Ok amazing is kinda a strong word, but as far as understanding goes, this book is awesome. I mean it has everything that you would think to ask and I have read alot of books, but I HIGHLY recommend this one to be your first and I am a pretty tough critic.

This is an excellent introduction to the psychic dimension and metaphysics in general.
In part one, the author explores some universal concepts that serve to explain the nature of reality and how psychic awareness is a natural part of that reality. The work of Fritjof Capra, Gary Zukav, Lawrence LeShan, Rupert Sheldrake and Carl Jung is referred to in these chapters and it makes interesting reading.
Part two discusses some of the more common psychic experiences and how to evoke them - through intuition, dreams, meditation and hypnosis. I found the chapters on dreams and dreaming the most interesting. When we dream, our vibrational pattern shifts and we tune to a different spectrum of reality. And if you want to become psychic in a graceful manner, you must allow it to grow out of the practice of meditation.
Part three probes the role of the body, mind and soul in psychic awareness. It discusses the hologram, morphogenetic fields, the conscious, subconscious, superconscious and infinite mind. It also includes a "second verse" to the children's bedtime prayer "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the lord my soul to keep" in these words received in trance:
"I thy child forever play, about thy knees at close of day, within thy arms I now shall creep, and learn thy wisdom while I sleep."
Part four provides some experiments for the reader that wishes to venture into this exciting realm, and discusses the ultimate purpose of psychic awareness. It includes planning, dream recording, using a pendulum, mental telepathy, open channelling and cultivating one's spirituality. The book concludes with a discussion of psychic awareness as harbinger of global changes, followed by a bibliography and index.
This is a highly impressive text, dealing with all the relevant aspects of the psychic realm and how to cultivate one's psychic powers. The style is engaging throughout and easy to understand. I highly recommend it as a sensible guide to those who are interested in metaphysics but confused by the large number of disciplines and books available.

This is really a good book. It gives a very lucid explanation on how amazing intelligence and psychic abilities can be. It covers a lot of material and is written with an holographic overtone. Learn how to awake from hypnosis - as it were a sugar cube in your hands.

In the age of computer games and 3-D animation, the simple imagination of a child to envision himself learning to be a jazz musician is refreshing. Unlike previous reviews, I feel the dramatic black and white drawings set off some of the cultural issues the illustrations portray. Obviously, young Ben does not live an idealized childhood at home. Yet, he finds that his passion for music can only be fulfilled outside of jazz clubs (which usually perform late in the evening and he is too young to enter). The point of the book is how he acts out THIS reality. He is looking "outside of the box" (hence the illustrations of his home life) and finds the attention from the father-figure (the trumpeter) who Ben wants to imitate. The book vividly illustrates the importance of role models in a child's life.

As an international music teacher we need to give all theencouragement we can give to keep the music programs alive in ourschools. Not just in the states but in the world. This short story relates to the young hopeful musican who hopes to be a contributor to the music world - Keep the dream.

This one little picture book is among the most beautiful and powerful books I've ever read. In fact I don't feel as if I've simply read this book; I feel as though I've experienced it. It was fast and dizzy, yet calm and peaceful. I could almost feel myself sitting outside on a warm night, listening to the wail of jazz music floating on the air. With its simple, easy charm this book taps into the hopes of a small boy, and gives the reader hope that the goodness of the human spirit can triumph over its evils. This book has some of the most amazing illustrations that I've seen in a children's book, and it uses them very effectively. So, whether you are a parent looking for a book that will stimulate your child's imagination, a jazz enthusiast, an admirer of fine illustration, or just a person looking for a heart-warming experience, this book is a fabulous selection.

A 600+ page chronology, year by year, of the black experience in America - from the first records of Africans on the continent onwards. If you have more than a passing interest in Black Studies, then this is an enriching resource. The entries are dense with information and well-written enough to be compelling to the casual peruser.

Black Saga is a book I turn to constantly when doing research for my books. I imagine I would cherish this book even if I weren't a writer. It is intelligent, compelling, and so comprehensive. It should be in every home and in every school--wherever there are learners and lovers of history.

