Barbara Chase-Riboud, one of the most amazing artists of the twentieth century, challenged many assumptions about what constitutes art, interrogating the viewer with complex and unforgettable images. Unfortunately, the male writers of this book seem unable to properly celebrate this brilliant artist; they do little other than catalogue her "influences", which one might better describe as the incredibly rich variety of artistic discourses of the past, which Chase-Riboud used subversively and excitingly. African and Egyptian influences are obvious, but she was also engaged with baroque art and Surrealsim (but *always* making it her *own*). Perhaps a better book will someday be written. This is an artist all Women should be able to study from, if only she were to become better known.

Barbara Chase-Riboud is one of the most significant and original sculptors of her generation. Her dramatic explorations of literary and historical themes earned her a presence in major museums throughout American and Europe. Barbara Chase-Riboud: Sculptor is a richly illustrated presentation and overview of her 30 hear career as a sculptor and draftsman. Peter Selz and Anthony Janson are distinguished art historians who draw upon their considerable expertise to reveal how history, archaeology, spiritualism, the Baroque tradition, and Chase-Riboud's parallel career as a poet-novelist worked together to influence her work, from the Malcom X, Tantra, Zanzibar, and Cleopatra series to her recent monument Africa Rising -- the award-wining New York City landmark commemorating an African-American burial ground from the colonial slave-era. Barbara Chase-Riboud: Sculptor is a superb and informative addition to any personal, academic, or community library art history collection.

introduction to cost control and what is a cost control

This is just what I needed to get started on my breakdown sheet for costs of job site work. Thank you.

Did you play 6 on 6 girls basketball in school or PE class? If you did, this book will bring back the memories of a game that girls learned to love. Tommy was a dedicated coach to a team of girls that had to "find ways" to get their practice time in since the boys had most of the court time. He was ever present for his girls in all ways they needed him. Not only does the book show the advances in girls basketball, it also shows you how life was in the Midwest at that time. Iowa is a very agricultural state and you see that through this book as well. His personal family was a great part of his basketball days, Barbara being a cheerleader as a little girl. I have the pleasure of knowing this co-author and know what a delight it was for her to write this book with her father. Pick it up and read it tonight. Does not take long, but certainly brings back memories to those of us that played the sport. A little unique book and a job well done within its pages.

My congradualtions to this new author. I enloyed the author's description of Tommy's early years and his problems with growing up. Instead of feeling sorry for him I felt I was pulling for Tommy. I just knew someone like him would find a way to overcome adversity and always seek out opportunties. Not being an avid sports reader myself, I felt I was sitting on the bench waiting for Tommy to come up with the answers. He never gave up on his team and always was looking out for his girls welfare. Once I started reading I couldn't put it down. I recommend anyone that may be feeling down or a little stressed should take an afternoon and read a book like "Courting Girls". It's a short book but leaves you feeling good about life. The reader can't help but feel as Tommy did, "where there is a will there is a way". I plan to read it again before I find a special place in my library for it. I'd like to know if the author has another book coming out in the near future and where I can find it? Good job!

I am the premiere Barbara Delinsky fan - and she was fabulous as always. I enjoyed Tess Gerritsen's story; but I LOVED the Linda Howard story, Midnight Rainbow. Haven't read Howard in years, but have already put in an order for more! Read and enjoy! Great combination of stories.

Nothing new by Howard, it is Midnight rainbow, the story that first introduces Kell Sabin (later Diamond bay) to the readers. The original story is about an old agent who goes to his last mission to saving a pampered lady from the terrorists. The scene is jungle where everything is possible.

I liked especially the end of this story. It showas that when a lady has chosen her mate the guy simply walks after.

Story is about the head of a secret orgaization who take's a rare vacation and falls prey to a trap set by someone in his organization, he's wounded and found by a widow and her dog who heal him and try to help him, they fall in love but he feels that because of his position in the agency she would be a target, but love has a way of making the impossible happen.

Simon Forman was one of the most fascinating characters of the Elizabethan age. Previous books about him have, however, been abysmally bad, particularly A.L. Rowse's 1974 biography. Traister provides a much more reliable introduction to Forman and his milieu that is concise and accessible to general readers. She describes his life, his astrological-medical practice, his many unpublished writings, his magical pursuits and his involvement in the famous Essex scandal, as the posthumus patsy. This is all irresistible stuff.

