This is such a beautiful book, it sits on MY bookshelf. I do LOVE to read this with our children, 6, 3, 1, years old. Mother Goose offers something to all age groups. All of the familiar poems and stories are here, as well as a few not-so-familiar entries. The best part of the book, however, is the illustrations. The book is exquisitely illustrated with the look of felt patchwork pictures. We all Really Do Love this Book!

Both my children (2 and 3), and any cousin who happens to be visiting, love this book. It's not short, and it's not small, but they're simply captivated by it. Both started getting interested in the book at about a year old, and continue to choose it from the tons of other books we have. I can't explain exactly why they love it over other Mother Goose books, though I suspect the 3-D look of a stitched picture has somthing to do with it. Everything Barefoot Books does is amazing: someday I'll own all their books.

As both a children's librarian and a mother of three children under the age of five, I've seen LOTS of Mother Goose books. This collection is really special, partly because the sewn illustrations are wonderful. They manage somehow to be both awe-inspiring in their creativity and homey in their style. The simple outlines will appeal to younger children, while the fabric and stitching details will intrigue older children. And of course, the rhymes themselves are must-reads for all kids; here we have a combination of old favorites and less familiar ones. Even if you already have Mother Goose books like the Iona Opie/Rosemary Wells collaborations, or Lucy Cousins' versions, this one is worth buying, especially as a gift for a new parent.

It is no overstatement to attribute to the publication of this book much of the fitness revolution that first began in the 1970s. It lionized the then relatively obscure sport of bodybuilding, and in particular made much notice of the then only marginally known figure of a relatively young Austrian muscle freak with the unlikely name of Arnold Schwarzenegger. The book proved such a trenchant and penetrating look into the shadowy subculture of fitness freaks and muscle-heads that it created a boom in the gym business, which previously existed only in a few locations where the numbers of bodybuilders reached enough of a critical mass to allow such a commercial venture. In fact, as Gaines points out in the narrative, most of the gyms were owned by guys like Joe Gold, who weren't in the gym business to make a profit, and who merely managed to eke out a living, and who rarely made much of a return on their original investment.

Of course, this affectionate and knowing look at the life and lifestyles of several serious competitive bodybuilders was so successful that it encouraged the photographer, George Butler, to try to find backing for a film version of the book. And it was a difficult sell, for the movie mavens had little appreciation for the degree of public interest in muscles and muscle men then. Indeed, the movie was never released for wide commercial viewing, but was rather relegated to showings at art cinemas and other venues. Yet the book was a resounding success, and was on the best-selling trade books for months and months.

The book can still be found in used bookstores, and is a wonderful resource for anyone interested in the history of bodybuilding or the lifestyles of the most famous musclemen of the late 1960s and 1970s. I have several copies, although I lost one in a fire last year. It is a shame it is now out of print, for the book (and the subsequent movie) capture the essence of the exotic little world of competitive bodybuilding as it existed in the days when the sport was marginalized, before it became big business, and before eager young men who want fame and riches got involved for that reason rather than because they just wanted to be bodybuilders. Ah, the good old days! Enjoy!

Before this book, bodybuilding was an obscure sport that nobody cared about or was interested in. Pumping Iron changed all that with it's realistic look at the sport with many pictures of the champions of the 70's & early 80's at work and play. Shattered many of the myths that people believed about bodybuilders and presented them as ordinary people with an intense drive and competitive will.

This engrossing documentary/commentary of bodybuilding is the Bible of what bodybuilding IS. It does not drown you with technical detail, nor attempt to teach you HOW to bodybuild. What it does is bring you inside the gyms, (where the competitors work out) the arenas (where they compete) and inside their minds, where the peculiar and fascinating drive for the physical ideal finds its germination, growth and finally fruit on the posing platform. Why they do what they do, and just a smattering of detail of the equipment they use to accomplish their ends, rounds out this book. It is centered around a not-then-well-known Arnold Schwarzeneggar in his quest for the ultimate bodybuilding title, the Mr. Olympia. A few other competitors are also featured along with their quest for physical perfection and recognition of that by the bodybuilding contest judges. The well-placed and very informative pictures of the athletes at work in the gym, at play and in competition were a constant source of fascination to me as a teenaged boy, and I spent uncounted hours slowly flipping through the pages and examining every detail of what I thought a physique SHOULD look like. If you have ever been mildly curious of what essence makes men into bodybuilders, or have wondered WHY they do this, this book is for you. I recommend it very highly, and would probably be flipping through it right now if I had it, so inexhaustible is its supply of interesting information!