Black Saga is an excellent book to assist young people to become more productive, contributing adults. It is important for young people to learn and understand their complete history. As a teacher, I found this book to be an excellent reference source, and an important part of any history class.

Charles Stanley's book can help you get on the right path when you are going through a tough time. I was lost when someone I loved passed away. My faith for the first time waivered. I've learned that when we are the most in need is when we need God most. I have a closer relationship with him and am learning more every day.
There is another book that is helping me to cope, Write from Your Heart, A Healing Grief Journal.
Immersing myself in the word has made a huge difference in the way I am healing.

I have to say that this was one of the most enjoyable books I have read in a long time. Reading about a chapter a night it took me through a course of revelations and growth, both introducing me to new concepts and renewing me familiarity with others. I liked that he wasn't afraid to quote scriptures (and let us know where they are so we can read them in context.) This book, coupled with much prayer, changed the way I look at life.

This book is beneficial for everyone to read, christians and non-christians alike. It can be helpful reading for those who are going through difficult and challenging times. Charles Stanley examines some very tough questions of "Where is God" during our most strenuous periods in life. If you think you have gone through the worst that life has to offer, hit rock bottom, then this book can help you understand the true grace, mercy, and love of God. Challenge yourself and read God's message of why you need to be broken.

Charles Ives (1874-1954)was the first, and still probably the greatest, composer of a distinctly American art ("classical") music. His relationship to American music seems to me roughly parallel to Walt Whitman's relationship to American poetry and to Charles Peirce's relationship to American philosophy. Like Peirce, Ives was little-known during his lifetime. Furthermore, while many people may be aware of Peirce and of Ives, a much smaller number have much acquaintance with their works.

Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut and remained throughout his life attached to his vision of the post-Civil War small-town New England of his childhood. His father, George Ives, was a bandmaster and the greatest influence on Ives's life. Ives was a musical prodigy who began composing at an early age, quickly picking up experimental styles. He showed great proficiency at the piano and organ. (Through young manhood, we worked Sundays as a church organist.) He studied music at Yale where his teacher was Horatio Parker, a then famous American who was trained in the music of German Romanticism. As a college student, Ives wrote music played for the inaugaration of President William McKinley.

After graduation from Yale, Ives became a millionare in the insurance industry where he pioneered many marketing techniques. He also became increasingly Progessive and politically active and actually proposed a constitutional amendment which would increase the power of the democracy in government decision-making. At the age of 32, he married Harmony Twitchell who, after his father, was the greatest influence on his life.

Ives wrote music in the midst of an extraordinarily busy life. Most people think of Ives as a trailblazer and iconoclast. He was indeed, but may of his earlier works, such as the Second and the Third Symphonies are easily accessible and have a feel of America about them similar to the feelings Aaron Copland evoked some three decades later.

Jan Swafford's biography movingly and eloquently describes the life of Charles Ives. This is a reflective, thoughtful discussion of Ives, his America, his music, and its reception. In addition to a thorough treatment of Ives' life and works, Swafford has three chapters which he titles "Entra'acets" which consist of broad-based reflections on Ives's music and its significance. Swafford's entire book is full of ideas which are intriguing in themselves. Of Ives's work, Swafford gives his most extended treatment to the Fourth Symphony (he sees Ives as essentially a symphonist) and to the Concord piano Sonata. But many works are discussed in detail which will be accessible to the non-musician. The book has copious and highly substantive footnotes and an extensive bibliography.

Ives's Americanness, humor, romanticism, modernism, optimism, and generosity ( Ives gave large amounts of money to his family and to musicians and music publications. He also paid for the publication of several of his important works when commercial publishers showed no interest in them.) come through well. Swafford sees Ives as the last American transcendentalist in the tradition of Emerson. At the conclusion of his book, Swafford writes of Ives (p. 434)

" [I]n his music and his life he embodied a genuine pluralism, a wholeness beneath diversity, that in itself is a beacon for democracy and its art. Aesthetically he is an alternative to Modernism, an exploratory road without the darkness and despair of the twentieth century. In spirit he handed us a baton and calls on us to carry it further. He suggests a way out of despair, but leaves it to us to find the route for ourselves. If we are alone with ourselves today, Ives speaks incomparably to that condition."

