A very diverse collection of interesting essays. I gobbled them all up. Edwin Locke, being my favorite, is a very captivating individual. I recommend doing a search for his name and checking out other works by Locke.

This book is great for the toddler who likes to help you water the plants or the kindergartener who's growing some seeds in a styrofoam cup. Actually it's a great little book for any "rookie reader."

After neglecting her garden, Messy Bessey realizes that it's hard work to help something grow. She goes to work immediately, and she's ultimately rewarded with the "fruits of her labor." She builds self-confidence and self-esteem from a job well done.

The book encourages children to work persistently and patiently, and it might even inspire them to help you out in the garden. I recommend this simple rhyming book for any child between the ages of 2 and 8.

Karl is an important Conradian scholar, yet there are points at which he makes claims that are almost indefensible. For example, in this treatise, he claims that there is no "cosmic significance" to The Secret Sharer." "The Surface," he writes, "is in this case the story." The novella is, despite Leggatt's protestations to the contrary, merely "a tale for boys,' devoid of any ulterior meaning. How a respected writer could make such a claim about any Conrad narrative is beyond the pale. The Secret Sharer is amongst Conrad's deepest and most symbolically rich excursions in any genre. It is a veritable cornucopia of symbolism and divergent meanings. To reduce it to a story "about growing up," is to miss the boat entirely.

To give Karl his due, he does allow as how "The Secret Sharer" is "one of Conrad's best." But his criterium misses the mark when it comes to the multi-demensionality of the narrative. He states that as far as its "suggestiveness, it is paradoxically, one of the most straightforward and obvious works. Its narrative is a model of clarity, like those uncomplicated narratives "Youth," and "The Shadow Line." In other words, if one accepts Karl's reading, "The Secret Sharer" is the kind of "traditional" text that Roland Barthes calls "sterile," since it becomes "wholly predictable and obviously intelligible" - a sophomoric tall tale easily digested and expunged in countless high school English classes from now 'till doomsday.

I could also expound from now 'till doomsday why this is justifiably not the case and that "The Secret Sharer," like its counterpart "Heart of Darkness," are in fact fraught with meaning and enigmatic depths. Both offer rich lodes of symbolism and psychological investigation, just as Conrad's other meaningful creations invite. To dismiss "The Secret Sharer" as a book for boys undermines and in fact almost torpedos an otherwise valuable treatise.

This book allows the reader to understand the processes that take place not only in the animal cell but also in the vegetables, which makes it really interesting for people devoted to Plant Science. It's easy to understand and the graphics are really helpful.

Silas Marner is a very interesting book. It is filled with excitement and suspense. I liked the book very much, but as a freshman in high school, it was very hard for me to read. George Eliot uses a lot of dialect along with some Old English words in her lovable tale. Eliot tells the story of a lonely weaver. After getting betrayed by friends in his old town of Lantern Yard, Silas moves to the town of Raveloe searching for a new life. His delusions keep him from getting accepted into the Raveloe community. After losing his faith in God and having his money stolen he gets a very special gift from someone he doesn't know, a little baby girl with golden hair. After that things work out for Silas and Eppie. George Eliot tells her classic novel in great detail with a lot of adjectives and metaphors. She has made a great novel that while a challenge is good for everybody. Silas Marner is really easy to comprehend because it is so realistic. I live in a small town and it reminds me of Raveloe. Sometimes I imagine that I am in Silas Marner's place and all my friends are the villagers. I think about what I would do if I was in Marner's place. Eliot also created a great plot for this book. This classic is great because it teaches people about life. It teaches people not to be selfish and to be kind to people no matter how good you think you are. Eliot has made a great book that would be great to read as a family.

Question: How can you ensure that a person will hate a book? Answer: Make her read it for 7th grade English class, make sure that the language is old-fashioned, and above all, make sure that the ideas and concepts are over her head. If that's what happened to you, and that's why you have an aversion to Silas Marner, and you are now over 30, pick it up again. Read it twice. Silas Marner is one of the greatest novels in the English language.

