I found this cool book in the city-but mine has a more nicer cover-this book is filled with beautiful paintings-this book makes you want to be an artist!

I would reccomend this book to anyone who likes Spirit and lovely paintings!

IN A TIME WHEN HORSES RAN WILD-ONE STALLION FOUGHT FOR FREEDOM AND BECAME A LEGEND!

This is a really beautiful book...high quality...the graphics and story are excellent...my 5 year old loves it. It's a keeper.

Great book and easy for kids to read. No nightmares here! Good story line where the good guys win and the ending will not disappoint the little ones...or the readers. This is a Tale with a meaning behind it and lessons to learn while providing action and a love story suitable for young readers. It Encouraged my kids to inquire about history and initiated a great teaching and learning opportunity for all of us. I Cannot recommend this book enough. It's a favorite in my family--the movie and the soundtrack are even better. The kids loved the movie and the soundtrack is easy listening for us too.

you've seen the herzog movie now read the participants' own account! available at all good libraries (about the only place you'll find this book unfortunately). one of the most bizarre journeys ever undertaken during the golden age of exploitation. i get lost with words trying to describe this book. i guess you could describe it with all of the usual superlatives about 'testimony to the human spirit', 'indominable willpower of men' but this quest for god, glory and gold rapidly descends into an exploration of greed, power and survival. it's well worth reading the original text of the journey, it's endlessly fascinating as the journey moves through the andes with hope and then down the amazon with horror. march on.

As an Italian-American myself, I was searching to fill the gaps on some of the details regarding some of the traditions and superstitions that my grandparents believed in. Since both of them have passed away, we have been filling in a family tree and are supplementing our research with some of the rituals and customs we have come to enjoy and would like to pass them along to our children.

This book was right on the money! Very enjoyable and easy to follow! My father and aunt and uncle enjoyed the portions I read aloud to them-- it brought back a lot of memories and is allowing us to build a more robust family history story! Excellent reading!

An absolutely fascinating work. Nagle sailed constantly and this journal is his amizingly accurate recollection of this life time of seafaring experience. Transcribed as he wrote it with misspellings, and errors it provides a vivid insight into the life of a sailor (not an officer) in the sailing navies of these times. Each chapter's forword by the editor sets the tone and historical context for the chapter and provides some of the historical documentation that authenticates this document.

This book is a most impressive account of the 18th century Royal Navy I have read. Althought it was written at the end of the 19th century it is written in a modern style which is surprisingly easy to read. This book is a must for any serious Naval Historian and will capture the imagination of all with any interest in Naval history. The authors commentries are based on an obvious extensive research and his opinions are based on facts not speculation. I consider this book to be a authorative tome which provides detailed accounts of all fleet and single ship actions of the period.

SPADA is a journal that contains some of most current ideas on historical swordsmanship by a number of the field's leading researchers. As a student of historical swordsmanship myself, I think it is an excellent step in the right direction for the progression of this school of study.

As far as the contents of the book are concerned, my hat goes off to the editor, Stephen Hand, for distilling such a diverse, and yet interesting range of papers from the vast array of excellent treatises available.

The book also features some interesting reports on some of the most recent activities undertaken in the WMA community. This provides the reader with a very good 'big picture' perspective into what advances are being made in what fields, and an appreciation for the vast range of people who are now interested in historical swordsmanship.

With regards to it's practicality, the book caters for many different tastes - whether you are interested in the finesse of renaissance fencing, or simply a medieval re-enactor using the trusty 'sword and shield' method. SPADA provides useful insights and a greater understanding of historical methods of fighting.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in gaining a greater appreciation of historical swordsmanship, and anyone who is curious to know what the swordmanship community out there is doing. I rate it as a 'must have' item, and I look forward to more SPADA releases in the future.

cheers

Matt Partridge
Secretary
Order of the White Stag

In preparing our list of Christmas books to share with others, we had to search far and wide on amazon to find this particular book, a paperback edition of the classic Night Before Christmas.

This is the book I've used for years when reading this story to my own children, passing on Tasha Tudor and other illustrators. Why?

Although we can find the same poem and pay a lot more, with award winning illustrators, the illustrations provided by Douglas Gorsline are surely the best. They are quite colorful, and offer details little children love looking into...cats lie sleepily on the window sill, we see an overview of the town, the presents spilling from the open sack are intriguing and plentiful, and Jolly St. Nick is -- well, quite Jolly (as you can see by looking at the cover!)

The story is an "abridged version" - I'm not sure about other parents, but we read this on Christmas Eve, and we only have so much time and energy. Everything we remember from the classic poem by Clement Clarke Moore is in this version.

