this book gives an overview on how to understand mandalas. I was looking for a book on creating them and teach students how to create them. This book is all words no pictures so if you are a teacher and want to teach students how to develop them this is not the book. If you want to understand mandalas and how they are used, this is the right book.

I met Suzanne Fincher at a conference sponsored by Journey into Wholeness some fifteen years ago. I did not know it but I was in the first round of a fight for life: midlife crisis. My old life was crumbling before my eyes, and I went to Suzanne's workshop on making mandalas. We drew a circle and used crayons to just let things happen. Somehow, again without my knowing it until later, all the floating pieces of my life found a place within this circle called a mandala. It gave me a profound sense of peace, AND as I learned from Suzanne's teaching and this book, about how to work with my mandalas, they have provided me - throughout the years - a powerful vision for what is happening within me. I have shared this book with small groups and classes and people seeking wholeness and healing for many years with great blessing to each person who worked with it, and I continue to recommend it as the best single resource for mandalas, and a pivotal resource for sensing the moves of the Spirit within us. Suzanne's other book, Coloring Mandalas, is a delightful coloring book that offers many diverse models of mandalas representing places on the great round of the mandala.

One of the encouraging dimensions of regular creation of mandalas is the opportunity to see "progress" or movement within our lives when we are going through changes. I remember encouraging a friend to draw mandalas one time when they felt very alone and lost. After a couple of weeks when she thought she was going nowhere and learning nothing we sat down and compared her creations with the great round of the mandala and she and I could see her movement around the cycle, charting in a most beautiful way the progress/growth/movement within her life that she could not otherwise see, It provided a deep sense of peace and encouragement on her path.

Through the years innumerable folks have found a similar vision of their inner life through mandalas. May Suzanne's book help you start on that path! A small candle, some peaceful music, some crayons or colored pencils, and a piece or paper are all you need to begin.

I bought this book AFTER I had done several mandalas in an art therapy class. I was amazed by the insight of the author into art (and mandalas) as a healing & exploratory tool, and by the extra dimensions Fincher's writing helped me to find in my art work. Using her book as a guide, I'm continuing to create mandalas... and am using her research to augment the interpretation of my OTHER artworks as well. I highly reccommend this book -- especially to folks who want to access and improve upon the instinctive, artistic side of their nature but fear that they "don't know how to draw". You'll find, using Fincher's book, that sometimes simply WHERE you put a blob of color on a piece of paper, and WHAT color you're using is far more important than whether or not you've drawn something that looks "perfect" or "realistic". If you want to learn more about YOURSELF, buy this book. It's a fabulous and fun tool!

The information presented is fairly easy to understand, interesting, and seems to be thorough. So what's the problem? I have to say, I would absolutely love the textbook and its corresponding workbook if it wasn't for one truely frustrating aspect - there are way too many errors. It's incredible! Here's an example - a question regarding roman numeral conversions (pg 38 wkbk)- what is 14 in roman numerals? well, anybody who's gone through grade school could tell you it's XIV - the answer key tells you it's CIV (104!!). How about this one (pg 85 txt) - convert 1mg to g: ok, i'm thinking - DUH - .001g - correct answer, according to the answer key is .011g -- Now, this is not quite a big deal when it's very easy to tell the book is wrong (yet, again) - but then, when you get into more difficult calculations and you can't trust the answer key, it becomes very frustrating. When you take into account the fact that you've spent over $60 for the text and workbook and you can't count on the information to be correct it becomes enraging. There are also a plethora of idiotic typos to furthur insult you for sending these people your money. Example (pg 108 txt) convert 120 mcg to mg - answer according to the key: 120 mcg = 0.12 mcg - that's 0.12 MCG not MG. Or, how about his - convert 50% to a decimal. Answer according to the key: 50/100. Now, the last time I checked that was something called a fraction - a decimal looked more like this: .50 - This isn't even the tip of the iceberg. I just have one question for Morton Publishing Co...Do you guys happen to employ anyone there called an EDITOR? I just hope to God you all don't have anything to do with the answer keys the PTCB is holding in their possession. If you do, I quit now.

If you have never worked in a pharmacy before and want to pass the pharmacy technnician certification exam, then you need more than just a certification review book. You will also need a textbook that explains comprehensively pharmacy laws and the operating procedures of a typical pharmacy. Because it isn't a certification review, be aware that it doesn't have enough practice problems. Overall, it is an excellent textbook to use with a workbook.

This wonderful book combines text and visuals to provide the most complete Pharmacy Technician book ever written. The authors of this book have done an outstanding job in bringing us an easy to read, easy to understand book on this subject. Take it from me a Pharmacy Technician student if you buy only one book BUY THIS ONE !!

Dr. Buckingham, the nations leading authority on hopice care, has written the most practical book yet on the hopice movement and philosophies in the world today.

This book is a must read for all those involved with hopice, either as a patient, family member or hopice health care professional.

