This book is incredible, the essays, photography, map drawings and descriptions really changed the way I looked at the world around me. This book was used as our text book for a Senior Project class in design school.

This book will change the way you look at and think about landscape. Technically, it's a landscape architecture book, and the essays that deal with that subject are excellent. James Corner is one of the best landscape architects/theorists around, and his writing is though-provoking, lucid and enjoyable to read. He draws an wonderful comparison between this work and Le Corbusier's sightseeing flights over North Africa in the 1930's. But without a doubt, the reason to buy this book are the photographs that document the unexpected beauty that arises out of the interaction between man and nature. The incongruities of landscape, juxtaposed against the linear certainty of the Land Ordinance Act grid, farm plots and other common interventions make for stunning photography.

There are also little subplots, such as creative reuses of already built spaces (tennis courts as parking lots & football field yard lines over a baseball diamond), and the similarity of totally unrelated natural forms (who knew that from 7,000 feet, cracked pond ice looks like microscopic images of streptococcal bacteria?).

There are dozens of other little thoughts I could include, and one of most remarkable things about this book is that the photogrpahs allow the reader to draw on his or her own knowledge to make connections and interpertations. There's no right or wrong way to see these things, which makes it universally rewarding and enjoyable.

I always enjoy graphic design, but this one integrates intelligent visual graphic representation and it portraits site/landscape analysis.
Not your usual blueprint survey, but delightful new way of documentation.

I never liked Nancy as a kid. It was too dumb and corny. Nonetheless, I always read it. Why did I read it? I didn't know. But now I do--it was Nancy's unique combination of precise drawing style and dumbass sight gags. "Bums, Beatnicks, and Hippies, Artists and Con Artists" has these qualities in spades. After reading this volume, one will conclude that all hippies carry acoustic guitars and wear Roman sandles, all artists have a goatee and wear a beret, and bums sport a uniform whisker stubble on their chin and a two-bit cigar in their mouth. (And, brother, are these hobos funny. I laughed for a week.)

Huzzah for Ernie Bushmiller! He's created a strip more bizarre than anything found in a punk fanzine or scrawled on a bathroom wall

This is a great resource for first year medical students who want to develop a good basic understanding of biochemistry in the clinical setting. I have been using this text/atlas a great deal as a good tool to get a quick idea of topics (which are actually written in quite good depth) and then to bring concepts together. If you like to learn through pictures and diagrams, then this is a must have!

I have always loved the novels of Henry James, particularly Portrait of a Lady and my real favourite, The Turn of the Screw. When I saw this book I thought it would be very hard going, but I soon realised that Flannery's book was clearly written but also sophisticated and at times surprising. Its a pity there isn't more coverage in it of the Turn of the Screw but Flannery's discussion of The Portrait of a Lady and stories by James like The Aspern Papers and The Figure in the Carpet more than make up for this. This book is written with real grace and sometimes wit, e.g. the chapter on the Tragic Muse and the books discussion of sexuality and aesthetics in the last chapter on The Golden Bowl. Flannery looks with cool and sympathetic eyes at other critics on James. You feel that he really loves James and is not just using him as an opportunity to demonstrate his own powers as critic and egotist, as I find with many literary critics. This book is informative whilst being non-judgemental. Anyone interested in James would, I am sure, find this book extremely helpful as insight and discovery. I also feel that it is driven by a sense of the complexities of James and the complexities of the real world.
I look forward to discovering more works by this author. A great read!

Clearly a simpleton's view of the world that caters to the simpleton audience of victimized men. If you've failed at most the meaningful things in your life, and tend to blame others, you will love this book. Underlying sentiments are jaundiced as it attempts to preach on and aggrandize all that would seem painfully obvious to even the mildly secure and marginally successful man. These guys sound as if their world is dominated by women as they appear to yearn for an all-male utopia. Skip this book entirely...or better yet, go hang out with Jimmy in his bar with a bunch of "guys" while you get drunk and bad advice as the world passes by. What else would you expect from a bartender? PS: Jimmy's Bar is not on the Upper West Side.

If you read Jimmy's column in Men's Health magazine, you'll enjoy this book. It was well-spent [money], I must say. Humorous, clever advice from Jimmy made for entertaining, if less than profound, reading. Definitely worth purchasing.