(From "'Twas the Night Before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse" to "He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle, And away they all flew like the down of a thistle. But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,"HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, AND TO ALL A GOOD-NIGHT!" In between we have everything, from the names of the eight tiny reindeer, to a belly that shakes like a bowl full of jelly, including dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, when they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky".

In other words, don't be scared off by 'abridged'!)

Perhaps a hardcover edition might be more appropriate if you're giving a gift (unless you're giving to more than one child), but this book is one of the best offers we've found!

A classic done simply and inexpensively!

I discovered this book 31 years ago, for my daughter and it is still loved by all the family. The illustrations are wonderful, warm, charming and delightful and bring a special meaning to the story. We still read it to all the young children on Christmas Eve and for adults we read the story and pass a grab bag gift every time the word THE is mentioned. It would not be Christmas without this book. It is magical.

This beautiful book was in my family as a hard cover edition for many years and was a Christmas Eve tradition for my four sons when they were growing up. It's poor battered body disappeared some time after the last of my little ones went off into the adult world. I am so delighted to see it back again, though this time as a nicely affordable soft cover. Clement C. Moore's enchanting story poem already provides an atmosphere filled with warmth and joyful expectation and with the addition of Tasha Tudor's quaint, nostalgic water-colors from an antique New England the Christmas magic is complete!
The winter landscapes fill our senses and Tasha's own gray tabby cat and Welsh Corgi welcome us into this charming world.
Tasha's Santa that you will meet in this book has been portrayed as the poem describes him...a right jolly old elf. He's not that much larger than the corgi and his team really consists of eight "tiny" reindeer. His pointy ears and his Eskimo mukluks add to the delightful ambiance of the book. He dances with the toys and with the happy animals and we can truly believe it will be a happy Christmas for all.
I hope this book becomes a Christmas Eve tradition for many, many more families.

Can a professional historian produce a book that represents both a contribution to scholarship and a narrative interesting and accessible to the reading public? Fred Anderson answers the question affirmatively in his "Crucible of War" a comprehensive narrative of the Seven Years' War.

The great value of Anderson's work is that it places the Seven Years' War in context. The French and Indian War, as it has come to be known in American historiography, was but part of a larger, global struggle for imperial supremacy. The great value of Anderson's study is that he places the war in the context of this larger conflict. Ample (and justified) attention is paid to political developments in England, to battlefields in continental Europe, in India and the Carribean. The result is that the reader learns much of the differing British and American perspectives preceding the American revolution.

Anderson's narrative proceeds in a chronological fashion (as well it should) and is filled with vivid descriptions of the battles, political maneuverings and major personalities which animated the War. For one relatively uninformed about American colonial history, I found this work fascinating, very well written and a welcome analysis of the antecedents of the Revolutionary War period. It is also a much more manageable read than the cumbrous, multi-volume study of Lawrence Henry Gipson, upon which Anderson relies heavily. This will surely be regarded as the best one-volume synthesis of the Seven Years' War in North America for many years to come. I would recommend it to anyone interested in American colonial history, the British Empire or even 18th century military history.

Fred Anderson's book, "Crucible of War" is a wonderfully written and comprehensive work about pre-revolutionary America. In its great depth and majestic sweep it ties together the politics within Britain, the warfare on the Continent, the struggle with the French in North American, the problems the American colonists had vis-a-vis the British, and the importance of the Ohio Country and the Indians livng there. Anderson is deeply learned, writes with great detail and balance, and with a clarity of vision. He provides us with deep insight into the social, political, and cultural confrontations, not only between these groups, but among themselves. He also gives us an understanding of the geographic dimensions of the struggle and how these affected the outcome. All in all, this is a grand synthesis in the classic tradition.

Anderson's thesis is that the war's progression "set in motion the forces that created a hollow British empire" with problems that could not be solved by decisions made in London. Understanding this makes our understanding of the origins of the American Revolution more complete. This book is a must read for anyone seriously interested in pre-revolutionary America.

As a writer, Fred Anderson is accessible and well researched. Sometimes history writing makes these two traits seem mutually exclusive, but not in his wonderful study of British and Colonial relations amidst the Seven Years War.

Anderson's main thesis is that the Seven Year's War (known more popularly as the French and Indian War) did not need to lead to the American Revolution, but was a significant and major turning point in its own right. The latter is fair enough, but I'm not sure that Anderson, despite his claims, is breaking really new ground with regard to not necessarily seeing the French and Indian War and our Revolution as a seemless progression to American Independence. His analysis at the end of the book as to why this was not necessarily so is pretty thin, although the coverage of the events themselves certainly let the reader understand that there were several possible break points where Parlimentary action or policy changes could have kept America as part of the British Empire at least past 1776.

