An extremely well-written compilation and synthesis of research in the field of Reading. Some areas that are explored include Early Literacy, Motivation and Achievement, Historical Perspectives of Reading Research, Comprehension, and Computers and Reading. The synthesis and meta-analysis of the research provides implications for instruction. A must have for reading specialists, Special Education specialist/teachers, and anyone who has the desire to improve their understanding of the reading process and improve their instruction.

This is the stories of how extremely skilled investigators solve one of the most difficult crimes Arson. This book takes you into the temntaments and streets with the investigators of the Fire Department of New York's Arson Buearu. This collection of true stories details the often monotonus and sometimes life threatening cases that the men and women have solved, and also examines the tradegy that arson can wrought on familes of the victims and the fire fighters them selves. A don't miss for anybody interested in fire investigations.

This book is a translation of a monks latin work on the albigensian crusade (launched 1209). It was actually written during the crusade (1212-1218). It has been translated beautifully and the authors has included many interesting notes about the accuracy of the monks work. If you would like to learns something about the albigensian crusade this book is great as it contains a rather detailed first/second-hand description of the events that led to the crusade as well as the crusade itself. The monk is rather prejudiced (he's a chatholic and the target of the crusade are heretics) but that only add color to the text.

The book is rather hard to read as the monk style of writing is very compact - very much information in little space - not many superfluous words or sentences.

Humboldt's On Language stands as one of the main sources to fully understand the key ideas exposed by Chomsky in his generative paradigm. Throughout this book, not only does Humboldt resort to a great erudition on Malayan languages, but also he exposes his own theory of language development. This theory is very close to Chomsky's generative view of language creation. To sum up, Humboldt's On Language is a great introduction to those who want to know more about how we, human beings, use and create language.

So many "best of" film books out there simply re-state lists that you have seen a million times. Most of them are American films that tend to be more mainstream as opposed to international and obscure. "Icons of Film: The 20th Century," however, displays about 80 films chronilogically from 1920 to 1999. The films range for the obscure to the better known, low budget to high budget and across all nationalities. The film descriptions also don't simply describe the films, but their importance to film as a whole. A great, stylish guide.

This book took me weeks to read, not because it was dull but because the copious footnotes at the end of each of the 14 excellent essays demanded investigation. The essays complement one another to present a more complete and cogent view of the antecedents and realities of the counterculture than any other volume I have yet seen on the subject.

Counterculture names, say Braunstein and Doyle, "...hippies, freaks, Flower Children, urban guerillas, orphans of Amerikka - underscores the degree to which Sixties cultural radicals had a revolving-door approach to identity, appropriating and shedding roles and personas at a dizzying pace." In these pages, the roles and personas in cultural politics, race, sex, the media (especially music, film and fashion), drugs, feminism, environmentalism and alternative visions of community and technology are thoroughly investigated.

"Unlike subcultures," says Marilyn Young in the foreword, "...a contraculture aspires to transform values and mores of its host culture. If it is successful...it BECOMES the dominant culture." I don't believe anyone would maintain that the counterculture of the '60s has become dominant, but its influence on our present culture is more vast and all-encompassing than much of the media would have us believe.

"The Sixties were centrally about the recognition on the part of an ever-growing number of Americans, that the country in which they thought they lived - peaceful, generous, honorable - did not exist and never had." The society they found themselves in was instead, "...morally bankrupt, racist, militaristic, and culturally stultifying."

Against the climate of the VietNam war and race riots in the South, these essays note that the era was one of post-scarcity abundance. Intentional poverty was adopted consciously by a generation that was appalled by the waste of human and material resources. They wanted to figure out how to "...live a completely new life as far outside the boundaries of the State and commercial marketplace as they could get." Dropouts could live on the leftovers of this affluent society.

The San Francisco Diggers' motto was "create the condition you describe." Says Doyle, "For the Diggers, the word "free" was as much an imperative as it was an adjective. They realized it with free housing, legal services, a medical clinic, film screenings, concerts, free [open]churches, and free stores with food, clothes and household utensils - all donated and gathered from the surrounding community. The Mime Troupe and other street theater groups drew people in to create "happenings," freaking freely on the streets and in public parks, de-legitimizing violence and racism, while the White Panthers staged a "total assault on the culture." Peacefully.

