This one is a classic. It has a perfect attention span for a 5-9 near old. This comes from series. All of these books they put out are awesome! I wish they were back in print and publish some new ones. They just don't make books like this anymore.

I had this book when I was little and I used to beg my mom to read it to me over and over. I loved it. It got me interested in science and research. It is at least partially due to this book that I entered college as a biology major. Highly recommended- I wish it was still in print.

My brothers and I grew up with the Value Books series, and this was one of our favorites.My mother still has the full set, but now my brothers and I are starting our own families and would love to each have a set. If you can get ahold of copies, get them. The lessons they teach are invaluable - I would reccomend them to any parent and for any child.

Literacy Through Literature provides some of the most useful techniques to teach students Reading, whether they are struggling with decoding or need to improve their comprehension skills. The techniques involve many easy to prepare lessons and visuals on sequence of events, character and plot development, and inference skills. The book is compact, but full of loads of strategies. I have not encountered any other book like it. Great for any teacher looking for fresh ways to keep students excited about Reading. Definitely a must for new teachers who are looking for activities that will ensure successful learning for all their students in all languages.

Gives a very clear view of the happenings during partition of India. For me this book also put into perspective the role played by major players like Gandhi, Nehru, Jinha, Patel, Mountbatten etc. and their interpersonal relationships and politics.

Move over, Paul Bunyan, there's a new tall-tale hero in town.

Well, not exactly a new hero.

In the New York City of the 1840s lived a legendary firefighter named Mose Humphreys. Standing eight feet tall, with "hands as big as Virginia hams," he fought fires all around the great city, striding towards danger with his flaming red hair under his stovepipe hat. Whether rescuing babies from flaming tenements or bankers from burning hotels, Mose was beloved by all New Yorkers for his bravery and selflessness.

Mary Pope Osborne's story, in true American folktale tradition, renders a loving portrait of a man who symbolizes all that we respect and admire in firefighters: courage, willing sacrifice, tireless service to others. These traits were never so dramatically demonstrated as they were on the morning of September 11, 2001, and the story is a fitting tribute to the 343 New York City firefighters lost on that tragic day.

Though dedicated to the memory of modern firefighters, the gritty tones of Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher's illustrations remind us that this is also a tale about firefighting in a city overcrowded with wood-framed buildings and illuminated by oil lamps, when water had to be physically pumped out of tank trucks with enough force to reach the upper floors of very modest buildings, and when firemen needed the strength to carry grown adults rung by rung down wooden ladders. The nineteenth century was a time when fire was a very real possibility, not an unfortunate occurrence that happens to others and played out on our TV screens.

Together, the text and illustrations bring Mose Humphreys to life brilliantly, and make him a potent symbol of the strength, valor, and sacrifice of all firefighters--in New York City and around the world...

I found this book at my 9 year old daughter's school bookfare. While she no longer reads picture books, I am enthralled by them and this one caught my eye. Like another reviewer, I had trouble choking back tears as I read the tale of Mose Humphrey's firefighting in the late 1800's of NYC. I bought the book and passed it on to a gentleman who is a volunteer firefighter, ems worker and full time police officer for his two young sons. A work of art, both with its sparse, yet moving prose, and beautiful paintings. Recommended highly for ages 4-7.

"New York's Bravest" combines text by Mary Pope Osborne with paintings by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher. The book begins with a historical note in which Osborne describes the background of her tale. In 1848, a heroic firefighter character first began appearing in stage productions. This character was based on a real-life New York City firefighter named Mose Humphreys. In 1915, historian Herbert Asbury included some Mose stories in two collections of stories about old New York. As Osborne observes, firefighter Mose is "America's first urban folk hero."

Osborne's story takes place in a past era where newsboys sold papers for a penny each. The story's hero is Mose, an eight foot tall firefighter with superhuman strength. Sample text: "'Come on boys!' said Mose. Mose was the most famous firefighter in New York City."

The story is well enhanced by colorful illustrations that are full of great details. There are some exciting firefighting scenes, as well as some nice pictures of Mose engaged in less dangerous pursuits (such as eating a hearty meal).

The book has the following dedication: "To the memory of the 343 New York City firefighters who gave their lives to save others on September 11, 2001." It's a beautiful tribute that I recommend to readers of all ages.

With the bookstores bulging with titles on Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, its about time that someone covered the modest master of the modern jazz trombone, J. J. Johnson. The discography alone is fascinating, listing numerous early Benny Carter and Count Basie sessions that J. J. played on. The only quibble on the discography is the scant information on the rare, recorded in the U. S., only released in Japan, album with Kai Winding called Stonebones. That and the numerous later listings of private audience tapes that most of us have never had the opportunity to hear.

