Minor Heresies, Major Departures is best summarized by Robertson Davies' back cover quote describing how Espy makes "high comedy about Presbyterian missionaries without any way jeering at their sense of dedication." These episodes from his childhood are a delight to read. He combines the truth of a child's eyes with the sarcasm of an adult as he describes events such as the battle with his sister for the longest prayer or his failure at "cementing the international bonds of love and law" during play with the cook's nephew.

This book is recommended not just to those interested in missionary work, but to anyone who enjoys travel or cross-cultural memoirs. If you are looking for an inspirational tale of missionary good deeds, however, it might not be your cup of tea.

John Espey's memoirs of his Shanghai boyhood are a finely done portrait of a moment in history. He expresses, with a wry humor, his "view of things" as a child, a view which contrasts with those of the adults around him. His disagreement with the Western perspective and Protestant missionary outlook that formed the backdrop to his life in Shanghai before WW II is recorded in civil tones; he gives people credit for good intentions and does not denigrate their sometimes misguided efforts. Espey's memories are a delightful entry into cross-cultural psychology--by one who knows what that term really means.

This book is for the serious jewelry student but even the casual reader could be caught by the amazingly beautiful jewelry in it. The collection consists of Etruscan, Greek and Roman gold jewelry reaching back to the 7th century B.C. and ending around the 3rd century A.D. The text is informative and succinct. The photos are superb. In particular, the technical virtuosity and design elegance of the ancient Etruscans are breathtaking.

This book was great. I read it 5 times in a row. I will read it again very soon!

Text book is written in user friendly wording. You are able to select sections of the book as they pertain to your individual teaching style. The student workbooks,teacher guides, suggested activities not only made my class fun but easier to maintain. I have been using this book for 8 years and was hoping for a new edition. Highly recommened!!

Genealogical Data on Burleson Family, Gives data on the migration of the Family from N.C. to Tenn.,to Georga ,to Alabama and to Texas, Biographacal data on General Edward Burleson Early life, Indian Troubles, Mexico, Gen. Burleson Captures The Alamo from the mexicans, Ordered out of the area to train troops, Later a Sen. in the Republic of Texas , President Pro tem of Texas. Stories, Data, Family history, The History of Texas is in here. A great read.

Pekka Ervast was a brilliant mystic from Finland who interpreted the Finnish National Epic, the Kalevala, with the "key" of theosophy. His book explains the adventures of the Kalevala's three heroes (who represent emotion, intellect, and will) as windows into the evolutionary struggle of human beings. Integrating these three forces is a challenging process, and their dynamic interplay and ultimate resolution is, amazingly, what we see within the Kalevala if we "read between the lines" with Ervast. There are hundreds of lines of Kalevala poetry in the book, drawing from Eino Friberg's 1988 translation. The deep wellspring of Finnish myth, touching such topics as shamanism, magic, astronomy, cosmology, and wedding rituals, is only recently becoming widely known outside of Finland. This first English translation of Ervast's book is a unique and valuable contribution to understanding the deep wisdom of the ancient Finns. I served as editor on the project and wrote the Introduction for it, and when in 1994 I first received a response from Finland regarding the possibility of translating Ervast's work, I had the sure feeling that the Key to the Kalevala's time had come.

My husband was loaned "left behind" and recommend I read it, but, I never got around to it. He really enjoyed reading it. A relitive had loaned him a few of the other books in the series to read and one day, having nothing better to do, I started reading book 2, I couldn't put it down!! I then went out and bought "Left Behind"(book one) and was glad I started with book 2. I love the series!! I never read, I can never finish any book. I found myself rushing out to buy every next book in the series. I finished all 9 books(thus far)in the series in just 3 weeks!!! I would highly recommend this book to eveyone.

'Seizing the New Day' is a wonderful book about enslaved southerners of Charleston, South Carolina freeing themselves. They are 'seizing the new day,' no gifts are discussed here. They are a somewhat surly group, quick to anger, but careful to keep long term goals in mind. They are still a surly group at the book's end, but they have made a lot of progress.

The focus is very narrow, but richly detailed. We only follow the events in Charleston. Who lived next to whom? What church did they go to? What school did they attend? Who did they marry?

This is a story of the 'Civil War.' Told from the street level of Charleston between 1850 and 1870, it twists the 'accepted story' presented by Hollywood. I'm used to the Civil War starting with the shelling of Fort Sumter and ending with Lee's surrender at Appomattox. This version of the 'Civil War' starts with the Nat Turner rebellion and ends with the 15th amendment. Instead of the great establishment leaders like Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln, this war is fought by people that won't abide with bondage. It is a war between slave owners and those they seek to dominate.