This book made me want to learn more about and to hear the music of Charles Ives. In its own right, it is a joy and an inspiration to read.

Charlie Ives was a visionary, an idealist, and apparently a manic-depressive. Swafford tells his story in a compulsively readable fashion, and wins you over to the side of the irascible composer. Ives never made any money from his music, in fact he subsidized it with the fortune he made in the insurance industry. But he was generous in supporting the work of other sympathetic composers as well, including Henry Cowell. Ives was rare in that he was a genius not only in music, but in business. Ives made a fortune in developing the modern, mass-market life insurance industry. He wrote a tremendously influential pamphlet in 1910, "The Amount to Carry," which pioneered estate planning. Ives was an idealist and an altruist even as he became wealthy -- he convinced himself that insurance was socially progressive, and motivated his sales staff with his lofty vision of cooperation. Later in life, he developed this into a plan for a People's World Union!

Ives' great successes all came together, early in life, following his marriage. He composed on the side as he built his company, burning the candle at both ends. Swafford speculates that Ives was literally manic during those heroic years of the Teens, and that he subsequently crashed, enduring more depression than mania for the rest of his life. Interestingly, the Great War was such a blow to his idealism, he reacted physically, compounding his collapse. Ives retired very young, but rather than turn to composing, he found that he was unable. The rest of his life was devoted to trying to find an audience for the works of his glory years. I found the book most interesting here, in situating Ives in relation to the more well-known Modernists of his time -- Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Varese and the others. The irony is that while Ives' music came about independently, it was "popularized," only through association with the European revolutionaries, and so he was widely perceived as an imitator. The world was only ready for Charlie's music after the ground had been broken! The story of Cowell, Slonimsky, Carter, Gilman and Bernstein, who championed Ives over many years until he was finally recognized, is fascinating.

This is supremely enjoyable reading. Jan Swafford clearly loves Ives, and I found his account irresistable.

Quite recently, I had the privilege of reading a copy of this book that was the personal copy of a musician who had been involved, in a rather unique way, in the centennial observation of Charlie Ives's birthday back in 1974. For reasons of geography, then musical interest, he "got to know" Charlie quite well, even if only 20 years after Charlie's death. I immediately ordered my own copy, while continuing to read the heavily-annotated copy of my musician friend. (It was rather vicarious pleasure, "looking over the shoulder" of this musician, to see what it was about the music, life and times of Charlie that fascinated him.)

In his early years, Ives was a one-man dynamo. Learning much of his music theory and practice from his father George Ives, who had been a very young (perhaps the youngest) Civil War band leader, and then from Horatio Parker at Yale University, he had more than a "thorough grounding" in the basics. However, unlike most American composers, particularly those of his and the following generation, he did not go to Europe for a post-grad internship with any known European composer, but simply set out on his own after matriculating from Yale. He went to New York City, employed as an insurance clerk for one full-time job, wrote music constantly for another full-time job, and had yet another career, had he wanted it, as organist and choir director for the Central Presbyterian Church in New York. During this period - leading up to his marriage in 1908 - he literally burned the candle at both ends. (Swafford goes on, later in the book, to posit why Charlie had this incredible burst of energy for the first 15 or 20 years of his adult life, but it's best that his reasons for this - and for Ives's shortened composing career - be left to you, the potential reader.)

Most anyone who knows anything about Ives knows that he became comfortably wealthy in the insurance industry, that during his active composing days little of his music was played by anyone, and that he was - literally and figuratively - burned out by the time he was only 40. For the remaining half of his life, much of it was spent editing, publishing and promoting his music and the music of others, including many friends, using the proceeds from his insurance success to underwrite projects for many composers who would have gone unnoted had it not been for him. Musical success - unlike business success - came too late in life for him to truly enjoy at least its artistic, if not financial, rewards. He was in his last years when Leonard Bernstein premiered his Second Symphony, and never lived to hear his masterpiece - his Fourth Symphony - premiered by Leopold Stokowski in 1965. Despite this, he was far from an unhappy man in his later years; philosophically resigned yet optimistic that his day might yet come would be the more accurate description.