This guy has good common sense when it comes to giving the right answers to men who have problems with women, the job, money etc. I first heard of him through Men's Health magazine, where he has his monthly column. Just about all of his answers to the men's questions on everyday problems will have you shaking your head in agreement. A great, entertaining book. I wish this guy was my bartender.

The last completed novel by Henry James is, like preceding works of his later era ("The Wings of the Dove" comes up to mind first), very hard to read. That's the warning to every unwary reader who happens to think about starting to read Henry James anew.

The plot is simple: its about two couples of people -- Charlotte and Amerigo, and Adam Verver and his daughter Maggie Verver. Charlotte loves Amerigo, who, however, decides to marry Maggie. Soon after that, Charlotte marries Adam Verver, an American millionaire. Still, Amerigo and Charlotte maintain their former relations as lovers until their secret is discovered by Maggie unexpectedly with an advent of a golden bowl, which looks perfect outward, but deep inside cracked. Maggie, who greatly adores her deceived father, in turn, starts to move in order to mend the cracked relations, or secure the apparently happy family life without disturbing the present relations.

As this sketch of the story tells you, one of the favorite topics of the 19th century literature -- adultery -- is staged in the center of the book, but the way James handles it is very different from those of other American or British writers. The meaning is hidden in a web of complicated, even contorted sentences of James, and you have to read often repeatedly to grasp the syntax. The grammar is sometimes unclear, with his frequent use of pronouns and double negatives, and very often you just have to take time to understand to what person James' "he" or "she" really refers to. It is not a rare thing for you to find that a paragraph starts with those "he" and "she" without any hint about its identity, so you just read on until you hit the right meaning of these pronouns. And this is just one example of the hard-to-chew James prose. If you think it is pompous, you surely are excused.

But as you read on again, you find, behind this entangled sentences and a rather banal melodramatic story, something intelligent, something about humans that lurks in the dark part of our heart. I will not pretend that I can understand all of the book, but James clearly shows how we, with a limited ability of our perception, try to act as the characters of the book do, in the given atomosphere of society. To me, this book is about the way of the people's behavior luminously recorded; about the way of our expressing and perceiving ourselves without uttering them aloud.

Gore Vidal says about the book: "James's conversational style was endlessly complex, humourous, unexpected -- euphemistic where most people are direct, and suddenly precise where avoidance or ellipsis is usual (see his introduction of "The Golden Bowl" in Penguin Classics edition. This is exactly the nature of this book, which would either attract or repel you. Unfortunately, I admit, this is not my cup of tea, for I prefer more story-oriented novels. Still, if you really want to challenge reading something really substantial, I for one recommend this book.

There is a sumptuous film version of the book, starring Uma Thurman and Nick Nolte. It might be a good idea to watch it before you start reading the book.

I discovered James in college and read all his full-length novels before reaching age 30. The only one I had real trouble with was The Golden Bowl.

I recently reread the novel and reveled in its elegant complexity. (It would be nice to think that the passage of 20 years has brought wisdom and insight that made me a better reader, but the credit belongs to Dorothea Krook's illuminating discussion in The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James.)

The Golden Bowl is the last, the most demanding, and the most rewarding of James's major novels. Even its immediate predecessors, The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove, do not reach its deep examination of the mixed motives, the tangled good and evil, that drive human action and passion. Although he presents his characters' acts and much of what goes on in their heads, James manages in such a way that while Krook believes Adam and Maggie are on the side of the angels, Gore Vidal (who introduces the current Penguin edition) believes they are monsters of manipulation--and (as Krook acknowledges) both views are consistent with the evidence.

Much--too much--of these riches of doubt and ambiguity is lost in the Merchant/Ivory/Jhabvala translation to the screen (2001). The movie has some good things, but it could have had many more. Surprised by extraneous material (like the exotic dance), heavy-handed symbolism (the exterior darkness on the day Charlotte and Amerigo find the golden bowl), and needless oversimplifications (Amerigo's talk of "dishonor" to Charlotte, which exaggerates his virtue and his desire to be done with her), I got the sense that nobody involved in the production had read the novel with the care that it requires and rewards. Had they done so, their version could have been really fine--both as a movie and as an invitation to the novel.

How does one choose between Henry James novels? Can one really put the feminine insight of The Portrait of a Lady above the moral conflict of The Wings of the Dove? I loved both those novels, and thought that The Ambassadors was quite good as well. But The Golden Bowl, for me, was another experience altogether.