Specialists will regret that Traister's grasp on the arcana of astrology and angelic magic is not stronger. And for a really thorough examination of his medicine and his patients we shall have to wait for Loren Kassell's forthcoming book. Still, a huge improvement on Rowse.

How did physicians run their practices four hundred years ago? It's a peculiar idea that in a time when so little was scientifically understood about how the body and how medicines worked, physicians did try to make sense of what their patients were going through, and even tried to be objective and logical about treatments that were mostly magical. In _The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon Forman_ (University of Chicago Press), Barbara Howard Traister tells of one particular physician working around 1600. The notoriety mentioned in the title of the book does not refer to his frequent sexual affairs, but to something that happened after Forman's death and for which he was completely unresponsible. Nonetheless, those who know Forman's name these days know it because of literary references to his dark posthumous connection with a case of poisoning.

But Forman was an earnest and serious physician. He wrote an autobiography, he wrote and copied textbooks for himself, and he kept a diary; Traister has gone to these core documents to give his picture. Forman was busy during the London plague of 1593 (unlike other physicians, he didn't flee the city), and he had an active career as physician and astrologer. He had many years of fighting the College of Physicians, which did not give him a medical license until 1603 (and persecuted him, in his view, even after that). Forman kept fine records, one of the reasons his life and practice can be reconstructed better than those of other physicians. Traister gives many quotations and samples to show how his practice worked. Forman was not so enthusiastic about bloodletting as were most of his contemporaries. He tended to give strong purgatives, and for this reason, he seldom treated children; the treatments of the time were too harsh. Parents seemed to understand this, and often only wanted him to give a prognosis. This was common at the time; ability to diagnose was severely limited and ability to cure was even worse, so patients were often satisfied just to know how bad they could expect things to be.

The pleasure in reading Traister's lively account is that Forman comes across as a active thinker who used his own resourcefulness and intellect to build a stock of clinically useful knowledge (and also spent as much energy womanizing as that other diarist, Pepys). He may have built his practice on superstition, aphrodisiacs, and fortune-telling, but he had a successful professional life despite many trials (literally and figuratively). Traister's book, an academic work full of quotations and footnotes, is nonetheless an engrossing picture of an interesting doctor and how he made his living.

Ron Howard had a very interesting childhood with being Opie Taylor in a very famous TV series, The Andy
Griffith Show, and then moving on to more interesting times with his debut on "Love and the Happy Days." It was
a pilot episode which was then named Happy Days. On Happy Days he played Richie Cunningham. During the
six years he was doing Happy Days, he married his high school sweetheart. He left Happy Days because he wanted
to pursue his dream of directing. The reason for wanting to be a director was because when acting if he didn't like
the script he would have to live with it. If he was a director he could change what he didn't like. The first movie
he directed was Grand Theft Auto, he also acted in this movie. As time went on he had several films that didn't go
so well in the box office, so when he directed Apollo 13 he worked very hard to make it a success. He showed the
world what a great director he really was.

The book "Ron Howard Child Star & Hollywood Director," on a scale of one to five is a three. The
book didn't really have a captivating mood or keep your interest throughout the entire book. In my opinion it was
slow and ponderous. Even in the parts that were more interesting, the author was slow to get to her point, I didn't
like that about the book. What I enjoyed in the book was how his family was the number one thing in Howard's
life. The main focus of this book shows how " Ron Howard has proved that a child star can grow up to find adult
happiness and success."

Ron Howard has always been a symbol of something good coming from an era of "Drug freaks and acid heads." I'm his same age and I lived in that same time when the clamps or thumb screws, as we called them, were put on us--the younger brothers and sisters--by our parents. We always felt that we were stymied as a direct result of the exiled hippy generation.

I remember hearing the words of Cruchev. He said, 'American children were nothing but spoiled brats.' Ron Howard, from Opie Taylor to the director of Apollo 13, has been a wonderful sample of the many good qualities that have come from our generation.

Ron Howard's example and accomplishments was one of the main reasons I purchased the book. The other reason was the Author: Barbara Kramer.

Barbara Kramer has a style that allows a young reader to read at a rapid pace,while at the same time, enabling the reader to comprehend the contents of the book.

As an adult reader, and author, I read the book with great enthusiasim. I'm actually a slow reader but I finished this book in one hour and enjoyed every minute of it.

