If you're a piper, Irish, Scottish, or just love the Celtic culture, "The Book of the Bagpipe" is a great book to own! It's full of information about the history of the great Highland bagpipes, bagpipe music, and bagpipers. This book also contains information on other types of bagpipes, but keeps the Highland bagpipe as it's main focus. The pictures and illustrations in "The Book of the Bagpipe" are excellent, a great portrayal of Celtic culture. The bibliography can be found at the back of the book, and the resources are absolutely amazing. Overall, "The Book of the Bagpipe" is full of great poetry and pictures and is put together by Hugh Cheape in such a delightful manner that I rate it as one fantastic read!

*Tiffany*

This pretty, little gem of a book is a great gift for the piper or Scot-o-file in your family, especially if that person is you. Cheape delivers a basic FAQ on pipes and piping, but it's the lavish illustrations that make the book special. Cheape gives ample space to pipes from other parts of the world besides the British Isles. If you ever visit Glasgow, Scotland, visit the museum at the Piping Centre. Cheape designed and installed this museum.

This book is the best single reference on humanity's long-love affair with this unique gem: the pearl. Information on the pearl is given by time period (up to the early 20th Century) and by pearl producing region/country.
If you love pearls (or are in the process of knowing about them), this book is definitely a must have. It has it all: scientific facts, pearl oyster biology and history. Incredibly well written.

This book has everything that one would want to know about pearls. It includes the pearl's cultural and natural history, commerce, industrial and medical uses, methods of pearl gathering, lists of famous pearls, ancient legends about pearls, (black and white) pictures of pearls, and portraits of royalty with their pearls.

Since this book was written in 1906, the values of pearls are outdated, and the pre-metric measurements used are confusing.

This is the best and most useful resource on pearls that I have discovered.

When you hold this set of three books, it feels as if you are holding something precious and rare, and in fact you are. The three books are beautifully illustrated; an introduction to each volume explains that which you are about to read and the verses and text were chosen with care. The books are described as being produced to ". . . delight the senses and enlighten the mind." They easily fulfill that promise.

The books are a feast for the eyes, the mind and the soul. Beautiful artwork enhances every page of the insightful and inspiring text. The combination provides moments of pure enlightenment.

Of the multi-volume series of Hugh Nibley compilations (all pretty good, actually), this is the most consistently accessible...probably because, like Brigham himself, these articles tend to focus on real-world, less academic issues than his highly technical theologial writings. Of particular interest are the articles concerning the environment, which (perhaps inadvertently) make a compelling argument that both Brigham Young and Joseph Smith were early exemplars of what we today call environmentalism. I believe that these writings can and will contribute to new phenomenon in the Mormon world: The gradual evolution of a new LDS environmental ethic.

Nibley's work on Brigham Young proves to be thought-provoking in a day when a lot of the books paraded before us are simply kitsch. Nibley does an excellent job in bringing out classic words from Brigham Young that have too long collected dust. The sections on education, patriotism, the environment, and the media deserve reading and re-reading. Nibley has that rare strength of being able to take material that is hundreds and even thousands of years old and making it relative to our own time and our own situation. This book is no exception and is money well spent.

This is an excellent book. The author's argue that the typical assumptions that animal researchers use to defend the importance and indispensibility of animal research for improving human health are inconsistent with evolutionary theory and basic, well-known facts of comparative physiology. In short, animal research seems to be founded on a myriad of false and unjustified scientific assumptions.

The authors also show that apologists for animal research have seriously overstated (and misrepresented) the historical record of medical advancement that has come about because of animal research.

These facts alone (apart from any views about the "moral status" of animals) yield the conclusion that animal research is, at least, of highly dubious merit.

I have been trying to find any critical reviews or reply pieces that dispute the scientific arguments in this book, but, unfortunately, I haven't found any yet. One would think that such a powerful book would generate critical responses. One wonders why there aren't any...

LaFollette and Shanks have shed much light on the heated animal research controversy. They argue that animal experimentation may occasional prove useful in biomedical research, but is not necessary for medical progress. In general, it is actually less helpful than other possible research approaches. Borrowing from evolutionary theory, they demonstrate that the more reliable the animal model, the more problematic it becomes ethically to experiment on it. This book challenges contemporary researchers to address the moral dilemma posed or adopt other means of investigating biomedical issues

Issues of world copyright law and privacy protection are detailed in an exciting examination of intellectual property and property rights in cyberspace, surveying how traditional intellectual property fits in a web-based economy. From file swapping services such as Napster to e-commerce patents, Caught In A Web details many important considerations in the web/business worlds.

Richard Poynder's new book is a must-read for anyone interested in the myriad and pressing issues relative to the creation, distribution, and protection of intellectual property (IP) in these wired (soon to be wireless?) times. In a lively, informative, and readable style, Poynder (a UK-based freelance journalist) discusses the impact of the web and the furious pace of innovation on copyrights, patents, and trademarks. Notably, he addresses the many challenges facing artists and content owners/distributors/publishers as the web becomes ubiquitous (and content of all kinds becomes easier to find, extract, manipulate, disseminate, and sell). Of particular interest to me were the discussions of domain name issues, and of the controversies surrounding software/internet and business methods patents in the US and UK. Security/DRM solutions are nicely covered in a non-technical manner. Poynder has included a number of contributions from other writers, as well as interviews with legal/media/entertainment/software industry experts and activists, in order to present a balance of viewpoints. Not only did I learn a lot from this book, but, somewhat to my surprise, I found it impossible to put down. If you have an interest in intellectual property issues, and concerns about where we are headed, you must read this book.

Read it and you will find a treasure.

