My father, who was an artillery Captain in the Philippines during WWII, frequently pulled this book off the shelf to show me what war was like. He said that it was as close as you could get without actually being there. He died before he could see "Saving Private Ryan," but I think he would still say so even after seeing the movie.

This is THE most unforgettable view of the first days of the then called "Police Action" in Korea. Author Duncan lived with the men and portrayed all the comraderie, terror and fear that they did. His work makes an indelable image in our mind & is easy to grasp the magnatude of it. My now deceased husband was one of those young Marines and one of the walking wounded who lived in pain his whole life. He treasured this book and knew the subjects. He found it a way to bury his emotions and go on with a "normal" lifestyle. This book had to help Truman change and understand it was not a simple mop-up action....but This WAS War! Although out of print, my family is trying to get copies to pass on to their children to help us better understand their father. It is especially appropriate at this time when attention is being given the Korean Conflict's 50th anniversary. I wish they would reprint it and distribute a copy to all high school and college libraries.

This book reads slowly and discussions tend to be dense while trying to be thorough but it is filled with very useful terms, charts, tables, diagrams, photos (B&W), and discussions of acoustic principals that all architects, engineers, and contractors are likely to encounter one day. An excellent resource for information about built acoustics for the professional, student or teacher. We highly recommend it. For further info: audioeng@europost.org

If you look at all of Debbe Kennedy's writing, there is at least one thread connecting all her thoughts: talk is nice, but action -- making something really happen -- is the only path to achievement.

What's great, then, about this "Strategic Action Series" is that, page after page, Kennedy suggests, profiles, highlights, or lists things you can do to move diversity from the discussion table to the office suite or plant floor.

The series is a perfect blend of philosophy, reporting, and move-on-it-now lists. Thus, when completed, the series not only helps you see diversity in a new light; these books also help you think about your own potential for converting diversity into actions with both a personal and organizational payoff.

This book is one of a kind! It is the kind of book that everyone who golfs should own. This book even has an illustration for the definitions of Knickers and Plus Fours. . .she's even kind of cute! A must have book!!!!

A History Of Utah's American Indians is an impressive, comprehensive historical survey of Native American inhabitants of Utah, including six Native American tribes recognized as official entities and residing within Utah's boundaries. These include the Northwestern Shoshone, the Goshutes, the Paiutes, the Utes, the White Mesa Utes, and the Navhaos (Dine). Each tribe has its own government, while individual Tribe members are also citizens of Utah and the United States. The numerous contributors cover such issues as origin stories, religion, politics, education, folkways, family life, social activities, economic issues, important events, migration, interaction with whites and among themselves, war, trade, intermarriage, common threats and challenges. Of special note is the introductory chapter providing an overview of Utah's Native Americans and the concluding chapter summarizing the issues and concerns of contemporary Native Americans and their tribal leaders. A History Of Utah's American Indians is a remarkable and very welcome contribution to Native American studies and supplemental reading lists.

Peggy Duncan was amazed at how little most people actually knew about the software in their computers -- even when they had been using it for years. She discovered that very few people actually read the user manuals and "how to" books for such widespread applications as Microsoft Windows 98, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 97. With this realization, Peggy set out to write Just Show Me Which Button To Click!: Computer Training For Busy People, a comprehensive, "user friendly", simplified guide that streamlines everything, that focuses on the user instead of the technology, and covers just those beginning to advanced features that are needed the most. Just Show Me Which Button To Click! is the best and highly recommended approach the computer phobic and the total beginner can have access to in getting up and running with these softwares for personal, academic, or business purposes.

I have read hundreds of fantasy books and this remains my my uncontested favorite series ever. Reading this book is somewhat like watching the felowship of the ring with out knowing that it is going to end in the middle. Your flying through the pages to see what will happen to Rap and Inos when all of a sudden it's over without realizing it you have finished the book. Now you must hunt through the used book stores to find the next one (before amazon[.com]) stopping at nothing to find what will happen to our stable boy and his queen, will Raps magic progress further or get him killed buy someone trying to torture his secret out of him.........

Fantasy often seems to have cliche after cliche...evil wizard, group of good guys which include a half-elf, a surly dwarf, and a warrior, who defeat wizard, etc etc. Duncan has created a truly unique group of characters, and a moving and wonderful adventure. The world and the complex magic system he creates is wonderful and imaginative. This is the best series I have ever read, and I have read a lot of fantasy. I have over 100 fantasy novels in my collection alone! Thanks to Mr. Duncan for giving us all these fabulous books!