All of J. J.'s long career is here. The early years as the prototype bop trombonist, his association with Kai Winding, his time in the Hollywood studios as a composer for TV and film. There is even a description of J. J.'s home studio and his personal collection of sheet music and records.

You can also find transcribed J. J. solos and excerpts from his original compositions throughout the book.

A pricey book, but well worth it for aficionados of jazz trombone or the history of jazz.

The in depth look at JJ's Hollywood career and his work with Q. Jones and I. Hayes is amazing and seldom mentioned outside of this book. Every aspect of this bio of the greatest jazz trombonist ever is fantastic.

Treffousse's look at the 17th President of the United States is a fair and well-balanced look at this driven politician. The reader will be left with little doubt that Johnson's racism was his biggest flaw in both his political and personal life. The impeachment is featured but does not dominate the book as it should not.

While the "personal" Johnson is given adequate attention, this book works so well because it concentrates on the political realm, a rarity in these days of social history and psychoanalytical treatises. Of course, the impeachment trial is of primary interest, but the focus on Johnson's overwhelming ambition was appreciated as well. Despite his stubborn attitude, inflexibility, and undeniable racism, Johnson was a committed Jacksonian and sought throughout his political life to promote policies friendly to his agrarian philosophy. Because his presidency represented a key transition in American history (a definite weakening of the Executive until TR as well as a regrettable loss of Reconstruction opportunities), Johnson is, with Polk, Lincoln, and Jackson, one of the key figures of the 19th century. Overall, a solid book worthy of a wide readership.

I found this book was fair to Johnson, despite the author's reputation as friendly to the Radical Republicans. I found myself believing that the failure of the Senate to impeach Johnson was a good thing, since he obviously was not guilty of an impeachable offense--even as our current president was not. Johnson was actually an able politician and a good President, but his bias against blacks caused him to err grievously in regard to them.

This contains one of Althusser's late writings on materialism, which might be read profitably alongside "Machiavelli and Us". The train metaphor is especially useful, and Althusser here rejects -- as he did increasingly after 1967 -- any idea of materialism as a philosophy of the primacy of matter over ideas, and grounds it in the thesis of the materiality of ideology, or that "the imaginary exists only in its effects" ... As far as the claims made by Althusser regarding his abilities and knowledge in the text, or his criticisms of his books, these need to be read in light of his quest of self-annihilation, and this genre of autobiography -- and the authority which readers conventionally regard it to have regarding the 'truth' -- provides the best means of achieving that end. Warren Montag's essay on the autobiography, which can be found in Callari, Cullenberg & Biewener (eds), "Marxism in the Postmodern Age" (1992) is essential reading for anyone tempted to take Althusser's confessions at face value.

A review in New Republic by Tony Judt of Althusser's posthumous The Future Lasts Forever implements what might be called the standard reactionary reading of that "curious" autobiographical document. Judt was, at least initially, correct in refusing to read the text as a "Rousseau-like confession", although he claims, and not incidentally, that Althusser would have us read it as such. Curiously enough, however, Althusser cites the exact reason as Judt for encouraging readers to repress the inclination to read the memoir as his Rousseaudian "Confession": he is simply not up to the challenge, at least in the sense that he has no pretensions concerning originality and philosophical profundity. Rather than Rousseau, Althusser sounds more like a victim of a Stalinist inquisition: all he has to do is to confess his guilt, explain in vulgar psychologistic terms his aberrant psychoanalytic constitution. He would have been wise to adopt the Deleuzian stance of, "I have nothing to admit" - who cares if Althusser only studied Vol. 1 of Das Kapital? This would be the effective hystericization of Judt's position in his review. Thus, it is not that he overidentifies with Althusser, takes him too literally, but that he does not identify with him enough - that is, we must take Althusser at his word when he says, "Alas, I am no Rousseau".

I like Althusser. He was the first to try to fit the esoteric Heidegger, as presented by Jean Hyppolite in Logic and Existence, together with Marx. There had been attempts (by Sartre and Henri Lefebvre) to put the explicit Heidegger together with Marx, but no one was buying it, since the German thinker disavowed humanism. Hence Althusser's rather bizarre (to contemporary eyes at least) claim that you need to READ Marx correctly, that is find all the esoteric truths in Capital, to have a revolution.

Althusser was a depressive all his life. His illness prevented him from entering into les evenements of 1968, where he might have actually done some good. But he was also a manic. His books have the sort of obsessive compulsive features you only find with people on amphetimines. Those who say that this memoir is just a depressive trying to commit suicide aren't taking Althusser as he was diagnosed. He was also capable of limitless affirmation of life.