Yes, it starts out sad, as our pathetic hero looses both his trust in humanity and his faith in God. But the power of love replaces his lust for money, and wins out in the end. Meanwhile, morally poor but financially rich, high-living Godfrey Cass provides a counterpoint to simple Silas. At the end there's a surprise when the fate of Godfrey's evil brother is revealed.

When you're all done, before you file Silas Marner on the shelf, go back and read the paragraph about Silas' thoughts when he discovers that his hordes of coins are missing. If you have ever felt sudden extreme loss, you will recognize the stages of despair from disbelief to acceptance "like a man falling into dark water." Which is why this book is not suitable for children, and is most appreciated by those who have undergone their own moral redemption.

Silas has been the inspiration for many other characters, including Dicken's Scrooge. He has been portrayed in movies, including "A Simple Twist of Fate" starring Steve Martin. But none is as good as the original. If you haven't read it since junior high, try it again. Silas Marner is an excellent book. There's a gem of human understanding in every chapter.

I cannot more agree with the reviewers who say Silas Marner is slow moving at the beginning, and that it is slow moving for the first half of the story, however I find that Silas Marner is not actually a story, more a biography, or a discription of the times. The scenes are that era are very vivid; the characters are very true and clear. Silas's betrayal, his 'death' and his obsession with money are reflected in the monotony of the book, just when you begin to feel the story has completely lost track of any clear-cut line, something new happens. Then, Silas is reborn, he remembers who he has been and his family. The most wonderful thing about this book is its summing up, happy ending. Nothing is left hanging, this book definatly has a good ending, and a book with an ending such as this is clearly the work of a gifted author; such as George Eliot. Do not read this book in search of thrilling plot, and captivating characters, read it for it's planning, and mostly for it's joyful conclusion.

This text covers several topics that other books tend to overlook, making it a frequent choice for undergraduate courses. However, the effectiveness of the book is dependent primarily on the quality of the counterpart teacher, as the book is quite difficult to understand on its own.
Many of the proofs in the book omit the most difficult and complicated steps, which are above the level of an undergraduate to be able to work on their own. Also, the book chooses to rigorously prove certain Electromagnetic properties while completely omitting other while still assuming that the reader has a full knowledge of both.
As a reference, this book also falls short in that, in the fourth edition at least, most of the important constants and equations are left scattered throughout the text and not included in the summaries. Also, many of the fundamental mathematical tools are not presented in their entirety and instead rely on the completion of the problems at the end of the chapters. While this is good in that it motivates the student to do the calculations themselves, it offers no recourse to a student who has made a mistake in any problem or who lacks a preexisting intuitive knowledge of the material.

If its important to you I am a rising Senior in the study of physics at UCONN. I wanted at first to give this 3 stars, 3.5 is not available so I rounded up for on reason: I feel that my understanding of E&M is rather well developed, and I learned from this book. My professor was also quite good and he supplemented from the Griffiths text, which I have not read myself, but these may have influenced my view of the quality of this book. The probems sets I believe to be challenging and reasonable, the actual text is not in any way PHYSICAL though. The math is extensive, a pro and con simultaeneously. Everyone using this book will probably be at the appropriate level of skill therein, but a certain proficiency in READING math, feeling it in a way is necassary here. My teacher was the source of most of the education I recieved in E&M but the problem sets in the RMC played a nearly equal role. I will say that the treatment of the Dirac Delta function was foggy at best, otherwise it was fine with the porper mathematical background

RMC is a clear textbook about electrodynamics. You don't have to have much previos knowledge about the subject to follow the theory, but you should be familiar with the basics of vector analysis. There are quite many examples and the problems are reasonably difficult (answers are provided).As a whole this book covers the theory well and some of the applications too.

I remember purchasing this 800-page monster with queasy forebodings. Its mere existence seemed an affront to the exemplary scholarship of Ernst Pawel and Ronald Hayman, as if the world of Kafka studies secretly desired Karl to take things up a notch with a "definitive" biographical study (if a definitional text can be so defined by sheer length and breadth).