I bought a copy of this book in 1981 and in my opinion, this is probably one of the most effective exercise books ever published. With this book, I lost mearly 60lbs in 3 MONTHS! My biggest regret is I misplaced my copy of this book and I have been trying to find another copy of this book for years. If amybody can get me another copy of this book, I greatly appreciate it.

This is the very best book I have come across dealing with fitness. It gives the reader great latitude assuming we all have different access levels to training equipment. Gaines's philosophy towards fitness is excellent!

The tree outside Petra's window makes strange shadows on her ceiling. This "darkling" has always haunted Petra's nights, but her simple sing-song spell kept her fears at bay. When Mr.Century dies, the darkling invades Petra's home. Somehow, Mr.Century is linked to Petra. If she doesn't break away, the darkling will fill her head with someone else's memories. In this eerie romance-thriller, twists and turns keep you guessing 'til the end.

Left for dead the USS. Indianapolis story. The book I read was called ?Left for Dead?. Pete Nelson wrote it with a preface by hunter Scott. This book is a true story about one of the biggest mistakes made in the NAVY. Lets start from the beginning; this story is about the boat the USS. Indianapolis called the indi for short. The indi was a proud flagship for the U.S. pacific fleet it had been through many important battles and won many medals for her crew. The indis next mission was so secret that even the captain of the vessel did not know what it was only what he was supposed to do the captains name was captain Macvay. What the indi was caring was the A-bomb it was to take it to the U.S. airstrip were it would be flown to drop on Japan. On the way pack to pearl harbor the India was hit by an I-58 sub torpedo well the indi sank after that and out of her 800 crew only 350 made it off the ship. The surviving crew survived in the shark-infested waters for 7 days with out food and water. When they were finally rescued there were only 50 people left. The captain was wrongly curt marceled because the NAVY wanted to hide the mistake it made even though the crow tried to clear his name they couldn?t Intel a boy named Hunter Scout did the India story for a history project did he find something to clear the captains name. You will have to read to find out what. I didn?t like the book because it was to slow for me.
NICK LAKE

This book is a very exciting journey. It kept me wanting to read on. I really felt as if I were a part of the adventure of the combat. It was a great thriller and at the same time a great lesson in history. It is a war time classic. Any one who enjoys an action war thriller or a good non-fiction book would absolutely love to read this. I have a hard time reading but found this kept my interest. I do have to say that the book starts out a bit slow, but towards the middle it speeds up into a fast pace adventure of the Japenese sending a torpedo into the front of a ship. Amercian soldiers were stranded in the middle of nowhere. I would say that my favorite part of this book is how they get themselves into more danger as they try to work their way back home. The days they are stranded are full of death, mysteries, murders and cannibalism. ...
This book was just over 200 pages with large font. Easy reading and a great book for adults and teens. I would not recommend this book to a younger child for it's graphic contents. I think that because of the war that is going on in Iraq right now that it made this book more interesting and more real to me. It also made me think about how horrible war is.
I think of how aweful it probably is out there for all those people fighting. So do yourself a favor and order this book online today. You won't be sorry.

I enjoyed this book and intend to recommend for purchase in my local high school library where I work. We need more high interest, lower reading level books to interest our young men. This will do it! Also, here's a true hero; someone who saw a "wrong" and worked to "right" it.

Notwithstanding its ominous title, this book is a reasonably conventional professional autobiography of a career diplomat. Author Richard Butler served as executive chairman of the United Nations Special Commission ("UNSCOM") charged with disarming Iraq from 1997 until 1999. Prior to that, he was Australia's ambassador to the United Nations and Thailand. Most of the book is devoted to disarmament issues, especially efforts to enforce U.N. Security Council resolutions requiring Iraq to destroy its weapons of mass destruction and to forbear rebuilding them and the subsequent decision to abandon those efforts. These issues must concern anyone interested in global security because, in Butler's view, the post-Cold War "new world order" may be every bit as dangerous as the frostiest years of the United States-Soviet Union confrontation.

Butler repeatedly demonstrates that he took a narrow, fundamental legalistic approach to his duties. He insists that the Security Council's decisions are binding on all of its members and that the Security Council has the ability "to enforce its decisions by military force, if needed." According to Butler, Security Council Resolution 687, which codified the terms of the cease-fire of the Persian Gulf War required Iraq to destroy all of its weapons of mass destruction - nuclear, chemical, biological, and missiles. Resolution 687 also set up the UN Special Commission - UNSCOM - as an organ of the Security Council to conduct the actual disarmament work, and the Security Council made completion of the disarmament work a prerequisite to the lifting of the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990. Butler clearly believes that Iraq never intended to cooperate with UNSCOM. As a pretext for reusing to cooperate, Iraq systematically blocked UNSCOM inspections, and this sparked a crisis that continued for 18 months. While Butler and UNSCOM were involved in an increasingly-bitter dispute with Iraq, Secretary-General Kofi Annan visited Iraq in February 1998 and proclaimed that Saddam Hussein was a man "I can do business with." In early August 1998, Iraq notified the Security Council that it had "decided to suspend UNSCOM's disarmament work." This led to a serious division in the Security Council, with the United States and the United Kingdom pitted against Russia, China, and France, which sought to end the disarmament work and discontinue the economic sanctions. UNSCOM was eventually disbanded and replaced by a body more sensitive to Iraq. Butler's outlook on the future is pessimistic. Butler asks: "Is Iraq as dangerous as it was a decade ago? And he answers: Elementally yes."

