This is simply the best yearly reference book on the market. If you want stats this book delivers. It's a great book whether you are a stat freak or just like having the stats nearby when watching your favorite team. I've been buying this book for 15 years, and will probably never stop!

"A Beowulf Handbook"--edited by professors Bjork and Niles--is an open door to a genuine treasure-mound. The volumes many scholarly writers describe the origin and chronology of, as far as I can tell, every important branch of "Beowulf" critical thought. Three centuries of interpretive battles rage between these covers. The index and bibliographies are a joy and, by themselves, worth the price of admission.

While exploring on the Saturnian moon Rhea, Derek Kuroda discovers the first alien artifacts found in more than a century of space exploration. Tests on the enigmatic object suggest that they are either energy packs or weapons. One thing is certain: they are sources of immense power. And so Kuroda joins forces with Sieglinde Kornfeld-Taggart, whose scientific skills and inventive genius helped to form the Island Worlds group of orbiting colonies. Following what had at first seemed a successful Asteroid Belt Rebellion, Liberty has somehow become no more than a word in the Belt as well as on Earth-so the plan is to use the newfound power of the artifacts to launch dozens of asteroid worlds to freedom among the stars. But repressive elements throughout the Solar System are just as intent on stopping them...
Eric Kotani is the pseudonym of a noted physicist. John Roberts is a well-known science fiction writer.

This is an amazing Book and I have enjoyed it so much.
It is a great educational resource for African American History.

The sequel to "The Islander" Book One of the Stormlands, was an absolute treasure of fantasy, adventure and a splash of romance mixed together in a wonderful blend of story-telling.John Maddox Roberts did a wonderful job of mixing in the real life learned strengths of Hael (hero) and a touch of a higher power type Colorful, adventureous and a pick up and don't put down kind of book.

This encyclopedia is indispensable to anyone seriously interested in blues and gospel recordings of the pre-WW2 era. Awe-inspiring labor has brought forth a volume of nearly 1500 pages listing, alphabetically by artist, recording data for every known African-American blues and gospel performer whose work was put on disk through 1943. It is not a jazz discography, though a few essentially jazz acts are included. As well as commercial recordings, it also attempts to catalog all known folklore field recordings of the same period, particularly those of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. Included are an index of artists, to help locate sideman appearances, and an index of song titles. The work involved here, which has occupied several writers for many years, is awe-inspiring, particularly since the book is specialized enough (and priced highly enough) that it will never break any sales records. A love for this wonderful music is evident on every page.

I bought a copy about 2 years ago and use it frequently, especially with my disk and tape collection. The kind of session data given so generously here was notoriously absent on LP reissues of early blues music. As an inveterate compiler and collator and list-maker, I can't imagine not having this info! The Oxford edition is a sturdy and well-made volume, and I consider the book worth every dime I paid for it, and then some.

One "improvement" I would like to see in a future edition is the addition of some symbol to designate records of which no copy is known to exist. Here and there the editors note that a particular recording has "never been found," but this should be done more consistently. Even with such a notoriously lost 78 as Pm 13096, only the absence of a master number indicates its status. Since 7 types of saxophone are differentiated in the instrumentation chart, I would also suggest that the Queen of Musical Instruments -- I mean, of course, the 12-string -- might be distinguished from the plain old 6-string guitar (perhaps as "12g").

The quibbles are quite minor. There is really nothing about this book that I don't like. Casual blues and gospel fans certainly don't need it, but it will be indispensable to those with a more serious interest.

John Cage was the first to introduce Pierre Boulez to the United States. In New York he took Boulez around visiting painters and musicians, this was the early Fifties. David Tudor(long a Cage friend) was performing Boulez's Second Piano Sonata for the first time. Bookstores were frequent stops and Boulez( we learn) never heard of the poet e.e.cummings, and bought a modest book of his poetry. Some thirty years later Boulez set a text of cummings for 22 unaccompanied voices. This correspondence was between two innovators coming from radically different places yet stopping at the same conceptual places. And it is a shame that this friendship fell out quickly,each going into radically different venues. Boulez although fascinated with chance procedures(which Cage had been working with the I Ching, Book of Changes at that time) Boulez was arrongantly fascinated by the aesthetic object,its history and attenuation, and has remained so since. This correspondence has frequent entries on the concept of indeterminacy, again Boulez comes to it via Mallarme, and aleatoric thinking, the throwing of the dice.Boulez sought a musical structure that contained the element of chance as in his Third Piano Sonata in the latter Fifties. Both however were at a creative place in modernity when the Western canon of structure and comprehensibility was falling itself.However it is odd for Boulez to this day thinks of his work as moments containing a "freedom" of something, when he conducts Mahler, he thinks of those passages that are freer than others,like a symphony is a dialogue between the two. Mahler's Sixth Symphony is the case in point. There are letters of Boulez to Cage, while in South America with the Barrault Theatre Company, one entry includes a description from Boulez that he is having a good time "milhauding" around, referring to Darius Milhaud the composer who frequently utilized folk elelments in his music by collecting them in volumes.Nattiez is a very sympathetic observer to this cause of modernity and the roots of things.

Bravo Of The Brazos: John Larn Of Fort Griffin, Texas by independent scholar Robert K. DeArment is the true life story of John Larn, a colorful Texas lawman turned frontier outlaw. No stranger to shootouts, Larn led a vigilante committee with widespread support and killed at least a dozen men before he turned 29. At first his killing of horse or cattle thieves on sight garnered approval, but then he started to kill for profit or revenge, and when Larn threatened to reveal the names of the people on his vigilante committee, a mob of relatives, former friends, and various associates ruthlessly silenced his threat and ended his life. Bravo Of The Brazos is a fascinating tale of power and corruption, as well as a welcome and appreciated contribution to academic American Frontier History & Biography collections.

The Franconia, New Hampshire, farm of the American poet Robert Frost was turned into a museum and center for poetry and the arts in 1976. From that time, "The Frost Place" has been annual event wherein an emerging poet has been invited to spend the summer living in the house where Frost once lived and wrote some of his greatest poetry. The Breath Of Parted Lips: Voices From The Robert Frost Place, Volume One is a remarkable anthology of twenty-four poets, each of whom won that honor of a summer's residency and document the success of the original concept as a means of generating outstanding poetry while nurturing the poet's muse in the rooms and views that were once the inspiration of the great Robert Frost. Poem At 40: Windwashed--as if standing next to the highway,/a truck long as the century sweeping by,/all things at last bent in the same direction./An opening, as if all/the clothes my ancestors ever wore/dry on lines in my body:/wind-whipped, parallel with the ground,/some sleeves sharing a single clothespin/so that they seem to clasp hands,/seem to hold on.//And now that I can see/up the old women's dresses,/there's nothing but a filtered light./And now that their men's smoky breath/has traversed the earth,/it has nothing to do with them./And now that awkward, fat tears of rain/slap the window screen,/now that I'm naked too,/cupping my genitals, tracing with a pencil/the blue vein between my collar bone and breast,/I'll go to sleep when I'm told.

A very concise and practical source of information about medicines and their use.