There is no talk of a Northern Army 'freeing' people, the most prominent army unit mentioned is the 21st United States Colored Troops. The mayor of Charleston surrendered the city to them on February 18, 1865.

The book is organized into 7 chapters. The first two and last are narrative, the war story. Chapters 3 through 6 develop sub themes regarding how the winners of the war (remember, the Mayor surrendered to colored troops) went about establishing economic, educational and community institutions for 'the New Day.'

The book is careful to bolster its case by retelling hundreds of stories pulled from contemporary sources; autobiographies, newspapers, government documents, etc. Anyone writing a civil war film script would find this book a welcome source of authentic street scenes.

Despite the bold title, the notion of 'seizing liberty' is rather hidden in the multitude of individual stories recounted here. It's easy to read the book as a colorful recap of many small and disconnected efforts. I suspect this reflects the author's desire to maintain academic respectability. The story about Lee and Grant is, after all, the accepted version.

This book is basically a manual for Unicode 3.0. It is not a light read but well worth the price and then some just for the glyphs from all of the various scripts that Unicode supports.

At 1040 large (8.5 x 11) pages it is the ultimate guide to unicode. With information on scripts and glyphs I had no idea even existed.

However if you are just getting started with Unicode I would recomend you get Unicode a Primer written by Tony Graham from M&T books. If you understand or feel you are starting to understand Unicode then The Unicode Standard Version 3.0 is the best comprehensive reference on the subject out today.

Consider it an overview of the developing UNICODE standard. As such, it will serve the engineer working on software in English and many other European countries rather well. It will be a good _starting_ _point_ for engineers developing software for other languages.

This book is essential for software engineers, at least for the next ten years or so. All programmers should understand characters, and UNICODE is the best we have for now. Even if you don't need it in your personal library, you need it in your company or school library.

The standard is flawed, as all real standards are, but it is a functioning standard, and it should be sufficient for many purposes for the near future.

The book itself is fairly well laid out, contains an introduction to character handling problems and methods for most of the major languages in use in our present world as well as tables of basic images for all code points. Be aware that these are _only_ basic images. For most internationalization purposes, be prepared for more research. (And please share your results.)

**** Finally, UNICODE is _not_ a 16 bit code. ****

(This is well explained in the book.) It just turned out that there really are over 50,000 Han characters. (Mojikyo records more than 90,000.) UNICODE can be encoded in an eight-bit or 16-bit expanding method or a 32-bit non-expanding method. The expanding methods can be _cleanly_ parsed, frontwards, backwards, and from the middle, which is a significant improvement over previous methods.

Some of the material in the book is available at the UNICODE consortium's site, but the book is easier to read anyway. One complaint I have about the included CD is that the music track gets in the way of reading the transform files on my iBook.

This is not just a reference for computer people, but for anyone interested in alphabets, symbols and character sets.

Central to the book, taking up the larger part of it, are the tables of the characters themselves, printed large with annotations and cross-references. If you enjoy the lure of strange symbols and curious writing systems then browsing these will occupy delightful hours.

For the Latin alphabet alone there are pages of accented letters and extended Latin alphabet characters used in particular languages or places or traditions: Pan-Turkic "oi", African clicks and other African sounds, obsolete letters from Old English and Old Norse, an "ou" digraph used only in Huron/Algonquin languages in Quebec, and many others, particularly those used for phonetic/phonemic transcriptions.

The Greek character set includes archaic letters and additional letters used in Coptic.

Character sets carried over from previous editions with additions and corrections are Cyrillic (with many national characters), Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, Arabic (again many national and dialect characters), the most common Hindu scripts (Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam), Tibetan, Thai, Lao, Hangul, Bopomofo, Japanese Katakana and Hiragana, capped by the enormous Han character set containing over 27,000 of the most commonly used ideographs in Chinese/Japanese/Korean writing. Then there are the symbols: mathematical/logical (including lots of arrows), technical, geometrical, and pictographic. You'll find astrological/zodiacal signs, chess pieces, I-Ching trigrams, Roman numerals not commonly known, and much more.

Scripts appearing for the first time this release are Syriac, Ethiopic, Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Cherookee, Runes, Ogham, Yi, Mongolian, Sinhala, Thaana, Khmer, Myanmar, complete Braille patterns, and keyboard character sets. And yes, there are public domain/shareware fonts available on the web that support these with their new Unicode values.