Nevertheless, I identify very strongly with what Karl is trying to do here - not so much the overzealous attempt to crossbreed biographical narrative with academic criticism, but rather the bodying forth of an unmanageable style and rollicking critical panache (my own affliction), a work of epic design and hubris that, given its tortuous subject, is almost destined to flop. Karl wants more than anything to be a critical uber-stylist (me again), an innovatory and polyphonic commentator on this most shadowy of literary personae, yet throughout the 200+ hours I've devoted to his book, I can't help feeling that I've gotten no closer to the heart of Kafka's universe than K. the Land-Surveyor got to the crow-infested central tower of his Castle.

Franz Kafka, the 20th-century author whom I love and revere above all others, deserves a biographer as ferociously dedicated and metaphysically haunted as his subject. Karl's book, at its worst, is a muddled implosion of rehashed ideas and marginally original insights. There are too many dead spots, too many lazy correspondences and simpering cliches, too much recycled exegesis piddling alongside desperate attempts at ingenuity (Kafka's obsession with orality and digestion, the hyper-mastication of food, his hypochondriac obsessions, are touched upon at least once per thirty pages!).

There are some gratifying moments as well, however. Karl's reading of "The Village Schoolmaster" as a meditation on the vagaries of (dis)information, the iniquities imbedded in the lives of "quiet old people," and on culture's propensity to transmogrify "the 'truth' with all the possibilities that transform every event into something false"(512), is criticism at its strongest. Karl also hits a high note with his chapter on Kafka's great epistolary novel, *The Letters to Felice*, working through the byzantine evasions and cruelly manipulative mind-games Kafka subjected his great love (and bitter nemesis), the unsuspecting secretary Felice Bauer, who was willing to forgive him his schizoid hysterics, so long as he settled into his ordained role as husband and provider. It was one of Kafka's most fruitful "literary" experiments, excruciating from beginning to end, and amply expounded by Karl in a 110-page chapter. "Kafka is our poet of ordinary madness," Karl brilliantly notes, and does his best to limn the preceding century as a magnificently horrifying Kafkan Event, the world becoming so "when it relocates the individual in areas he or she could not have preconceived; when it redefines the terms of existence in unforeseen modes; when it resuscitates the terms of life in ironies and paradoxes that run askew to human will or purpose"(759). I'll leave it to the individual reader to decide whether this sentiment is ingenious, trite, simplistic, or merely vague. It is, I would say, fairly representative of this scholar's rhetorical style and comportment.

Sadly, Karl is unable to sustain the above level of adroitness throughout this marathon of a treatise, and all but flounders when it comes to analyzing Kafka's subtler and more elusive efforts. His dismissal of "The Hunter Gracchus" as "not [a] major work," for example, is simply too much to take. His similar shrugging-off of Deleuze and Guattari's pathbreaking *Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature*(1975), is another in a wide range of disappointments the reader must slog through.

Nevertheless, Karl's book has some great insights on specific texts and events. Beneath all the pandering hubris there *is* a semi-coherent narrative of Kafka's life, his relationships with women (transmuted into the cloying eroto-doppelgangers of *The Trial* and *The Castle*), the claustrophobic pressure-chamber of the Kafka household, the humiliations of his professional life, his patronage of the Yiddish theater, his Zionist aspirations, his readings of classic literature (Goethe, Flaubert, Kleist, and Dostoyevsky above all), and so on....

Perhaps my problem is that I just have a very personal and decisive idea of who and what Kafka is, an image I am driven to safeguard at all costs, against all intercessors. Maybe Karl (whose George Eliot biography I much prefer) isn't the obnoxious hack he makes himself out to be in these circular and overwritten pages. Or perhaps this book is meant to be read through relatively quickly, rather than pored over obsessively (as is my habit), stripping every sentence of its rhythm and panache. That said, I urge the potential reader to try and prove me wrong.

This is an enormous book, in more ways than one. At 810 pages, there is lots of material here, and events or issues are often brought up in more than one place, giving you a curious sense of having read something before. But this is to some extent an inevitable product of the subject: Kafka's life and literature are full of complex intersections of thoughts, feelings, obsessions, issues, events, relationships, etc., and Karl's densely woven narrative preserves and illuminates all this rather than smoothing it out. His discussion of Kafka's odd, intense, anxiety-filled connection with Felice Bauer is especially good: he dissects all the parries and ripostes of this ultimately pointless relationship, seeing them as reflecting Kafka's desperate need to plumb the depths of his own psychology through his impossible need for her (much more insightful than Elias Canetti's book on the subject). True, the book is massive and sometimes untidy, but for those who love Kafka, it is a uniquely penetrating read.

