I consider this book to be one of the best dollhouse references out there. Every page has color photos. Many of the furniture pieces are photographed individually. Each photograph is clear and detailed. The author is careful to note when a piece is original, antique, or modern. Everything in this book is well-researched and documented. You could carve replica furniture pieces from the photographs in here, they are that good!

Needless to say, the houses featured in here are gorgeous in their own right. My favorite part of this book are the great photos of the Grodnertal peg-wooden dolls. This book contains some of the best Grodnertal photos I've ever seen!

The Gardens of Colonial Williamsburg is a most inspiring and beautiful book covering the four seasons in Colonial Williamsburg. This book covers not only the history of twenty gardens in the historic district, but who these eighteenth century garders were. The archaeological research provides a detailed look at each of the gardens, giving layout plans and detailed list of all the plants used. With the addition of beautiful color photography, this book will provide all gardeners with a source to re-create a eighteenth century garden.

This book is highly recommended for its telling of a famous story. It has a quietness and gentleness about it that I did not expect. I would read this story to my class when they are learning about the middle ages and during the Christmas holidays.

This collection of more than 55 excerpts not only offers an introduction to the environmental issues currently affecting our world (e.g., pesticides and pollution, growth, overpopulation, third-world poverty, and consumerism, among others), but also provides an excellent introduction to the classic writings of numerous contributors including Rachel Carson, E. F. Schumacher, Fritjof Capra, Ed Abbey, and Aldo Leopold, among others. Although writer Thomas Berry is unfortunately absent from this collection, and the selections are short (3 to 5 pages each), this book should nevertheless be considered a good starting place to get one's feet wet in the green debate. Then, if wet feet aren't enough, I would recommend the recent "Dharma Rain" (2000) collection of environmental essays from a buddhist perspective.

The "Green Whistle" by Professor David Koenig is a lot of true accounts I know since I know Professor Koenig personally in fact I was in his class at Oakton College where he brings to life the amazement of what each poem in the book means. I recommend this book to students and teachers alike! Koenig is a Genious with much talent!

HUEY is an excellent reading book that reveals the inner workings of being a Vietnam helicopter pilot. Back in '88 I checked this book out from the local library and never forgot it. I purchased my own copy in '92 and have been averaging 4 years between readings. Aside from one chapter on Buda which I always skip, the book is a real page turner.

The Frontier Issues in Economic Thought summaries, along with the overview essays, provide a markedly different service from the standard collection of abstracts. The series will benefit not only scholarly work but the application of our best thinking to the problems of the times.

Kenneth Prewitt, President, Social Sciences Research Council

Since Vatican II Catholics, guided more by the Spirit than law, have had special need for discernment. Fortunately, as Lonsdale points out, they have also moved from devotional piety to the Scripture and personal prayer that provide tools for discernment. Lonsdale sketches the global, social, cultural, ecclesial, historical and religious contexts of personal and group discernment, and analyzes sensitively and thoroughly its many and various elements and techniques, its intellectual and affective dimensions, the roles of consolation, desolation, and desires, and the obstacles to any form of discernment. He is deeply rooted in and draws heavily upon the spirituality of Ignatius Loyola, and writes with wisdom, clarity, and literary grace. One useful addition to the text, however, would be a treatment of an element of discernment found in Ignatius's Spiritual Journal and in the First Deliberation of Ignatius and his followers that persuaded them to form a religious order: the options should be considered separately (even on alternate days), and in group discernment the group should seek in unison first the reasons for one choice then later the reasons for the other. This technique maximizes individual openness to the force of each argument and objection, and minimizes conflict. Two insights in his last chapter are especially good: that Jesuit spirituality may be rooted in the individuality of the desert spirituality explained by John Cassian, and that Ignatian discernment unites the intellectual, institutional Catholic tradition with the affective, personal Protestant tradition. Some books you hand on to friends, libraries or charities; this one is a keeper.

This is a very enjoyable collection of stories based on scripts from the original radio plays.

Basil Rathbone was a "softer" version of Holmes. The original Sherlock could be hard and unfeeling - a machine as Watson often describes him.

That probably didn't play to audiences so, by comparison, Rathbone is just mildly eccentric. He's far more tolerant of the inability of Watson and others to keep up with him than is the original Sherlock.

It's a little as if someone had found the dichotomy betwen Hamlet's magnificent spirit and his fatal flaw disconcerting and had rewritten Shakespeare's classic to make Hamlet just a typical troubled young adult struggling with newfound freedom and responsibilties.

And Nigel Bruce's bumbling Watson is largely comic relief and equally unlike the original Conan Doyle version.

But at least the original radio playwrights kept the two heroes in late 19th century/early 20th century England. I think that most of the movies that Rathbone and Bruce made were set during World War II. I mean, no one could be a worthier contender against the Nazis than Sherlock Holmes, but still...

The story of how Holmes and Watson first meet Moriarty is unconvincing, as is the portrayal of Moriarty, and equally unconvincing is how, in "The April Fool's Adventure", Holmes finds all of the clues that the pranksters leave for him to find but doesn't see how they were intended to point to himself as the culprit. His inability to recognize himself is bewildering, and he must have forgotten to use his magnifying glass to look at the calendar.

But so what? When a classic is changed for mass market effect, the result is often disastrous, but not so here.

The bottom line is that all of the stories are very enjoyable. For all of the merit of the original Conan Doyle classics, they were written as a disagreeable chore to satisfy the public's demand for a character that Conan Doyle himself had quickly grown tired of.

These stories were crafted with a lot of love and care, and that might be why the two main characters themselves draw more affection than do the original versions.

Our debt to Conan Doyle for bringing us Sherlock Holmes is incalculable, but equally incalculable is our debt to his contemporaries for forcing the author to resurrect the great detective from (what we were led to believe was) the bottom of Reichenbach Falls. Perhaps the public also deserves credit for rescuing Holmes's humanity as well as his life from the clutches of his original creator, and perhaps this kinder, gentler Holmes is an example of this second rescue effort.

And speaking of Holmes's life, the last story in this collection provides a plausible explanation (entirely consistent with the Conan Doyle concordance) of why Sherlock Holmes cannot die. Literally. That's worth the price of admission, in and of itself.

The little traveled, little known wilderness area in far northern California comes to life in this well-written and organized guide book. It includes an extensive natural history section to make your hikes more enjoyable and informative. It also includes the most accurate, detailed map of the wilderness (throw out those outdated, dangerously inaccurate Forest Service maps)! This guide book is well worth the money if you're looking for an escape from the crowds in the better known wilderness areas.