If there is one thing I dislike, it's a biography that is slow and ponderous. I think young readers feel the same. "Ron Howard: Child Star & Hollywood Director," picks up on all the interesting points of his life. I was particularly interested in how Family was number one to the Howards. They wanted to make sure Ron had a normal childhood. I also liked how Ron got along with people of the older generation, like Betty Davis and John Wayne. In my opinion that was how the "Generation Gap" was really bridged, by people like Ron Howard.

Great book. my wife is next in line to read it after she's through my oldest son wants to check it out.

My daughter was given this gift by her Hebrew School teacher. We read the book together and enjoyed the tales very much. I think I liked the illustrations more than she did though. Still, it's a nice batch of Jewish folklore for kids.

Like all of Howard Schwartz's books that I know, this is a collection of fairy tales with a Jewish or biblical theme. The stories in this collection are fun to read, geared for kids 9-12, but appropriate for younger ones too. One of the things I liked about these stories was that when reading them to a younger child, I enjoyed them too. So many books for kids are crashing bores for an adult reader. This one definitely isn't!

Dear Barbara:

Please forgive me for taking so long to finally get to your new book of stories, "Serious Kissing." You know what it's like being a college writing teacher--it seems there's hardly ever time for anything but student manuscripts. Thank heaven for the occasional summer off!

What struck me most was the intimacy of the first-person voices of so many of the stories. Small wonder that Grace Paley wrote your foreward--you've got the same knack. And you show terrific range. It's hard enough to inhabit the point of view of left-leaning, idealistic, romantic American kids trying to change the world (sort of) in Puerto Rico (In your story "Catching the Last Publico,") but you've gone beyond that to pitch us the voice of Puerto Ricanas as well ("After Death You Still Believe in Love").

In my favorite story, "The Spread of Maoism," you write, "Listen, ludicrous things happen to the young and Maoist." That's a promise that you deliver on with aplomb. Who would imagine that an account of life behind the scenes among the joyless cadres of the Progressive Labor party could be so funny, and human, and endearing? I remember those people from the late 60s and always managed to keep my distance. Readers will share my delight that you evidently didn't (That or you're one heck of an acute researcher!).

There it is: "Serious Kissing" is an intimate, funny, smart read, a short story collection that captures and preserves some of the unlikeliest slices on the left side of the American pie.

Your pal (We did meet once, all those years ago), Rod

After Requiem for a Dream, I thought the Room would be a good book to read. I was expecting an emotionally disturbing, but thought provocking book, much like Requiem, but the Room was not like the well know Selby novel. Room is a wandering and discusiting book, with discriptions of rape and tourute that seem to come from the mind of a sick and twisted man. Unlike Requiem for a Dream, Selby is not shocking yet intriging, in the Room, Selby is just sick. The plot is weak, and there is no sticking moral message in the book. It was promising at first, but left me very disapointed. I highly recomend not reading this book.

but not always a good book. The room, has an interesting premise, maybe for a short story. But for a novel it gets tiring quick. It doesn't seem to have much of a point other than to offer up two different fantasies of an inmate: one very violent and disturbing, then other benevolent. Whatever, they both get old. Some of the writing is the most disturbing I've ever read, which is fine, if it has a point. I don't believe it does. I have read two other Selby books, Last Exit and Requiem.. both are far superior to Room, Requiem is a masterpiece! So if you haven't read any selby go to one of those two first.

On the one hand this book does a pretty good job delving into the tedium that a prisoner must experience and it does a pretty good job exploring in a realistic manner the fantasies in which a criminal pyschopathic personality might engage. But to tell the truth, I got bored with the book. Maybe that's one of the points--incarceration in not an exciting thing.

Basically, the main character, the prisoner, engages in two alternating fantasies. In the first, he dreams about using his intellect to blow the cover off of the corrupt law enforcement system. In his mind he becomes the hero of the oppressed and the hero of reformers making it all the way to capital hill to regale the senate with his misfortunes. I don't doubt that many criminals engage in self-deceptive ego trips, but after 10 or so pages of redundant self-aggrandizement the reader gets the idea. The second line of fantasies involves the brutal torture of the two police officers that arrested the prisoner. In his mind he dehumanizes the policemen in almost every way imaginable. Again, I don't doubt that many convicts engage in this manner of perverse self-pleasure, but it does get somewhat monotonous as every last detail of the gruesome fantasies are laid out time and time again.

This was my first Selby book and it is obvious that he is a talented writer. I am going to give his other books a try.