First of all, I found "Bowl" to be the most difficult of James' novels to read. Actually, it was one of the most difficult books I have ever read, period. One must reread many passages to make sure they have the right meaning because the prose is so austere and almost impenetrable. But, once you get to the conclusion, it's more than worth it. You have to stick with this novel right to the end in order to fully appreciate its brilliance. The characters are realized with an intelligence that is rare to find in literature today, and they are written about in such a wonderfully restrained and subtle way. Don't miss this literary triumph, and please don't shy away from it because it is considered a "classic" or because of your possible misconceptions of Henry James.

Also, I read that it is being developed for an upcoming film version by Merchant Ivory. If that's true, then moviegoers are in for a treat!

This Cliffs Notes volume by Denis M. Calandra and James L. Roberts examines three Neoclassical comedies by Moliere. The volume begins with a section on the Life and Background of the author and an excellent section that distinguishes "Neoclassical Comedy" of Moliere from the "Romantic Comedy" epitomized by Shakespeare. Following a concise explication of Moliere's Comic Technique, Calandra and Roberts look at "Tartuffe," "The Misanthrope" and "The Bourgeois Gentleman." Each play is examined with a List of Characters, a General Plot Summary, Summaries and Commentaries that look at each of the five acts in turn looking at one or two scenes at a time, and then Character Analyses of the main characters. As always, the best way of making use of this little yellow book with the black stripes is to read the commentaries after you have read the corresponding scenes in the play. The greatest strength of this particular Cliffs Notes is the set up of Neoclassical Comedy and Moliere's comic technique. For those teaching/reading these plays that background information will allow better understanding of any one of these plays.

A CD-Rom jammed with articles from EXECUTIVE EXCELLENCE. I actually got my copy as a bonus for subscribing a couple of years ago. Many of the articles are interesting, but they are all quite short, almost MTV-ish. This seems to be the preferred style for this publication. If you are a fan of Warren Bennis, or one of the writers who regularly contribute to that publication, this is a good way to pick up some new material from your favored writer. The articles are on a variety of topics, which means that there will probably be something for everyone with an interest in this subject, but by the same token, there will be a lot that won't interest you. The CD includes a search engine that is workable. I benefitted from the magazine and the CD, but they didn't set my world on fire.

Although at times wordy and dense, this book should be vital reading for anyone concerned with education, politics and economic growth in the late 1990's. Although focussing on particulr issues in the UK, the critiques made here are as relevant for all post-industrial societies in which education is at once controlled by a managerial agenda while leaving its co-ordination to a so-called rational market. While celebrating individual agency, it disputes both the rational individualist and deterministic views of human behaviour, re-defining choice in terms of social networks. It is radical rather than liberal, while recognizing the need for investment in education as an economic resource it also proposes deeper reforms which support education for citzenship, and the challenges of globalization

How can anyone find this confusing? This is a pretty simple work, and I find it difficult to believe that anyone can be confused as to what it's about. And why would you need Cliff Notes for this?

In any event, my problem with this play is that its just too simple: not enough meat and the characters aren't all that interesting. Yes, it shows us how narrow-minded the Puritans were. It's also an allegory for McCarthyism, for those of you who don't know. But do we really need this play to point out what it tells us about human nature? I personally find it overly long and overly dull for what it's trying to convey.

i was required to read this book for an english class, and am glad i did, because it really made one think about how narrow minded the puritans were and how that really brought on the hangings of the so called witches. this is definately a book to read.

this is a great piece of art by arthur miller. he catches your attention with the lies and injustices of the 1600's. this is a good book because of it's content. the speech is, as it was in that time. it tells a tale of a little girl who gets caught being "naughty" and blames it on the circumstances of those she doesn't like or has problems with. this book teaches that to lie about something that could have been small makes it much larger and much more complicated to deal with. the girl in this this book is in witchcraft and is caught dancing naked in the woods by her uncle who is the reverend. with her are two other girls, a servant, and a cousin. the town is brought down to a level where every one is accusing every one else for past happeneings. farmowners are accusing neighbors of it so that the land is auctioned off at low prices so that they can increase the quality of their own land. it becomes a big issue when it could have been solved completely with a simple confession. the subject is blown out of proportion and it destryos a lot of lives and families. the truth is finally found after nine-teen people are hanged for the crime of witchcraft. i reccomend this book to anyone who enjoys "a good book".