Swafford's writing is simply wonderful. It tells the story of a true American iconoclast; an "original." The narrative flows beautifully without omitting anything of significance in Ives's life or about his music. (The book contains nearly 80 pages of endnotes, in which the musical marginalia are explained in exhaustive, but emminently readable, detail, to preserve the flow of the main narrative.) In parts, it is incredibly moving. I particularly enjoyed the extended "mating dance" of his courting of Harmony Twichell, who was to become his life-long helpmate (and who did live long enough to attend the Stokowski premiere of his masterpiece, as the guest of honor). Ives, ever the Victorian man if something else as a composer, would always refer to her, to third parties, as "Mrs. Ives." Yet their fifty years together could be a model for today's dysfunctional families. A beautiful chapter; one of the best in the book.

There's a curiously cryptic endnote that suggests a "what might have been." It is a fact that very little of Ives's music saw public performance before the early 30's, when Nicholas Slonimsky championed Ives and other "moderns." Yet another two decades were to pass until Bernstein premiered the Second Symphony. Yet, in 1910, while shopping in a music store in preparation for his final return to Vienna, where he would die in less than a year's time, Gustav Mahler purchased a fair copy - one of only two or three in existence - of Ives's Third Symphony. Swafford doesn't make that big a deal about this, but I do. I've always thought that Ives and Mahler, aside from being near-contemporaries, had more in common than they did in opposition. It is just conjecture - but truly fascinating conjecture - to think what might have happened had Mahler premiered Ives's Third Symphony at a time in the life of Ives when it really might have made a difference.

Just what was Ives, as a composer? Bernstein did him no favors by calling him "a primitive; a Grandma Moses of music" while at the same time championing his music. Back in those days, there were no labels like "atonalist," "serialist," "avant-gardist," "post-modernist," what-have-you, that we tend to use today to compartmentalize a composer. To me, Ives was, well... an iconoclast, an "original," and, if a label must be applied, our first "pre-post-modern." He was never imitated, at least not successfully, not only because he didn't have his own students as did other composers, but because by the time his music enjoyed sufficient - if not plentiful - performances, composers' agendas were different.

Fortunately audiences think differently, and do enjoy Charlie's music. And you will enjoy this book.

I'm currently training to become a Pharmacy Technician, and this book has a wealth of information I constantly tap into. A great resource for anybody in the health field!

I rely heavily on this abbreviations dictionary and have referred to on a daily basis for many years. I have recommended it to all of my colleagues (medical transcriptionists) and they agree that it is focused on the information we need, making work a lot easier. Even though it came out in 1997, it serves us very well in our daily work, although I must say, we are all looking forward to the new edition!

I am a nurse in a major urban hospital who is constantly having to decipher all kinds of abbreviations. I have used many many different abbreviations dictionaries and I particularly like this one for several reasons:
1) It gives the only clinical abbreviations that are most commonly encountered in my work, so I don't have to wade through endless choices that wouldn't be applicable anyway
2) Much more accurate than other abbrev. dictionaries (you cannot imagine the mistakes I have come across in very popular dictionaries such as Stedman's and Mosby's!!). I have seen a few minor errors in this dictionary, but far fewer than other dictionaries
3)The type is large enough to read
4) Price is great
So, all in all, I highly recommend this dictionary to any health care professional, and believe me, I know of what I speak!

This is a great book, detailed concise. It is wonderful from a Historical standpoint and for someone wanting simply to know the where and why of chickens. It is not light reading but it is the best fact filled book out there, most chicken books are too "ditzy". This is not the case here.Fact filled and entertaining, could use a few pictures but excellent just the same.