What Anderson has done is written a thorough history of the conflict. He takes a wholistic approach and in fact focuses on war management and policy in more detail than the military campaigns. They do not necessarily get short shrift, but they are not evaluated in the kind of minute detail that military histories provide. This is appropriate. As Anderson shows, the conflict was as much driven by the chess game played in European capitals and between Parliment and the Colonial assemblies as it was by battlefield developments. The book reminded me of Middlekauf's "Glorious Revolution," a series in the Oxford history of the United States that gave great background and discussion to causes and English debate over our Revolution in additon to telling the story as written by our troops.

Anderson shows how the character of the relationship between England and the Colonies was much different while the French held Canada. France brillintly used its indian allies in ways the English never considered, treating them as co-equals and using them to harass the American frontier in order to protect their penetration into the Ohio Valley and Illinois country. While this menace existed, the colonists were united in desperately wanting British troop protection. The British-Franco rivalry, always upon a tinderbox during this time in Europe, only needed an incident to ignite it anew into war. That the incident was provided by troops under George Washington's command in Pennsylvania is a delicious irony of history.

The reslutling war was a struggle between French and English troops, between various Indian tribes allied to or caught in the middle of the combatants and between Parliment and the Colonial assemblies regarding funding and local support for the war. As history would show, the debates and various strategies employed by Parliment to secure colonial financial and manpower contributions to the effort would set the stage for the Stamp Act, Quatering Act and other post war Parlimentary initiated crises that paved the way for American Independence.

Along the way we meet wonderful characters. An early George Washington in search of glory and wealth via militia command. The indominable William Pitt, parlimentarian master and stragegic visionary whose management of the war effort led to a stunning military victory and close colonial cooperation with the mother country. Lord Grenville, who followed Pitt and in a short time reversed the policies that had brought the colonies close to Parliment and accepting of Pitt's imperial order. George III who in a pique of personality sacked Pitt for no other reason than to placate opposition forces that had gathered around him while he was waiting for a vacancy on the throne.

All in all, its a big story that is well written, lucid and engaging. For a big book, it has short paragraphs, which help keep the pace moving along nicely. For anyone interested in the French and Indian War and the evolving nature of American identity as well as the path toward Revolution, this is a good choice.

This text has some insightful commentary and historical analysis regarding the degree to which the Corpus Hermeticum does or does not reflect Egyptian theory and practice as opposed to the merely Hellenic (which point, being academic, is therefore of no great moment). This new translation, however, should assist those relatively unfamiliar with hermetic literature to begin to see suggestions of praxis within the text whereas many other translations obscure such. As with any such endeavor, decision(s) surrounding what to include and what not to include seem rather arbitrary. Nevertheless, on the whole, a worthwhile effort. And at the price, it is a very solid choice.

The newly translated 'definitions' are valuable to those otherwise unfamiliar with the larger body of hermetic literature, but will not offer any revelations to those familiar with the larger world of hermetic study (which makes use of Platonic and Neo-Platonic texts as well as various genuine alchemical remains in arabic, latin, german, french, english, etc.)

"The Way of Hermes" is a god send to students of Alexandrian Hermeticism! Taking their cue from the premise that Hermeticism is a living and vital practice as well as philosophy, the translators have given us an updated version that more closely expresses the actual meaning and intention of the principle Hermetic writings than preceding editions. Moving beyond the limits of dogmatic rationalism, "The Way of Hermes" expresses the mystical beauty and transcendental purpose for the very existence of 'The Corpus' - to help humanity to know itself, and to know God. Of exceptional value are the foreword, afterward, and preface in their expression of Hermetic philosophy and its impact on Western thought. The additional English translation of "The Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius" make this a must read volume for students and practitioners of Hermeticism and Western esotericism.

Kelley's et. al., Textbook of Rheumatology has been considered the Bible of Rheumatology ever since its 1st edition. The 5th edition still lays claim to that honour. However, the appearance of Klippel and Dieppe's Rheumatology has effectively relegated it to a second place. Kelley's is lucid and far-reaching into areas of Rheumatology, but it is more concise, less illustrative, and harder to digest than Klippel's. Moreover, the tendency to have the same editors and authors write chapters throughout the history of the book has made the book rather stagnant, with few differences between the 4th and 5th edition. The book is rather ethnocentric in concentrating on research done in USA, largely ignoring research (and authors) from other parts of the world, while Klippel's is more cosmopolitan and has more global representation in authorship and content. For example, in the chapter on Rheumatoid Arthritis in Kelley's, it is held that the occurrence of the disease is constant in different areas of the world, while Klippel's points to evidence to the opposite of that statement. Still, Kelley's is a very useful reference textbook for the specialist rheumatologist who knows quite a bit about his subject, less so for the beginning fellow.