This wonderful book, the series it begins, and the second series which follows it, are great books to read if you just want to be swept up in a great story about boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl (in cards and spades!) boy-gets-girl. If you like your fantasy built on an original, well-thought-out and carried to its logical conclusion worldview and concept of magic, the set works on that level. If you love great characters lovingly written and described, who you will remember fondly (or not), this is definitely for you. Little Chicken, Sorcerer Ishist, Gathmor, Jalon and the boys - these aren't even the main characters! Also my personal favorite, Princess Kadolan - who starts out as almost a caricature of dotty older princess gone a bit to seed, but becomes so much more. (!) Finally, if you like your fantasy to have a conscience, to speak to issues of classism, racism and sexism, and have something to say about power and corruption, this book and its sequels are a must read!

David James Duncan is one of those rare writers that leaves you forever changed after encountering their work. I know I will gratefully never be the same after reading this book. I walked into it one person, and upon completing it, was another. His perceptions of the world are so rare that the fact he can write them down with such fathomless talent, passion and care, verges on unbelievable. I only come across writing this powerful once every five to ten years and count it a true blessing when it happens.
The portion titled "A Prayer for the Salmon's Second Coming" should be read by every single American period. In another chapter called "When Birdwatching Is a Blood Sport" he writes, "When wild elk, to remain alive, are forced to wipe out wild salmon, it is time, in my book, to get sad".
This book woke me up to many things I'd slept through. If you are more fortunate than I, and already awake, the words in this book will make your own words even more powerful. Buy it, read it, treasure it, share it. You'll never regret it.

My Story as Told by Water covers a varied terrain ranging from environmental activism to the virtues of fly-fishing without a hired guide. The book is really a collection of essays (many published in other books and periodicals) about rivers in the Northwestern United States. Duncan shares much of his early life growing up in neighborhoods just beyond the growing tentacles of Portland, Oregon. He writes openly about this family, including his bitter confrontation over the war in Vietnam with his dad, and the loss of his brother. Given such a backdrop, it's easy to understand how Duncan turned to the solitude of fishing local streams to deal with the pain of his youth.

Later in the book, Duncan finds his stride writing about the not-so-bright outlook facing wild salmon along the Columbia and Snake Rivers. You can almost feel the tears welling up in his eyes as he describes their near exit from his world. He sums up the disaster of the salmon run on the Snake River this way: "The babble of 'salmon management' rhetoric has taken a river of prayful human yearning, diverted it into a thousand word-filled ditches, and run it over alkali. When migratory creatures are prevented from migrating, they are no longer migratory creatures: they're kidnap victims. The name of the living vessel in which wild salmon evolved and still thrive is not 'fish bypass system,' 'smolt-deflecting diversionary strobe light,' or 'barge.' It is River."

Duncan opens his heart to the connections he has to rivers and wild fish. But more importantly, he gives us inspiration for making our own connections to those wild places.

Once again, David James Duncan captures most eloquently the inherent spirituality of nature. This collection of essays, speeches, and 1 song has moved me just as much as "The River Why", perhaps even more so, as this book is set in beautiful, raw, besieged reality. I dare you to read this book and not be inspired to make your corner of the world a little better, and a little more hospitable to every living thing. Duncan writes that he "became a nonfiction writer--after no apprenticeship whatever--at the age of 40. I did so not out of a sense of calling, but out of a sense of betrayal, out of rage over natural systems violated, out of grief for a loved world raped, and out of a craving for justice." This is the passion that forms this book, a book created in love for the rivers his writing sings for, and anger for the desecration of those same rivers. BUY THIS BOOK!

This book is sentimental, overwritten, trendy and sickeningly mediocre. Duncan may very well be the master of kitch readers crave from years of Hollywood molding their aesthetic preferences. Perhaps it would not be so bad if Duncan actually had some biting or original insight into human lives or the human condition. He appropriates "eastern philosophy" to not only trivialize the philosophy itself, but to make his lack of originality transparent. With Duncan, eastern religion can indeed be bought in a Santa Barbara bead boutique or between the lines of a hippie's banter.

