IMHO, A Path in the Garden is an excellent book of haiku. Christopher Herold takes the reader on a wonderful journey of brief yet poignant moments in time. Several of the poems in this book reminded me of some of my experiences as a youth growing up on a tobacco farm. I was too young to appreciate my time exploring nature; Christopher helped me remember.

Christopher Herold brings a rare elegance to a spare and demanding verse form. Come absorb yourself in a vibrant world of dragonflies, stone lanterns, overgrown footbridges, whistling tea kettles, mysterious purple flowers, curshed mint, campfire smoke, empty snail shells, mountain roses, thin shadows, and shooting stars. Like the many simple wonders they celebrate, these reflective little poems nourish the soul!

Christopher Herold's deeply satisfying poems affirm our connection with nature, as we share the author's joy in his own interrelationship with the natural world. This is a treasured path delighted readers will want to travel many times.

Enigmatic and sublime. This stark noirish nightmare is as good as they get. Baer makes what almost could be called a surrealist hardboiled novel. Without lossing control of the narrative, Baer does a superb job crossing the border between naturalist crime writing and heady phantasmagoria. Phineas Poe is one of the most interesting, beguiling anti-heros within the noir genre, a tight lipped drugged out sam spade caught up in a underground world of would be vampires.

In Penny Dreadful, Mr. Baer switches from smartly noir to sweetly nasty as we continue to follow along in the dreamsteps of the excellent Phineas Poe. This work ups the complexity quotient on Kiss Me, Judas, sending, as it does, the readers' minds spinning off into a glittering p.o.v. mosaic that tips it hat to the signal work of a certain J. Joyce. One can only hope that the third installment of the remarkable Poe Trilogy will not be too long in coming.

Just finished Penny Dreadful. Awesome! There were some parts that I questioned and I won't discuss them b/c I don't want to give anything away. I love the way Baer writes Poe. If you liked, Kiss Me, Judas...you'll love Penny. Can't wait for the next book and hoping it won't be the last!

This was a great referance tool for most of the abbreviations used in aviation... only dissapointment was that there were no airport codes in the book!

This book has helped me win many beers on several overnights by stumping the "Most Experienced" pilots online. Keep 'em coming!! I'm looking forward to future editions.

Finally a small reference guide with thousands of aviation abbreviations.

Now I can learn and impress my "expert" friends with my new knowledge. The terms PAPI and CAVU for example, were easily deciphered by me recently when someone asked what the exact meanings were. Also, the weather section is full of abreviations that I now can understand pronto. I would recommend this book for any person in aviation.

Shawn Christopher Shea does not quite measure up to Irwin Yalom as a poet/philosopher in the realm of psychiatry and mental health. And yet, like Dr. Yalom, the master of group psychotherapy, Dr. Shea is very good in his own published niche, the art and science of psychiatric assessment. Unlike Yalom's specialty, Shea's work contains the elements of life and death. A superficial or faulty diagnosis can result at worst in suicide, homicide, or fatal medication reaction. Thus, while Shea is a funny and thoughtful man in his own right, his book is of necessity grave. Coupled with thoroughness, this gravity makes the work a standard referral source that should enjoy a long shelf life.

It is hard to imagine a better work than Shea's for psychiatric orientation. His working setting appears to be the emergency clinic of a major hospital in which the assessor must do a lot of things in a sixty minute time frame, though Part I [pp. 3-224] deals with such issues as subtle nonverbal behavior that seem more accessible in a leisured, office setting. With a somewhat undisguised distaste for present managed care practices, Shea assumes the worst of all worlds as to working conditions: a cold client, resistance, multiple diagnoses, soft signs, need for medication and follow-up treatment, and development of a working relationship or engagement with the client-all inside of sixty minutes and assuming the assessor has leisure to dictate later in the day.

There are several features of his teaching style that merit attention. The first is adherence to the DSM-IV. The publishers of this work purchased to right to reproduce those familiar "symptom boxes" verbatim and incorporate them into the text at appropriate points. The ease of use of these cross references in the text, and the author's lucid commentary on how to verbally elicit indications of the symptomatology call for special note. Second, Shea is a master of risk management. He leaves no stones unturned in his interviews in his efforts to determine suicidal or homicidal risk; or, in another vein, he garners from clients a near exact tally of daily drinking. Since reading the work, I have found myself asking patients about suicide as often as three different times in an interview, in various guises. [Shea 's "Far Side" sense of humor comes to the fore in his treatment of suicidal assessments; noting that psychiatrists and mental health professionals are all too human, he observes that assessors are less likely to probe for suicide and severe psychotic warnings at the end of their work shifts.]

A third characteristic worth noting is Shea's attention to the "soft signs" of an emerging psychosis. It occurred to me that, given the pressure of time upon psychiatrists, the non-physician practitioner [eg. psychotherapist, social worker] might actually have more exposure to the little indicators and trends than their harried colleagues: preoccupation with an incident in the distant past, infrequent loosenings of thought associations, inappropriate affect, etc. [p. 317]. This is an excellent work for non-physician providers who wish to collaborate with psychiatrists more succinctly and Shea's reflections upon the writing of clinical notes bears special attention.