"If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable," said JFK, and his words reverberate across cultural boundaries today. But hippies didn't WANT to become the next coercive power structure in some kind of psychedelic fascism. They wanted a "free frame of reference."

Braunstein observes that the post-scarcity abundance of the era fueled a new drive toward leisure and play. Against a system of "...lifelong competitiveness, materialism and avarice"...LSD and other mind-expanding drugs "...incapacitated the discriminating faculties of the brain that placed objects and images in hierachcies of value." David Farber adds that LSD and other hallucinogens were used as "...an agent in the production of cultural reorientation...a new set of cultural coordinates."

My only beef with the book is in Philip Deloria's "Counterculture Indians and the New Age" and it's not even a criticism of the essay (which I found among the most brilliant and absorbing) but of scholarly research in general. From personal knowledge, I know that there are egregious errors in what Deloria's sources reported about New Buffalo and Lorian. Scholarly research breaks down when such sources are trusted, and Deloria gives an excellent example of this in the much-repeated death speech of Chief Seattle - who never uttered it. It was written by a white screenwriter from Texas for a 1972 TV script on pollution. Hippies and New Agers reinvented Indians without careful reference to the source. And of course the image became marketable.

"Playing Indian," says Deloria, "...had a tendency to lead one into, rather than out of, contradiction and irony" and "...people are simultaneously granted a platform and rendered voiceless."

In his excellent essay on communes, Timothy Miller notes that they were "...enormously, endlessly diverse." "The ultimate culprit, perhaps, was that sacred American icon, individualism. The time had come, communitarians believed, to give up the endless pursuit of self-interest and begin thinking about the common good. They wanted the country to start moving from I to we. It all added up to a vision of nothing less than a new society. The new communitarians were out to save the world and made no bones about it."

Miller's essay segues nicely into the last - on alternative technolgy, environment and the counterculture by Andrew Kirk. Buckminster Fuller's geodescic domes were used extensively in the Drop City commune in Colorado as well as "...composting toilets, afforadble greenhouses, and organic gardening techniques along with alternative energy technologies." And don't forget that the first computer hackers, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, were longhairs who smoked grass.

It's not that there were no mistakes, ineptitudes and downright stupidities in this deliberately unorganized "happening" of the '60s and '70s, but that what was good about it is still good. We're still out there. Here. Hippies didn't disappear and they didn't become corporate CEO's either. Instead, nearly all became teachers, health care workers, artists, organic farmers, social works and the like. "Cultural creatives" of the present, for instance, are either hippies of yesteryear or their heirs in some way.

"They are still out there, well into a third generation, coming together by the tens of thousands once a year at the Rainbow Gatherings. The hallucinogenic age, while tamed in some respects, has survived and mutated and reproduced."

This is the closest thing to the WHOLE STORY" that I've seen yet. Put it on your reference book shelf. ...

I have read a lot of "vanilla" books on the Internet and technology. This is the first book with some excitement to it and some very interesting issues addressed by these CTOs. A great book for both techies and business executives....

From GERRY MACKIE St John's College, University of Oxford review of the book:

Does leftist political thought have a future? That is the question addressed in this collection from the editors of the Thesis Eleven. I found the essays refreshing, for the most part, because the authors tend to be beyond the `ill-tempered and puritanical politics' (p. 26) of the actually existing left that I, for one, am tired of being lectured by. They propose to overcome the failings of American liberalism, European socialism, and cultural radicalism with a revived and revised civic republicanism appropriate to current conditions.

Crozier's and Murphy's introductory essay is more thoughtful than a mere summary of the essays to come; it is a politically committed but entertaining review of the present global political situation, and contains some piquant observations. Their unexpected emphasis on the cultural aspects of political theory is welcome... The volume is more unified in theme and tone than many collections. The writing is most lively when it deals with particular places, situations, and thinkers, as one might expect from a civic republican approach to political thought (and what one might recommend to competing approaches as well)...

From Australian Journal of Political Science, 03/01/1997

My kids loved this book and so did I. Lots of adventure, some history and good lessons about the dynamics of friendship and what greed can do. I'm thrilled that my kids enjoyed this book so much, and it was able to pull them away from television and into another, more engaging world.

To visit Paul McCartney teenage home in Liverpool is to fall in love with Mike McCartney's early photographs of Paul and the Beatles. This books is extremely hard to find and worth every penny.