And we find Althusser making some pretty huge affirmations in this book. He liked the USSR in the post-Stalin era. Since the people of Russia are so much worse off under the system that they have now (arguably the world is, both for their infamous Mafia and the lack of a check on US hegemony), this is probably not a bad thing. His argument as to how the people of the USSR really were free in every way except politics is specious (it's sort of like saying the people of the USSR were free in every way except the one that counts), but its very speciousness smacks of a manic affirmation.

He also says that he never had sex until he was 29. This apparently was because he was disgusted with sex. He says something like "We have bodies! And they have sex organs!" He went on to be quite the ladies man, even conquering women in front of his wife. Which means that he affirmed, like a good Deleuzian, life in all its ugly glory.

Then there's his last work on Machiavelli. Or is it his last work on himself? Machiavelli formalized the relations between king, nobility and people. Just as Althusser formalized Marx's discussions of class relations and structures in Reading Capital. The fact that he's pulled this off so convincingly in Machiavelli and Us, and the fact that the people who have made a career out of riding on his coattails totally missed it, implies to me that he successfully became-other/imperceptible. In the same way that both Bataille and Sartre missed the point of Genet means that Genet did successfully become-other (as per Derrida's Glas).

As a last point to consider, for those who see this book as just the sorry chronicle of someone who had better shut up before he gives the entire game away, look at the books he did claim to read. He read all three volumes of Marx's Theories of Surplus Value. I know of no one else who can make that claim. I barely made it half way through the Grundrisse before I gave up. Since he's so humble about his actual reading of Capital (didn't get past the first volume and didn't get the theory of fetishism in the first 50 pages), he probably really did read TSV.

It's true that after this book Althusser was shunned by French intellectuals. It was, as a French student of Badiou wrote, a form of social suicide. BUT that wasn't what Althusser intended to do with this book. Or not only that.

If you're a Marxist and you liked Althusser, you can always enjoy Etienne Balibar who has at last fitted together the esoteric Heidegger with Marx in his Marxism and Philosophy. That was what dear old crazy Louis was trying to do all along.

This well-told saga, chock-full of rich description of its time period, takes the reader on an adventure of surprises at every turn. Based on historical truth, folk tales, and legends, this story of historical fiction mystifies and spurns the reader. For me, a Norwegian through and through, the best part of reading this book was thinking about the possibility of my husband's family (true Irishmen and women and, oh, so proud of it!) possibly being "tainted" with the blood of the Scandinavian Vikings, whom they despised all these years! Seeing the author's name also encouraged me to begin working on my family tree.

This was an excellent read. Not something you're going to plow through in a couple of days. I'm near the end now, and have been "digesting" this book over the course of several weeks.

The photographs are excellent-some of the best work I've seen in compilation form. Haven't read Larry Burrows yet, but that's on the list. The distraction comes that when you've been inundated with one photographic history, they all become somewhat similar. Carnage on a grand scale, big machines, weapons, sad people and faces, etc. Some useful maps with photo displays.

I found that there were some inaccuracies, particlarly when I submitted this book to my professor of military history as a good read. He was in Vietnam, and immediately picked a couple of issues right off the bat, but overall thought it was a great book for the cost. Typos are a small issue, would have been worth the effort for an additional proofread for such a sturdy, big book, and sentence structure is sometimes off, making things confusing.

While this book does a good job of detailing a photograpic illustration in format by year (e.g. 1965, 66, 67, etc.) it reads a bit dry at times due to the nature of trying to cram a ton of strategic and tactical information in as simple blow by blow. For instance, unit x came from position y, and unit w, from position z, etc. It is, however, very effective in transcribing in detail the history and some of the complications surrounding the Vietnam War.

... well worth the space it takes up in my bookshelf. Don't try toting this thing around, it's massive and heavy.

James Weldon Johnson was a man of many firsts. For me, this book was also a first. It was the first time that I had ever sat down with a book and not wanted to get up. I was thoroughly captivated by this fabulous piece of African-American literature.

I thought this book was great. The writing was good and the story was good, and what else can I say? It gives you insight into life. He's a good storyteller.

Johnson's novel travels through various African-American societies (New England, Jacksonville, New York City, the Black Belt) in a story of a mulatto caught between two opposing racial identities. The novel is an epic journey (emotionally and physically) of this African-American, who is light enough to "pass" into the white American dominating the turn-of-the century. The Ex-Coloured Man's personal struggles to reconcile his true private self with his public self in a divided and prejudiced society makes this novel an emotional and enlightening read. Johnson takes up the issue of WEB DuBois's double-consciousness, and gives it life in the form of this ambivalent protagonist.