From egg to poult to hen to rooster to featherbed and deepfreeze, from the ancient Egyptians to neo-feudal Southeast Asia to the iconographic Petaluma chicken ranch to the modern industialized chicken culture, this book covers everything you could ever need, want or just happen upon with respect to the chicken---except for one thing: it totally ignores the Chicken MacNugget!! Nonetheless (or perhaps because of this), it is not just a manual for the chicken fancier, the cockfight afficionado or the backyard farmer. It is truly an examplary product of a "LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION", and deserving of much wider appreciation than it has received to date. Page Smith, a well-known popular historian, co-taught an interdisciplinary seminar with a biologist named Charles Daniel entitiled "The Chicken" for undergraduates at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the early 1970's. No doubt some initially perceived the course title as a joke, but they were wrong. Somewhere along the line, someone injected some intellectual rigor and real insight into the course syllabus. With the aid of their teachers, the students performed a tour de force of research, covering every facet of the chicken from cultural, historical, religious, biological, agricultural and even epistemological points of view. The professors took the student work and fashioned it into a book that is a classic in every sense of the word. "THE CHICKEN BOOK" is a beautifully written minor masterpiece of historic arcana, zoological detail, small-scale poultry management, veterinary medicine, cultural anthropology, blood-sport historiography and culinary arts. Long out of print and hard to find, the book well deserves this new edition. Whether or not you have a specific interest in chickens, this is well worth reading. As an example of what an active intelligence can do with a relatively commonplace and mundane topic, this book was way ahead of its time!!

I live in a small, um, somewhat rustic village not far from Sacramento, California. In the sixties, there came to the town, so the local lore goes, artisans, who tended to live somewhat communally. They ultimately brought chickens to live with them, also communally. When the sixties were over, and the artisans moved on to state jobs and law school, the chickens remained. And were fruitful. And multiplied. And multiply still, as well as serving as mobile speed bumps, tourist attractions, points of political controversy (Chased and attacked chickens, particularly adults, especially roosters, have been known to retaliate in kind, to people who treat them fowlly: actions are afoot to collect ((nap?)) the current chickens and replace them with non-aggressive breeds ((Hey, it's California, after all))),and t-shirt and advertising icons. All in all, it's an idyllic little place that resembles nothing so much as say, the set for Murder She Wrote, if you happened to toss in some palm trees and some chickens along with the pines in the town square. Think Norman Rockwell. Think Norman Rockwell on nitrous oxide. It's a place where nobody sleeps very late, where nobody really has to go hungry, and where approximately every other resident is a chicken.

But I've lived there for a while, so I know these things. Paige Smith's book was out of print for a long while (But now thanks to U of Georgia P, the folks who brought back William Hedgepeth's The Hog Book--there's a pattern here), but now you can read and know these things as well.

The chickens will be grateful.

This book is laid out in a very clear and consise manner, and gives you pretty much everything that you will likily need to pass the A+ exam. The person who said that this book doesnt cover enough Windows XP obviously doesnt know what the A+ exam is. Since technology moves at such a fast rate, this test does fall behind the times very quickly, and since the test is not updated very often, if does not have any questions on Windows XP, therefore why should they cover in this book. Buy a Windows XP book for that coveredge.

I not only passed the exam, but I saved 30% on my test voucher through a special offer with this book. I'm not sure why the previous reviewer wants more XP info -- it's not tested on this exam! It will be tested on the new exam that is comign in September.

Although it is 2003 edition, it doesn't have much information about the WindowXP. I think we need to know more XP since it getting more and more common.

I grew up with Chapman's and I still have it close at hand...the latest edition is exceptional. If you only have one boating book, this is the one you need.

I was talking with a cruise ship captain in Key West, and he brought up Chapman's guide to piloting. We were discussing rules of the road, ie, under sail has right of way over ships under power. Being the captain of a large cruise ship, he said, "Ask yourself, is it easier for a sailboat to come about to avoid a collision or is it easier for a large ocean liner to stop before he hits you?" Therein lies the true wisdom of rules of the road: the bigger vessel will win every time. If your boat is easier to handle and can get out of the way sooner, be polite and make the first move long before it becomes an issue. Although Chapman's is the authority on rules of the road, common sense should prevail when rules come in conflict.

The quality of presentation of topics of interest to boaters is excellent. Good illustrations and clear explantions typify this latest edition. The sections on boat handling and navigation alone are well worth the price.