As a Medical Director of a hospice, i can honestly say that Dr.Buckinghams book is a maginicient addition ti the existing literature.

I am requesting that all our nurses and volunteers read this book.

This book is the best general overview of hopice in this country.

Colin Rollins MD

Dr. Buckingham has written the best general overview of hospice care in america. this book is perfct for the lay audience as well as the practicing health care professional.

If anyone is interested in volunteering for a hospice program than this book must be the bible of understanding the history and reasons for the existance of such a fine compassionate program.

Dr. Buckingham has written other books on hospice care. This is his best book yet.

A must read for all those considering hospice care for their loved one or friend.

This book is NOT a companion to the box set recordings that feature all of Johnson's songs and alternate takes. This book has a partial arrangement every song, but not every take. The arrangements are not complete, and varies from song to song.

There is not much guidance on playing, just the transcriptions. This may leave many people puzzled about how to approach the tunes, especially with using a slide and the alternate tunings and fingerings.

Take a look at some of the other books available. Robert Johnson: The New Transcriptions is a much more complete effort, with accurate tunings and capo positions. Robert Johnson: At the Crossroads is a prior editon of the same book, and may be found a little cheaper.

A couple of words on the reviews below: this edition DOES indicate the tunings each song is played in, and in the tablature, indicates the exact voicings as well. OK, the five-line musical notation might not, but if you're reading that, you're not a real bluesman in the first place - everyone knows bluesmen don't read music.

But seriously, on that point, Robert Johnson isn't meant to be played note perfectly - if you listen to his own recordings, you'll see he didn't play it the same way twice himself. So what this book gives, a pretty accurate verse and chorus from each of his songs, should be more than enough to get you on your way.

And if it isn't - if you don't immediately feel imbued with the spirit of the great blues masters, then here's what you do - to hell (ahem) with a note perfect trascription: just head down them cross roads at midnight...

Woody Mann does his usual fine job here as he teaches aspiring guitarists to play in the style of the blues master Robert Johnson. Not for beginners, but more experienced players will learn a great deal from these well-notated transcripts.

You should buy this book for the information in it. It's a nice tour through the RAA, going through DBI, the various XML processors, XMLRPC/SOAP, Tk/GTK, and other packages that make you want to use Ruby for *everything* ;).

But don't buy it for the writing. It's excessively verbose (do I really need a walk-through of the install process for every package? come on...), is typeset in an overlarge font, has too many screenshots, and has far too many spelling and usage errors.

In short, this book is a bit of a doorstop, but it does contain useful information, and I find myself referring to it often.

Astounding how one sided the flow of information is in the
computing world. Despite Japan's impeccable high tech
credentials most anglophone programmers are unfamiliar with the
Japanese approaches to software development. Shame, as Ruby,
created and widely used in Japan, suggests that there is much to
see and learn.

Ruby, as you probably know, is a particularly elegant OOP
language created in Japan by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto. Ruby is
often described as an OOP a scripting language. A debatable
description; this book shows that Ruby is a software engineering
language whose zone of applicability has as much in common with
Java or C++ as with Perl.

The ground covered here has relatively little in common with
other Ruby books. Ruby as a data processing tool or glue
language is handsomely covered in Fulton's Ruby Way cookbook and
the Pragmatic Programmer's "Programming Ruby" is more tutorial
in nature. No book for beginners, Ruby Developer's guide steers
away from there areas in to more exotic zones.

The bulk of material in the book could be described as a guided
tour through the Ruby Application Archive - a large, and at
times anarchic, zoo of contributed Ruby code.

Particularly interesting is the coverage of distributed Ruby
programming, SOAP/WebServices, Rinda - JINI's JavaSpaces for
Ruby. The various GUI toolkits are given an airing and the book
looks at techniques for writing C extensions to the language.

The chapter on XML covers all the major parsers including Sean
Russell's divine REXML package. Sadly XSLT processing gets only
a page and a half of coverage, nothing to drag Python
programmers away from their current toolkit. Despite the book's
700 pages, the often wordy presentation leaves little space for
a more thorough exploration of the theme.

In the end what impresses about the Ruby Developer's Guide is
how "hot" many of the programming areas covered in this book

remain. Almost a snapshot of the Ruby mailing lists, one gets
the positive impression that the book was being updated a few
weeks before it hit the shelves.

The danger of writing a hot book of course is that, most
probably, it will cool more rapidly than coverage of "classic"
data processing themes. Time will tell if the more experimental
areas of coverage remain as interesting over the lifetime of
this book (will Ruby still have four competing approaches to XML
parsing ?, for example). None the less, a challenging and
consistently interesting volume for intermediate to advanced
programmers.