YES! It truly is a horrifying experience to get lost in the store when one is a toddler. But Duncan's style and knack for cheese reduce such moments to the most trite melodrama. He is the classic example of the writer who has used more words than he knows what to do with. If you admire the aesthetics of Hallmark cards, buy this book and swoon away.

For better nature writers, turn to Henry David Thoreau, (early) Robert Bly, Paul Theroux or even Ernest Hemingway's Nick Adams stories. Compared to Duncan, a man like Hawthorne takes readers closer to nature by having characters walk through a forest.

as I read this book. Although I don't like fishing (Duncan's favorite subject), I do like good stories. And Duncan knows how to write them. This book is easy to read because it is a compilation of short stories, albeit some better than others. But all the stories are worth reading at least once. And believe me, after the first time, you will be returning to read a few of the stories over and over. I know I did.

I was a hitch-hikn' looking for Sissy out there somewhere and along comes this book with the upside down fish-hook on it and I finally had the term for my favorite piece of women's clothing (i.e. 'the upper tenth of a pair of levis').

Ten years later I was having babies and was reading The Brothers K with my son asleep on my chest.

Now, well beyond that divorce, I find "home" in David's stories in River Teeth. His attention to me not his characters is extremely evident through his writing. I can still get chills up my spine just thinking about that Oregon concert when the lightning and thunder peeled...

This book is one of a number of Professor Challenger adventures of Sir A. C. Doyle. A noted zoologist (Challenger) has come across evidence that there is a plateau in South America that can be reached from deep in the Amazon rain forest in which prehistoric animals still exist. An expedition of four (Challenger, a sceptical zoologist named Summerlee, a noted hunter (Lord John Roxton), and Edward Malone, a journalist) sets out to verify this report. The arguing and interactions between the academics is interesting in that little seems to have changed in the last 87 years! It should be noted that Doyle isolates the plateau so that there is minimal interaction with the rest of the rain forest (thus, the dinosaurs can't escape). But, why couldn't the ptereodactyls spread out? This story was one of the earliest "Lost World" tales and has been made into a film a number of times. Other stories in this sub-genre owe much to Doyle and Challenger.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created a classic dinosaur adventure story when he wrote The Lost World in 1912. The tale's narrator, Ned Malone is a newspaper reporter who joins an expedition to the wilds of the Amazon to impress his girlfriend. However, he scarcely anticipates the dangers he will confront when the expedition's leader, zoology professor George Challenger takes them to a plateau filled with dinosaurs and ape men.
Doyle's human characters are described much more richly than Michael Crichton's minimally interesting protagonists in Jurassic Park (1990), so the story hinges as much on Challenger's eccentricities as it does on dinosaur attacks or Ned Malone's quest for validation of his masculine bravado. A weakness is the lack of female characters worthy of more than passing note. Ned's fickle and heartless girlfriend makes only brief and displeasing appearances at the beginning and end of the tale. Crichton does no better with females.
Hopp's Dinosaur Wars, published in 2000, does a much better take on genders, giving equal weight to a young male/female pair who brave the dangers of dinosaurs loose in modern-day Montana. It seems that even dinosaur fiction has evolved over the years.

Professor Challenger, a protagonist as unique and eccentric as Sherlock Holmes, "challenges" the London Zoological Society to send a team of impartial judges to verify his claims that dinosaurs live on a plateau in the Brazilian rain forest. Professor Summerlee, a staunch foe of Challenger, accepts the challenge. Lord John Roxton, a soldier and big game hunter, agrees to go along, and Edward Malone, a star rugby player and journalist, goes as their scribe.

The world they find is every bit as captivating as Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, and the danger is every bit as exhilarating. The characters are more engaging, and the story contains a good deal of humor as the four strong personalities clash a number of times on a number of levels.

There are no velociraptors to menace the adventurers, who have become hopelessly marooned, but a tribe of ape men serves quite well to provide the danger. It is a pleasure to have the English language used so well in describing the adventures of the four.

"The Lost World" is obviously the inspiration for Crichton's "Jurassic Park." Crichton may have modernized the story, but he certainly didn't improve it. Unfortunately, "The Lost World" reflects the ethnic insensitivity and "classism" of the Victorian Era, but if you can overlook that flaw, you will thoroughly enjoy the story.