I knew Dr. I.C. Sharma personally. He was one of the most enlightened philosopher of our times. But unfortunately, very few people recognize him. This book is recommended to anybody interested in Philosophy.

Hallam ptovides us with a wonderful book on the reigns of Henry III, Edward I, Edward II and Edward III. Each of the reigns is examined in detail with a series of essays written by experts in medieval history. The 113 essays cover a wide range of topics and provide the reader with a vivid history of Europe from 1216 - 1377. Contemporary chroniclers tie the book together. This beautiful book contains over 235 illustrations (in color and black and white), five detailed maps and a genealogy chart showing the interrelationships between the English, Scottish and French Dynasties.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in medieval history.

I read the British edition and found it fascinating. This book is for the general reader interested in English medieval history. It is not a scholarly piece of work, hence it is easier to read and more entertaining. Every aspect of the life in medieval England (and a little of France) is covered as well as the rule of the Plantagenet dynasty. There is lavish use of photographs and colorful illustrations which brings all the information more into perspective. I highly recommend it for general reading.

The above review of this book does a great job already, so I will try to complement it as best I can. Deleuze is a difficult thinker for newcomers. His ideas tend to refer to one another and have developed into a complex network of concepts over the course of his writings. The good news is that Deleuze is drawing an immense amount of interest in the US and UK now.
Deleuze sets out in the cinema books to create a theory of film and the image that stands in sharp contrast to the film theory we're most accustomed to. Deleuze does not accept that narrativity is a given in film. In fact, he wants to find a way of appreciating and describing what distinguishes film from language and narrative systems. For Deleuze, the moving image is not a system of reference. One doesn't refer to something through a segment of film. The filmic medium is direct, not referential.
Cinema 1 is thus a look at how the early cinema learned to produce the "movement image." It's a review of "auteur" film-makers and their experiments with the medium (in addition to those mentioned above are Welles, Godard, Eisenstein, Lang, Resnais, Hitchock...) to produce perception, affect, and action.
He contrasts montage with mise-en-scene. He shows how action corresponds to situations, either responding to situations or modifying them. He describes the discovery of depth of field, and use of affect in close ups and still images, the importance of shot and reverse shot sequences, and movement within the scene vs of the camera. He shows how pre-war film maintained a commitment to the whole. Characters' actions were motivated by situations, and films as a whole hung together.
The book concludes with Hitchcock's invention of the audience as a third term in the filmic experience: subject, object, audience. Audiences complete Peirce's sign system (firstness, secondness, thirdness) because they interpret the film. Indeed, Hitchcock's art was in showing the audience what the character would only discover later, and in making his films into logical puzzles rather than whodunits.
A dazzling book, I had to read it twice, and many of the films referenced won't be on dvd for years....

Gilles Delueze creates in his books on cinema a taxonomy, an attempt at the classification of cinematic images and signs. This classification is an insightful elaboration on Bergson's theses on movement and on Pierce's signs system. If this taxonomy is the core of the "movement-image" book, its heart is a brilliant and systematic history of aesthetic forms of the classical cinema. Some of the more interesting ideas are the two poles of the close-up, Goethe's theory of color and German expressionism, the space in Bresson, an account of Bunuel as naturalist, the difference between John Ford and Howard Hawks, the crisis of the action-image and the essence of comedy as in Lubitsch, Chaplin and Keaton. Nevertheless, it is not a book about cinema, nor is it a book of film history. It is the practice of concepts. Deleuze writes: "Philosophical theory is itself a practice, just as much as its object. It is no more abstract than its object...So that there is always a time, midday-midnight, when we must no longer ask ourselves 'What is cinema?' but 'What is philosophy?'". Only Deleuze, one of the greatest minds of our Century, could answer this question with so much elegance, profundity, ingenuity and mystical charm.

This is a fine wicked knowledgeable book, and entirely readable, especially the beginning, which can be read aloud straight through without losing you your audience.

I first met =A Colder Eye= when I was one of the editors of a literary criticism reference series. We were proceeding alphabetically, which meant that when we hit "O" we got half the Irish writers in one go, also alphabetic near neighbors like Mary Lavin. I found =A Colder Eye= on the shelf at Columbia University's main library, and went flipping through its index to see whether it had substantial sections on the authors I was researching. What I found was that all its index listings for authors had epithets attached: "O'Casey, Sean," it said, "ventriloquist."

"?", I thought, and checked another.

"O'Nolan, Brian," it said, "logician."

"Right," said I, and put the book on my small and extremely selective "books to be checked out" stack. As I knew only too well after reading several small mountain ranges of literary criticism and rejecting most of it, a critic who can joke about his subject, and get it right, is to be cherished. Hugh Kenner knows his stuff.

(It's one of the two great funny indices in English literature, the other being of course the index to =The Spotted Owl=; but leave that for another day.)

You would be well rewarded for buying =A Colder Eye= in hardcover if you did nothing more than read the part about the charming unreliability of Irish recollections; and allow me to say that the ghost of Brian O'Nolan should be both ashamed and proud of himself for perpetrating the interview with James Joyce Senior.

There's nothing else so good on its subject as this book. Enough. Go buy it now.

(And if you like it? Hunt up a copy of Walter Bryan's (that is, Walt Willis's) =The Improbable Irish=. If you like both, you may need to acquaint yourself with the works of Brian O'Nolan. But start with Hugh Kenner.)

A deliciously funny and engaging look at the personalities and history behind Irish literature in a tumultuous time. The care and humor with which Kenner treats the subject of Yeats is just beautiful. Several times I laughed out loud while reading it on public mass transit, much to the dismay and confusion of my fellow riders, but I just couldn't help it. I can hardly wait to read Kenner's other works (and I wish I'd discovered him a long time ago).