This wasn't your typical true crime novel. It was well-written and not exceedingly repetitive as many true crime novels are, repeating all the facts over and over again throughout the telling of the story. The fact that this was a murder case involving 6 typical teens, yet atypical teens, makes it all the more interesting. This book was hard to put down and unlike many novels, it seems that the murderers get for the most part, what they deserve.

The best part of this book is the author's description of southeast Passaic County, New Jersey, where the action almost exclusively takes place. Clifton, Paterson, and the industrial Passaic River valley are evoked quite well, especially the area's weird mix of industrial might, industrial blight, and lower- to middle-middle-class residential. The kids are the same dumb (but the author unconvincingly claims throughout the book that most of them are smart), wasted youth described in so many true crime books lately (e.g., Bully, Smoked), with an ethnic twist. All you need to know about a crime that was sensational back in the early 1990s but is probably forgotten now, even in northern New Jersey.

(yawn) I love to sink my teeth into big history books but this one's so flat. I tried several times to pick this one up but it seemed very monotone to me. It was like reading a text book. Perhaps it was all just above me, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you were a hardcore "facts" person.

My favorite part of this book was the early part, where Roberts paints a picture of the 19th century and how it influenced the direction of the 20th century. As for his look at the 20th century, I believe he spends too little time on any one topic to shed much light on anything. I found his coverage of the past 20 years (my adult life) to be especially wanting. My recommendation would be to seek out history books with less ambitious scope.

Robert's latest epic is a largely Euro-centric review of world events during the twentieth century. Overall it is enjoyable, comprehensive and easy to get through. It is deliberately Euro-centric since the century began with Europe as the central power and ended with Europe closing ranks to form an important political and economic zone that is probably larger than the sum of its individual parts.

Much of the book deals with Europe's influence on the world - either as a colonial power expanding its empires or as an impoverished post-war debtor disposing off its overseas assets. The only other nations which receive half-decent coverage are the United States, Russia, Japan and China.

I think the strength of Robert's book is his enviable grasp of the big picture. The scope of this work is beyond the vast majority of popular writers. I think the best individual sections are those covering the years and events leading up to WW1 and those which deal with Japan prior to WW2. Very few generalist readers will be fully up to speed on the effects of Japan's defeat of imperial Russia in 1906 and the long-term implications of its invasion of Post-Revolutionary China. Roberts does a fine job on both counts.

The book's weakness are three fold. One, this is almost entirely a social and political history. Economics gets little attention, even though it has played a central role in world affairs since 1900. Just imagine writing a history which says little on international monetary crises, the Great Depression, oil crises and the staggering improvement in global living standards since 1900. Roberts does cover these areas, but they read almost like add-ons. Two, his coverage of the Middle East is rather perfunctory. Details of France and Britain's departure are terse and the reasons for the Ottoman collapse are a bit hazy. So too are the influences of the UN and the US in post colonial times. Third, his style of writing comes from my father's era. Some of his sentences seem to go on for ever, although this is more of an editing issue than a criticism of the author.

Overall though, Roberts has put together a fine book on the past 100 years. The disappointments are more than made up for in its analysis of Europe - which is truly first class. Four Stars.

Rasch was clearly a dogged researcher and a pioneer in many avenues of researching and writing on the Lincoln County troubles. Unfortunately, this collection of his Brand Book essays, valuable as it is, shows his blind spot - a bias against the McSweens, Tunstall, and Billy, that sours his evaluations and his prose.

His writing is competent and engaging, though the collection over several decades has a lot of repetition (sometimes showing that Rasch CAN learn and re-evaluate) that becomes tiresome. Without having done any research on the author, I would guess he fawns on military types (Dudley, in this case) and the Texas Rangers, and dislikes the rebel type and lawyers in general (McSween, Chapman, Leonard).

Without the evident bias, I'd rate this a 5, but the sarcasm and slant is ultimately fatal. If you want to cover the bases, you need these volumes, but take them with a large dose of sodium cloride.