Although it is a cliché, I believe that this book is an extended exercise in preaching to the choir. Readers concerned with international-security issues already know and probably will agree with Butler that the UNSCOM period revealed "the real shape of the post-Cold War world," and they will share his criticisms of Russia, France, and China for having "clearly defined, separate interests in addition to their obviously shared concerns about a unipolar world." Much of this book is a detailed, sometimes tedious, narrative of Butler's two-year tenure at UNSCOM. After a while, it is mind-numbing, but, to the extent that Butler sought to make a historical record, he succeeds. This is an important book which ultimately asks: Can anyone have confidence in the United Nations if it allows cynical self-interest and endless palaver to prevail over principle and action?

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Book Review: Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory by David Isenberg Thursday, May 18, 2000

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There is no way to say this delicately so I may just as well come right out and say it. This is a painful book to read. Why? Is it badly written? No, it is both informative and engaging. Does it deal with an unimportant topic? On the contrary, it deals with a critically important issue: the effort to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Why then the pain?

This book is essentially the story of a failure, one that has consequences for the entire world. Specifically, it is the telling of the undermining and destruction of UNSCOM by Saddam Hussein. The West set up UNSCOM, short for the United Nations Special Commission, in the aftermath of the 1991 Persian Gulf War to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction.

Rolf Ekeus, a Swedish diplomat, headed UNSCOM for its first six years. In 1997, after Ekeus left to become Swedish ambassador to Washington, Richard Butler took over as executive director. Butler was an experienced Australian diplomat who had previously worked on many other disarmament issues. This book is the story of the final two years of struggle with Iraq in accordance with the original U.N. Security Council Resolution 687 of 1991. This struggle more or less ended -- unsatisfactorily -- when the United States and Britain bombed Iraq in Operation Desert Fox in December 1998, an event that marked the end of UNSCOM inspections in Iraq.

Caught cheating

Bear in mind that the various global arms-control regimes are based on the presumption that if those being inspected are found breaking the rules, some sort of enforcement will take place -- usually through the U.N. system and specifically thorough the Security Council. When enforcement fails, as happened in Iraq's case, the consequences are critical. As Butler notes: "Saddam's cheating has been detected, but it has not been stopped. Nations that could take action have chosen not to. The implications of this for the maintenance of the strictures against weapons of mass destruction, built so painstakingly over almost half a century, are dire. If Saddam finally gets away with it, the whole structure could well collapse."

Butler's is a story of many disappointments. He faced lack of political will and crass appeasement on the part of member nations of the U.N. Security Council. Constant obfuscation and deception by Iraq are the main themes, highlighted by vignettes of pettiness on the part of U.N. bureaucrats, such as the advisers to U..N Secretary-General Kofi Anan, and brazen lying by such Iraqi functionaries as Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz. Butler had a reputation as a plain-spoken man. It is a reputation that is deserved. It is refreshing to see a diplomat use words like "outrageous," "appalling," "word witchcraft," "blackest lie," "phony" and "facile."

Back to Iraq?

In the first two chapters, Butler briefly describes his childhood and later working for the Australian Foreign Affairs department and the work he did prior to taking on his position as head of UNSCOM. But the remaining chapters constitute the core of the book.

Much of the book details the two wars that UNSCOM waged. Sadly, it lost both. The first and the better known is the daily war of attrition it fought with Iraq, which used ceaseless tactics of cheat, retreat and cheat in order to thwart UNSCOM. As Butler explains, Saddam Hussein did not believe he lost the Gulf War. Though Saddam was driven from Kuwait, he viewed the Dessert Storm coalition's real aim as to remove him from power or turn Iraq into a vassal state. Thus, for Iraq the battle with UNSCOM was simply the last battle of the Gulf War. And for Iraq to "cement its "victory" in that war they had to defeat both UNSCOM in general and Richard Butler personally. In fact, Iraq paid Butler an ironic compliment when it demanded his removal as item 9 of a list of demands presented to the Security Council in November 1998 in its attempt to forestall the Clinton bombing.