As this is a second edition of an original work, there are a few additions that might prove valuable in future editions. One is an acknowledgment that many [most?] psychiatric evaluations for diagnosis and medication are not being done by psychiatrists. In my own setting, the client's primary care physician is the gatekeeper, and one can assume reasonably competent risk management skills among MD's in regular practice. But as one progresses further down the medical service food chain, it is not unusual to see bachelor's level personnel in public receiving facilities performing the very duties outlined by Dr. Shea in this text. As state funding of services becomes more acute, there will no doubt continue to be a "dumbing down" trend, with less qualified personnel being authorized to perform more delicate psychological services, such as assessments. Consequently, although Dr. Shea's present work is unquestionably thorough, it may be that future editions will need to assume less technical background and include more basic information, given that his target audience is the entire mental health community.

Along these lines, the construct of this work assumes a one-hour psychiatric assessment. One wonders if this is an optimistic time frame. In this corner of Florida, a 30-minute office assessment is the gold card of psychiatric care among private practitioners, Medicaid, and the better health care plans. The hour assessment appears to be the domain of the inpatient residential/involuntary population, sort of a closing of the barn door after the horses have gone round the bend. If indeed one must assess in a thirty-minute window, it would be interesting to get Dr. Shea's pecking order of urgencies from those cited in this work. But I don't want to be the one to ask him.

Easy to read, written in a interesting format with a dramatic and poetic flare! However, the content of this book is invaluable to anyone performing intake and inital assessments. Shea breaks down the interview into understandable and logical components, and discusses methods and techniques to fully engage interviewees. If you haven't heard fabout Facilic's get this book and learn how this linguistic study of conversation can help you understand your own strengths and weaknesses in interviewing.

As a MSW student this book explained concepts and theories that was easy to read and understand. It displayed through variouss examples how to conduct and critic interviewing skills. The only book of this kind that I have read every page.

Christopher Harding's "The Reindeer Boy" is so uplifting, easy to read, and reveals through a delightful story the inner journey of someone who has found his oneness with Spirit. A wonderful book to read for the holidays or anytime!

Christopher Harding's "The Reindeer Boy" entrances us with engaging characters and a charming story. The tale challenges us to become whole, to accept and reunite our disowned and buried parts, to become the deep-rooted hero in our own life story.

(Stephen Paul, author of "Illuminations - Visions for Change, Growth, and Self Acceptance")

Christopher Harding has done a masterful job of taking us on a journey into ourselves; into facing our deepest fears so as to free us to discover who we really are.

(Bill Guillory, Ph.D. author of "Spirituality in the Workplace")

In "Sauron Defeated", Christopher Tolkien brings to a close "The History of The Lord of the Rings", a subset within his "The History of Middle Earth". Like the previous three volumes in this series, Christopher traces the development of his father's thought as the final chapters of The Lord of the Rings are written. Of special interest are the early conceptions of "The Scouring of the Shire" and the two versions of the never-published "Epilogue". The Epilogue was, to me, particularly touching, as it involved Sam, now a middle-aged hobbit with a houseful of kids, reading to his family and keeping the Story alive.

HOWEVER, the above material, while unable to fit into the previous volume (The War of the Ring), was not enough to warrent a volume all by itself. So Christopher has also included "The Notion Club Papers" -- a space/time/dream travel story, written at the same time as The Lord of the Rings was being developed. The story itself involves Numenor -- Tolkien's telling of the Atlantis saga. Of particular interest to CS Lewis fans, "The Notion Club Papers" purports to be a discussion of (among other things) Lewis' own space travel fiction, penned in the late 30's and early 40's. It's a shame that this story was never brought to completion -- I'm finding the ideas it expresses to be quite interesting.

Again, 5 stars, both for the Master, and for the tireless work of Christopher.

In the ninth volume of The History of Middle Earth and the last dealing with LOTR Christopher Tolkien gives us not only the original ending to Tolien's epic trilogy, but also an essay called the Notion Club Papers, an edition of the Drowning Of Anadune, and information on Adunaic which was one of Tolkien's invented languages. I liked this book very much even though the Notion Club was hard to read at times. Thankfully, this is the last edition dealing with LOTR and Tolkien soon turns again to his father's greatest work, The Silmarillion. I recommend this book to any Tolkien fan.

The title of this book should say it all. Certainly a book designed for die-hard Tolkien fans, 'Sauron Defeated' hardly represents interesting reading for people unfamiliar with the Lord of the Rings series. That said, the thick volume is still essential for anyone who has read the previous three chapters of the History. Although some parts of 'Sauron Defeated' are better off left out in its next edition, it presents enough interesting information in its 482 pages to make it a worthwhile (not to mention impressive) presence in your Tolkien library.

The report should be in every home and be read .This book is actually an official document reprinted word for word .An objective , honest analysis of this material would cause a sea change in public opinion reguarding this subject.This bipartisian effort is to be commended.As an engineer and a serious investigator of this subject for over two years I could not recommend this book more highly.This is not a laborious read.It presents the material in a well organised and cogent manner and many readers will have trouble putting this down.Get this book.

