List price: $19.95 (that's 30% off!)
Used price: $8.99
Buy one from zShops for: $9.95
I've been cooking for more than thirty years, and this book stands on my shelf with very few other cookbooks as one I will actually use.
I know we're not supposed to talk about the price of the book, but here goes: for my money, you won't find a better value. There really are a thousand and one recipes, but the other information truly puts this book over the top. Buy, try it. You won't regret it.
Used price: $67.15
Buy one from zShops for: $62.66
Very well-written.
Used price: $2.75
Collectible price: $3.12
Buy one from zShops for: $2.74
The characters are very well drawn and I'm really looking forward to the next novel by mr. Kahn.
Used price: $10.30
Buy one from zShops for: $10.30
Used price: $11.03
Buy one from zShops for: $11.19
An epic story with a moral but deadly hero, To Tame a Land tells the story of a boy orphaned on a wagon train headed west. With natural skill and the luck of Raggedy Andy he grows into a gunfighter as fast as John Wesley Hardin, a bronc buster, a gold miner, a card sharp and a cattle driver. The story starts with a sad little boy and ends with man fighting for the woman he loves. Corny Cliches - sure - but this book captures the language and feel of the old west. Scratch that - it DEFINES the old west as we all know it. I re-read the book recently and twenty years later it still works (although it seemed awfully short the second time around...).
List price: $18.95 (that's 30% off!)
Used price: $13.16
Collectible price: $9.50
Buy one from zShops for: $12.40
In "Treatise on the Gods," Mr. Mencken offers a simple account for the rise of religion that is not founded on much more than his own imagination. But it is as defensible as anything written by anthropologists, and is certainly several orders of magnitude more sensible than taking the stories at face value. For the sort of "true believers" that Mencken would casually dismiss as the "vast herd of humanity," this book will be an affront and an insult. But to cowboys riding that herd, it's a delight.
Used price: $4.49
It challenges ideas of Native "authenticity" and gives short shrift to out-of-town environmentalists (rather shorter shrift than I entirely agreed with, in fact). When Tom decides to act against a copper mine, he does so not out of simplistic ideological purity but because of a complex of reasons, largely having to do with his own identity. (And he was uncritically working as a logger before that.)
Nevertheless, this is a profoundly environmentalist novel, with intensely beautiful descriptions of wilderness. It's an environmentalist novel because of the unbreakable connection it creates between humans and their environment and because of its challenge to the ideals of short-term profit. (At the same time, the problems of poverty are never glossed over.)
Owens wrote beautifully and incorporated stunning passages of magic realism. Tom is a believable character--confused, irresponsible (college drop-out), lonely, fierce, and ultimately heroic in the same way animals are in those old Western novels where wolves and mustangs leap off cliffs rather than be captured.
For wilderness supporters, this book is a horror story. The book is based on the very real possibility that a copper mine could be opened with the attendant roads and carnage, on Miner's Ridge, north of Glacier Peak in the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area. Congress left a loophole big enough to drive a front-end loader through when the Wilderness Act was passed. The road isn't there yet, but Owens' vision is remarkably clear. Take heed, and enjoy
List price: $14.00 (that's 20% off!)
Used price: $7.84
Collectible price: $9.53
Buy one from zShops for: $7.40
Skillfully he shows how these tensions were manifested in Nat Turner's rebellion, the founding of THE LIBERATOR by William Lloyd Garrison, the radical religious fervor of Charles Finney, the evangelist, and the industrial utopianism of Robert Dale Own. He shows the rise of the anti-elite democrats as exemplified through Andrew Jackson's fight with the Federalists over the Bank of the United States, and the power of social censure as practiced by Washington's social elite when they forced Jackson's "firing" of certain cabinet members who condoned another member's too hasty remarriage after his first wife's death. The Anti Masonic convention in Baltimore in 1831-1832 is emblematic of the seizure of power from the Federalists. He shows us how the genocide of the Cherokee's Trail of Tears was prompted by designs of speculators for their land, and how Marshall and the Supreme Court acceded to those expansionist desires through a peculiar reading of the status of the Cherokee status as a "nation" was revised to "citizens" so they could be removed at will. The Nullification "movement" over tariffs also came to head, and though the South did not withdraw from the Union, the States Rights doctrine which became the ideology of the slavocracy was put definitively into play.
The chapter covering abolition and slavery, especially the pithy telling of the Nat Turner story and the furor and fear this small "revolution" set off is particularly well-told. Particularly striking is that Turner (who had taught himself to read) saw in the 1831 solar eclipse a portent from heaven that it was time to kill his oppressors. Using the lessons of the Bible, he cast himself as a redeemer who would free his people through a conflagration and bloodshed. Although the revolution was short-lived, Turner's rebellion had an enormous impact on Southern fears, serving to reinforce and justify the prevailing military and concentration camp culture. At the same time, Garrison's "Liberator" began to become a thorn in the side of slavers who considered such tracts as direct interference in their business. The Liberator and other abolitionist newspapers, books and tracts are banned from circulation by the slavocracy.
Masur amply shows that America in 1831, the promises of the revolution were being enacted in ways the Founding Fathers could not have foreseen and would not have endorsed. Contrary to their program, where a benevolent oligarchy of elite planter and merchant families would administer America to the obedient masses, a new more democratic America was taking shape. Max Weber, according to Lipset in "American Exceptionalism" believed changinng liberal societies be likened to a game of dice where the dice were "loaded" by tradition. And as time went on the dice became more and more "loaded" as the accretions of time and custom were sedimented into the society, eventually creating framing stories and commonsense views that closed the foundations of society to debate. 1831 was a watershed year, a year in which some sluices were opened and others closed, a time when the roiling waters of liberty and democracy were undermining the foundations of elites, when the promises of revolutionary America were being extended to, revoked from, or taken up focibly by its people. It is a fascinating time, and "1831 Year of Eclipse" lays out the key events of this era with admirable clarity.
I learned a lot from this fast paced, but thoroughly researched book and would suggest it to anyone with even a passing interest in what was going on during the subject era.
List price: $12.95 (that's 20% off!)
Used price: $8.75
Buy one from zShops for: $8.95
Using materials most people have around the house you can simply flip to the beginning and follow the headings for ideas.
What can you use straws for? Try out the section on "Clutching at Straws", make an Oboe, balance scale, spear a potato, etc.
Would you like to know other uses for lemon juice? Start on page 36. Keep going- check out soap suds, strings, paper cups, experiments with temperature, etc.
Basically you get it, you could spend many great minutes or hours teaching your kids through hands on learning.
Many of these can be done by an older child with very little help- a perfect solution to the "I'm bored" problem.
Please- turn of the TV, electronic games. etc. and let them use their brains- actively.
This is a wonderful book, one that every household would benefit from.