The other war UNSCOM fought with the U.N. to both preserve its independence and to get the Security Council to support its documentation of Iraq's continuing refusal to live up to its pledge to allow UNSCOM inspectors to carry out their work.

One of the more intriguing sections of the book deals with the allegation by Scott Ritter, former UNSCOM weapons inspector who resigned in 1998, that Butler had taken direction from the U.S. government and that UNSCOM had allowed itself to be a conduit for U.S. intelligence collection in Iraq. Ritter's view was detailed in his book Endgame published last year. We may never know the exact truth of the matter, but Butler musters a good case that his charges are false.

As Butler makes clear in his conclusions, we cannot expect UNSCOM's successor organization, UNMOVIC (United Nations Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission), created in December 1999, to accomplish anything worthwhile. To name just two flaws, unlike UNSCOM it will be under the direction of the U.N. secretary-general; its staff will be U.N. civil servants instead of technical experts.

The conclusion that Butler leaves us with is both dismaying, and even worse, true. "When a determined criminal flouts international law under cover of the principle of state sovereignty, the world system, as currently constituted, appears able or unwilling to stop him," he writes.

In short, we should be afraid, very afraid...

This book is exceptional on so many levels I scarcely know where to begin. Richard Butler former Executive Chairman of UNSCOM is very definitely a man of deep integrity driven by an equally deep concern for the issue of arms control not solely in Iraq but throughout the world. This book is his story and how during the course of two years he battled to achieve the complete dismantling of Iraq's stockpile of weapons chemical biological and nuclear.

He describes in detail the stand-offs between himself and the Iraqi authorities and how ultimately the united nations through weakness and division have allowed Saddam Hussein to hold onto much of his deadly arsenal. He charts the use of these weapons by Iraq in its war with Iran as well as the use of gases on ethnic minorities inside the country itself.

The reader gets an incredible look at the UN Security Council attempting to apply a, geo-political rules as usual approach, to the problem of Iraq's non-compliance with UN resolutions. The role of the Russian diplomats along with the French and Chinese come in for close scrutiny. If Butlers understanding of Israel's defence posture during the gulf war is accurate then the reader can take it that if Saddam were to use a chemical weapon or worse against a city like Tel Aviv then almost certainly and without consultation Israel would respond with tactical nuclear weapons against Iraq. During the gulf war Israeli Jets sat fuelled and ready to fly against targets in Iraq following the deployment of some 39 Scud missiles fired at Israel during the conflict. This analysis and so much more is contained in this sober but authentic look at how dangerous the world has become. Worst of all is the ongoing capitulation by the United Nations in terms of forcing Iraqi compliance with its own resolutions.

It is often said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, this book chose the thousand-word route in most cases. Neural nets are ideal candidates for illustrations. So, why they decided to use endless descriptions is beyond me. It is like giving directions over the phone when a map would get to the point much faster.

It also needed to explain more conceptually how neural nets actually work, not just how they are arranged. Examples where the net matches one-to-one with an actual image or pattern are easy to follow, but how they recognize different variations of patterns (variety) I never got a good feel for from this book. However, the description of an Adeline node was pretty good.

The book is a very inspiring introduction to artificial neural computing. It explains the intutive motivation behind the design of almost all major artificial neural models. It explains insight in simple english. This book along with a mathematical rigourous book can provide a very good understanding on the modern neural network research.

This book walks through practical examples of various neural network designs and their relationships among eachother.

This book is a good review book for the novice geology fan or the most crusted old timmer. Good indepth explinations without much of the techno babble that can be associated with geology. Easy to fallow and understand. A good companion for those who do the Death Valley car tour. A must have.

Excellent but very personal view of the nature of soils. Crtitique of Soil Taxonomy unjustified. Most suitable for undergraduate geology students. Fine illustration are useful.

I like many boys in my youth took the Charles Atlas course and therefore was very interested in this book. The book contains exercises out of the course,but instead of telling the truth stays with the fictionalized version of 97 pound weakling who becomes The World's Most Perfectly Developed Man.I was actually disappointed and find the exercises from this course written in 1922 drastically out dated and except for a few exercises where you are pushing one arm against the other no different than you would find in any high school gym class.

Although informative, this book does not present an in-depth review of Mr. Atlas and his life. It's almost as if the authors were writing a comic book story. Atlas is presented in a rather two-dimensional manner. There are some issues of Atlas' life that are just barely touched upon. And some REALLY INTERESTING issues the authors just choose to ignore and not elaborate. The writing is rather amateurish. The examples of photography are excellent. More mention and discussion of Sansone and Grimek should have been included. It was at least helpful in some minor ways for my research.

This book covers everything about the great Charles Atlas. History, biography and even a look at his famous bodybuilding course.