After a year of study and hearings, this report by US Senate is the most authoritative statement of the Y2k issue available. These Senators have nothing to gain by overstating the issue, and risk looking silly in a few months if they have overstated it. This report shows where we stood as of February 1999. The informed facts present a far different picture than most expect. This is very worth reading, especially the beginning and end. (Some of the summaries of witness testimony can perhaps be skipped.) The report covers Y2k in utilities, transportation, medicine, etc. Determining why this information was not reported more widely by the media will occupy historians for years, if any of the risks presented by Y2k come to fruition.

I'm serious - you should get this book just so you can read the forward by - get this - GARY NORTH himself! He did a mean-spirited thing (grin): he quoted Senator Bennett's 1998 statements verbatim. That these do not match the toned-down report is obvious to anyone who reads both... and now you can read both.

I read Dream Parlor first and was impressed. Pandora's Game solidifies my view that Mr. Andrews' is a brilliant writer and a wonderful storyteller. I started and finished it without putting it down. It's a smooth ride, it's weaving plot keeping you drawn in until the very end. I can't wait to get my hands on Mr. Andrews' next novel!

Andrews keeps you on your toes with every twist and turn of this unforgettable plot. He portrays vampires, werewolves and zombies not always as the bad guys. This is a great story and a must read.

This is a wonderful piece of work -- it does an excellent job of taking you into the characters' adventure and the consequences of their actions. Christopher Andrews did an excellent job of making it seem as if all this could really happen. I would love to see this put on the big screen!

I read this book in one sitting. It's hilarious. The ensemble are all developed well and likable. Murphy's writing is funny, mean and sweet at the same time. He clearly loves the characters and I could see him writing the story laughing at his clever self. I loved the twists. The plot was VERY well constructed, and the ending is a nice, bittersweet surprise. This is a must read.

This was a delightful little read. I loved the characters. They were described so realistically I felt I knew them. It is so tightly written. Murphy doesn't waste a word, or his reader's time. I laughed out loud more than once. Saving Aurora is thoroughly enjoyable.

What can I say about Murphy's prose... mixing humor and serious topics in any novel is a tough assignment, and Murphy tackles the task with aplomb. He's clearly a writer with talent to spare.

Prabhavananda used to be an indian monk of the Ramakrishna order directing the hollywood branch of that organisation in the first half of the last century. Isherwood was a famous writer who worked together with Prabhavananda. They translated indian scriptures and wrote several books, either together or independently. This particular book is a translation of the Vivekachudamani, a compact presentation of advaita vedanta, attributed to Shankara. It's pleasant to read and contains deep wisdom. The Ramakrishna Vivekananda Organisation has also another version of the Vivekachudamani on sale, which contains the Sanskrit text as well.

Shankara was a 7th century hindu mystic/saint. he founded a number of monastic orders in his short life,[32 yrs], and showed remarkable spiritual talents and insights from a very early age. this book is a true classic in the field of the jnani yoga tradition. his directives are clear, succint, and leave no doubt in the readers mind he knew where of he spoke. i wouldn't say this should be your entry level book into the advaita philosophy but if the idea of your oneness with brahman, the impersonal ground of being, appeals to you and you're ready for the genuine article, then this little book is for you and will reward your careful study. i'll be quiet now and let the master have the last word with a few quotes from the book: "when the vision of Reality comes, the veil of ignorance is completely removed. when our false perception is corrected, misery ends." and "the self controlled man is illumined when he enjoys eternal bliss. he is entirely merged in Brahman. he knows himself to be the unchangeable reality". and, "teachers and scriptures can stimulate spiritual awareness. but the wise disciple overcomes ignorance by direct illumination, through the grace of God". and, "the treasure i have found cannot be described in words, i am one with Brahman".

Traditional Hindu philsophy asserts that the true nature of ourselves, other people, and everything around us is Brahman. But that truth is often covered in superficial illusion, or maya (in pop culture terms, 'the Matrix'). Shankara expounds upon the traditional Hindu philosophy and posits that the key to enlightenment is the ability to discriminate between what is True (i.e. Brahman) and what is merely illusion (maya), to look past the appearance of things and seek the Truth that lies beneath the surface. We do not have to go far to apply this centuries old insight to our own lives. With the light of Shankara's simple philosophy to cut through the swirling mists of illusion that surround us, it is soon apparent that very few of the things we have taken seriously matter at all. They are mostly superficial maya and we must not allow ourselves to lose sight of the core Truths that they would obscure. It may sound abstract, but once you start recognizing that very few of the things people say, do, or believe have any foundation in Truth (in the Brahman sense), you will adjust your perspective accordingly and will be surprised to find how unperturbed you are by the concerns that stir others into an emotional frenzy. If you understand what does and doesn't matter, you can devote your energies to the former and shield yourself from concern for the latter.

For an explanation of these principles in prose by my favorite author, I strongly recommend "Maya", a short story that appears in the back of Hermann Hesse's Nobel prize winning novel, "The Glass Bead Game."