Ruby is together with python the new star at the programming
sky. no more ugly pointers, no memory management and Ruby
has a big and powerful high level standard library.
this book has lots of useful stuff in it. I liked especially
the chapters on DBI, SOAP and Performace. The Rexml part
could have been bigger in the XML chapter, but when the book
was written Rexml was not as powerful as it is today.
If you like Ruby (and you will if you want to have fun when programming) you should buy this book. the authers really know
what the are talking about.

it can be fun but somtimes its annoying like on page 35 when you are asked to be a teacher and you have to give your students some advice so that they have a good year, but I know that I don't have the vocabulary to answer that correctly and it's not in an earlyer lesson.

I had the more fun learning French with this book than any other book I've tried. Lots of the expressions in this book are more useful than the ones in my textbook. I used some of the expressions in class and really impressed my teacher. She was amazed!

This is a fabulous reference for how Lyndon Johnson outedged Coke Stevenson for the Senator of Texas in 1948 by a mere eighty-seven votes. Had Lyndon B. Johnson not of won this election he may of never became President.

A well-written, thorough study of one of the forgotten, yet most important, moments in Texas and American politics. Kahl provides a complete story of "Landslide Lyndon's" ballot box fraud in his race for the U.S. Senate in 1948. Had Johnson lost this election, he might never have been president, and this book tells the complete story of how LB J and his cronies stole an election, then used parliamentary tricks to avoid being overturned. Mary Kahl puts the whole story together in a fascinating read. If you are a Lyndon Johnson fan, or a Lyndon Johnson critic, you have to read this story.

Much of this book contains distilled insights from the far superior _Balancing Heaven and Earth_, published last year by the same authors. That is its strength and its weakness: the insights from that book deserve further discussion shorn of biographical references, but extracted from that other book without elaboration, the insights seem anemic. The authors try to add something new by introducing a running exegesis of _King Lear_, but the result is that the book does not cohere. Insights that deserve a more thoroughgoing treatment, like the need to embrace paradox, receive short shrift. This is an odd book, with something important things to say, which have not been said entirely well.

This is a powerful book, full of concise wisdom. Rather than telling you how to interpret an idea--too many books tell you what to think--this thin volume, echoing Shakespeare's King Lear, allows you to integrate the wisdom deeply into your consciousness. What I have always marveled about Johnson's books is their ability to suggest ideas without talking down to you, evoke wisdom without hitting you over the head. Johnson lets you find your own answers to the big questions. This book points me closer to God. What more could you expect from a mere book? (Another bonus: it's inspired me to read Lear again, this time from a new perspective.)

When I started training in Family practice I searched for a large reference book to study from. I choose this text because it was written so well. The Language is direct, the explanations are clear and the advice is well founded. Now that I am in training the book is not as helpful as I hoped. Most of the time I find the treatment on any given topic too shallow for what I have to learn. I belive this is the result of a compromise between size and completness. I now wish I had saved my money and bought three textbooks - Harrison, Williams and Nelson as opposed to trying to find one book to cover all of internal medicine, obstetrics, and pediatrics.

This book is designed in a practical and understandable approach to family practice. It is an excellent text and a comprehensive reference especially useful for a nurse practitioner/graduate student in family practice. Not only does it provide treatment and management of common medical conditions but also includes psychosocial aspects of caring for clients and their families.

againandagainandagain. it gets almost interesting. lovecraft's scientific story ending up with nothing much of a climax, Poe drowning in nautical technical information and fragmentary style. taine's is the most interesting one. first too little happens, then too much. could have been good, but is first too boring then too much in the overwhelming action-genre. glasby has good descriptions, but his story doesn't go anywhere. some of the other stories could have been good too. but always, something destroys. too boring, not going anywhere, lacks suspence. truly sad since many of the stories shows potential.

An excellent collection of short to medium length stories, all dealing with Antarctic expeditions and what the adventurers found (but wish they hadn't).

I only gave this book three stars because of the horrible proof-reading. It appeared as if the original documents had been scanned in and run through OCR software without a human bothering to check the results. Some examples: in one story, Tekeli-li is printed T>k>li-li; in one story all instances of "he" are printed as "be".

Other than that, I would recommend this collection to anyone interested in weird fiction set in Antarctica.

From the ends of the Earth come stories of adventure and really BAD things. Start off with a sonnet by Lovecraft himself, called, 'Antarktos', then on to the first course with 'The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket' by Edgar Allan Poe, with a follw-up of excerpts by Jules Vern's called 'The Sphinx of the Ice Fields'. This is followed by the not-so-well-known 'The Greatest Adventure' by John Taine. 'At The Mountains of Maddness' by H.P. Lovecraft is served next, the main course, followed by 'The Tomb of the Old Ones' by Colin Wilson. Arthur C. Clarke cooks up a fine story in 'At the Mountains of Murkiness' and what meal would be complete without 'The Thing From Another World' by John W. Campbell Jr.? We finish off our fine dining with 'The Brooding City' by John S. Glasby and 'The Dreaming City' by Roger Johnson. Full yet?