerning wisdom that rises from the particularities of our lives so that the story, the characters, the emotional terrain emerge fresh and real amidst sentences that delight, vivify, ring true.

The year is 1588, England is at war with Spain, Queen Elizabeth I is on the throne, and London is a bawdy, boisterous mix of courtly elegance and general squalor. Against this background, Marston paints a picture of the precarious life of a small theater group, Lord Westfield's Men, who perform in the galleried courtyard of a pub called the Queen's Head. Nicholas Bracewell, the company's bookholder, not only holds the troupe together but also solves a murder in the bargain. The wild and colorful period comes vividly to life in Marston's mystery.

Amidst the quest for novelty in the mystery genre during the late 80s, when contemporary and 20th century period settings became passé, came THE QUEEN'S HEAD. Despite its weaknesses, it is sure to delight many fans of SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE as author Edward Marston hit a fresh, new concept for milieu, especially when the book's 1988 British release gives it a good eleven-year clearance before that of the successful movie scripted by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard.

This Elizabethan mystery is the story of Nicholas Bracewell, the bookholder of an Elizabethan theater company, who seeks justice when Will Fowler, one of the actors and a good friend, is murdered in a lowly tavern. Although this 1989 American release novel does not give its readers any red herrings, it is captivating entertainment that takes place during one of England's most colorful periods of history.

On the dying request of Fowler, Bracewell searches the unseemly streets, boozers, and brothels of London for the mysterious, violent red-bearded man who ran the victim through with a sword. During his investigation of Fowler's unwarranted murder, Bracewell finds Fowler's daring lifestyle disguised his more latent proclivities. In the meantime, Bracewell also has to deal with the pulsating, on-going problems of day-to-day working in the busy Lord Westfield's Men theater company, which frequently plays at The Queen's Head Inn.

Marston brings the crowded, busy atmosphere of Elizabethan London to life. The affecting ramifications of the Queen of Scots's execution, Philip II's impending invasion, and the subsequent defeat of the Spanish Armada on English society bring even more life to the historical background. His knowledge of Elizabethan theater is thorough, successfully transporting his readers into another place and time.

The colorful mixture of characters bring about some hilarious and ironic situations. Lawrence Firethorn, the leading actor and manager of Lord Westfield's Men, does his darndest to keep peace at home with his wife despite taking a fancy to one of his more distinguished female punters. Edmund Hoode, the company's resident poet, decides it has been too long since he was last romantically involved, then pursues the daughter of the protective landlord. The youngest and most promising apprentice, Richard Honeydew, yearns to be accepted by the other three who constantly make him the butt of their practical jokes. Meanwhile, someone else has more sinister plans for him.

Readers are not kept abreast of everything Bracewell knows in this mystery, but humor and suspense still abound in THE QUEEN'S HEAD. Any reader looking for a fun mystery can quickly overlook this story's shortcomings.

An Elizabethan theater troop is bedeviled by mishaps, including the murder of one its players in a tavern brawl, the theft of its one complete copy of the script with stage directions for a performance before the queen, an attempt to kill on the young boys who plays the female roles, and others. "Book holder" (akin to the director with extra duties) Nicholas Bracewell hunts for the killer while trying to hold the troop together. Great period details. General bawdiness and terrific dialogue add up to a fun read. Also, don't miss Marston's other series, which follows a group of traveling magistrates just after the Norman conquest of England. More terrific historical whodunits.