There are very good (and not always brief) descriptions of the various scripts and of the special symbol sets. Rounding out the book are some involved, turgid (necessarily so) technical articles on composition, character properties, implementation guidelines, and combining characters, providing rules to use the character properties tables on the CD that accompanies the book. After all, this is the complete official, definitive Unicode standard.

Of course this version, 3.0, is already out-of-date. But updates and corrections are easily available from the official Unicode website where data for 3.1 Beta appears as I write this. My book bulges with interleaved additions and changes. And that's very good. Many standards have died or been superceded because the organizations behind them did not keep up with users' needs or the information was not easily accessible.

Caveats?

The notes on actual uses of the characters could be more extensive, particularly on Latin extended characters. More variants of some glyphs should be shown, as in previous editions, if only in the notations.

Some character names are clumsy or inaccurate (occasionly noted in the book), because of necessity to be compatible with ISO/IEC 10646 and with earlier versions of the Unicode standard. For example, many character names begin with "LEFT" rather than "OPENING" or "RIGHT" rather than "CLOSING" though the same character code is to be used for a mirrored version of the character in right-to-left scripts where "LEFT" and "RIGHT" then become incorrect. And sample this humorous quotation from page 298: "Despite its name, U+0043 SCRIPT CAPITAL LETTER P is neither script nor capital--it is uniquely the Weierstrass elliptic function derived from a calligraphic lowercase p."

I finished it! But it took me four months. Then I got turned on to a book (I read an excerpt in a magazine) called LightShift 2000 by Ken Kalb, which I was able to read in about 2 or 3 hours. I came upon Chapter 7 called "Making Time on Planet Earth" which was an entire history of popular calendars, plus a solution to Y2K! Then the mystical Chapter 9, The Rites of Passage -- explained in 13 pages -- and took the material a step further -- everything and more I had spent four months laboring on in Mayan Cosmogenesis. I am becoming quite the expert on day keeping these days. Jenkins book is a good one to read during an El Nino winter in the Pacific Northwest.

In Maya Cosmogenesis 2012, author John Major Jenkins has combined his gift for incisive, mythic and symbolic interpretation with rigorous research, to reveal the Mayan calendar as a world cosmology and spiritual philosophy, firmly grounded in precise observations of celestial patterns and rhythms. According to Jenkins' in depth yet accessible and often poetic analysis, the Maya had reconciled a number of planetary and sidereal cycles to accurately define the passage of our earth and solar system, as it moves through millennia, in and out of alignment with the galactical core and equator. This vast, celestial conjunction, so central to the Mayan sages and astronomers, holds profound transformative implications for individuals and civilization today.

The Earth spins on an axis. Like everything else that spins, it wobbles. That wobble is technically called precession, and it explains why Earthlings have seen the sun rise against different constellations over the centuries. In his latest book, Maya Cosmogenesis 2012: The True Meaning of the Maya Calendar End-Date, John Major Jenkins explains how the Maya mapped the movements of the Earth, including precession, and incorporated their measurements into their calendars.

Jenkins, who has researched Mesoamerican cosmology and calendrics since 1986, has written five other books and numerous articles about the Maya. In Maya Cosmogenesis 2012, he ties together Mayan mythology and astronomy in a scholarly discussion of the source and meaning of "end date" indicated by the Long Count calendar.

He supports his theories with nearly 200 line drawings, and provides extensive appendices, end notes, and a comprehensive bibliography.

Each "wobble" (or precessional cycle) lasts 25,800 years. Researchers believe that the current precessional cycle will end in the year 2012. This date is known as the "End-Date" in Maya calendrics. At that time, the Earth will begin a new cycle in the opposite direction.

Jenkins says his focus is "on how the precession of the equinoxes was mapped and calibrated among the ancient civilizations." He adds that his book "is devoted to exploring the Maya's understanding of the 2012 end-date and the philosophy and cosmology that go with it. This is a book about cosmogenesis, the creation of the world. The Maya believed that the world will be reborn, in a sense 're-created,' in the year we call 2012."

What does all that mean? Will humans survive cosmogenesis? Jenkins thinks we will. He says the end-date marks the beginning of a new and better world. He believes that "what looms before us is a great opportunity for spiritual growth, both individual and planetary." Others, of course, disagree, and foresee a time of cataclysmic destruction.

Regardless of whether they see the predicted end-date as a non-event, as destructive, or as an opportunity for growth, readers will find Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 a fascinating book. Astronomers and students of cosmology and mythology will especially appreciate Jenkin's research and thorough documentation.